Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to speak in this debate on the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Amendment Bill 2006. This is an important and significant bill. The Labor Party supports its passage and I personally support its passage, as I do the work of the people at ANSTO. It is an extremely important facility and one that I have visited a number of times with a number of different committees, including the Standing Committee on Industry and Resources, to look at the work that is being done there and to speak to the individuals who have done such great work and given such sterling service to the Australian people.

The other members in this debate have canvassed the current functions of ANSTO and canvassed from the materials available to them—on the website, in the Bills Digest and elsewhere—just how broad the activities of ANSTO are. They have indicated that providing radiological isotopes for the treatment of a series of conditions has been one of the fundamental activities of ANSTO over many years. According to the argument by the government and a number of people from industry, one of the reasons it is located at Lucas Heights and not further from Sydney’s CBD—and why the replacement reactor OPAL, which will be replacing HIFAR, has been located there—is that there is a necessity to get those radioisotopes into the major hospitals in the Sydney region as quickly as possible, and also to access Kingsford Smith airport as quickly as possible in order to get those materials interstate because their useful life is relatively short.

This site in itself is significant—and the work that is done there is extremely so. It covers not only those health areas but also areas that are extremely significant in environmental terms. The work that is being done by their specialists on using nuclear facilities, trace elements and so on to look at the movement of clouds and river flows, to investigate the landscape and its formation and the way in which the environment has been impacted upon by various activities is a testament not just to what is being done now and what has been done in the last few years but also to the future importance of ANSTO and the fact that the broader range of applications is potentially much greater in the future than it was in the past.

The member for Hughes has the facility within her electorate. The member for Banks in his contribution indicated that he was not too far away. Given he is in the lower part of Bankstown and I am at the top, I am not too far away either. The placement of the facility in the middle of Sydney, as I have said, has been key in terms of radiological isotopes. There have been a series of concerns addressed in the past over the many years of the operation of ANSTO at Lucas Heights about the fact that it has been placed in the middle of Sydney. Of course, that did not stop Frank Walker, when he was the state Minister for Housing, locating housing in a ring around Lucas Heights. The safety record over the period it has been in operation has been particularly strong, as has been the case in most of the other similar nuclear reactors around the world.

The people who work there are dedicated to ensuring a safety environment for their coworkers and to minimising impact on the community, but this bill also extends the powers of ANSTO to deal with material that is produced by Commonwealth agencies or contractors and to then take material in from overseas. The amendment relating to that deals with fuels that have been sent to France which are due to come back here by 2011 or 2015. Having been reprocessed, it will then be the responsibility of ANSTO to see to their successful management. In doing so the particular problem is—and the amendments are there to deal absolutely with this risk—that, when those materials come back, there can be no guarantee that they are just reprocessed ANSTO material; they can in fact be mixed with some other materials and that intermediate waste can have been generated from uranium from elsewhere. So, in order to cover that possibility, that is dealt with by one of these amendments.

It is very interesting that one of the other amendments this government has done—it would not have been so surprising if we had done it—concerns the extension of the defence power to cover certain activities. The relevant section of the Constitution, which is section 51(vi) and covers the defence power, has been used to govern the way ANSTO can have its resources called upon in the event of a terrorist act or other acts that relate to the defence forces or emergency areas and, further, to ensure that its activities could not be invalidated as a result of that. Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan, I simply point out—as you would know from your experience as a minister in our government—we actually used the foreign affairs power fairly effectively.

As far as I know, apart from its use of the defence power, the only other power this government has used has been the corporations power, which is used to bring in its industrial relations legislation—and we will find out what the High Court thinks about that in due course. This is an unusual use, but I think here it is an appropriate one. The elements dealt with here and in some of the other amendments are that it is not just Commonwealth entities and agencies that can have material but also state and territory governments or local authorities, if there is a terrorist incident or other happening—and the emergencies that relate to this are not strictly defined. One of the questions for the minister that should arise with regard to this is that such emergencies are not actually specified or defined within this act and it should be asked how that would come into being. But the key here is that it is necessary to make these changes because of the changed environment we are in.

Further to that, if you look at the broader questions, the member for Hughes quite correctly said that 95 per cent of the waste that the Commonwealth has is already stored on site. Under this bill, there will be an extension to ANSTO’s capacity to store such waste. Until this amended bill goes through, ANTSO’s capacity to deal with material from other Commonwealth agencies is nil. So what has been happening to the rest of that material? It has just been sitting at those Commonwealth agencies, just as the material that is produced by state hospitals that is radioactive in nature—most of it is low-level radiation—is stored at those facilities. It is stored there because there is nowhere for it to go, which has been the case throughout our history. We know that will change in the future. Looking at the opposition’s amendments—and remembering the manner in which the Commonwealth, in pushing through the relevant bill last year in terms of waste management, opposed itself to the Northern Territory and so on—we know they will be contentious; that issue has been and will be. But the fundamental fact is that Australia has to do something about its waste management.

One of the activities that ANSTO have been involved in for a very long-time—30 years plus, given they invented it—is developing a method of dealing with medium- to high-grade radioactive materials and encapsulating that material so that it is not a danger to anyone. We have only flogged the product synroc to one other country so far. The British are using it at their facility at Sellafield. It was 30 years in the making. The Americans are the biggest market and the French have not taken it up yet. At this point, the Americans and the French are using vitrification. So they lock up these materials, which are either medium or high grade, into glass. However, synroc is a much better process. Vitrification does well enough in order to stabilise the materials, although that is after they have been left out for a considerable time in order to degrade. But we argue—and certainly the people in ANSTO have argued, although they have not been able to commercialise this until now—that synroc is much more capable. The fundamental reason is that it is a ceramic waste where the radioactive material is mixed in with the very ceramic. So, at a molecular level, you get a binding into the synthetic rock that you can then place in a repository.

We know that in Norway and the other Scandinavian countries they are already depositing their material deep underneath the earth. Where they are using vitrification there or in other places where they will be producing radioactive material, there is potential for Australia. But we also know that a whole range of other things need to be looked at to identify the problems with the development of this.

I am proud of the fact that our shadow minister in this area, Martin Ferguson, has really led the field in the last year or year and a half in this debate. He is the one who initiated the parliamentary committee’s investigation of this issue. That has helped to kick-start the whole process of a re-examination of not only the mining of uranium in Australia but also its use. Part of the key approach that he put in a significant speech in March of this year—and that speech was given to one of Australia’s key bodies—was to underline Australia’s pivotal role in the global nuclear cycle. In that speech made at Paydirt’s uranium conference in 2006, he pointed out:

After a period of 25 years when not only Australia, but the rest of the world, has let its nuclear skill base decline, there is a serious shortage of skilled people at the same time as global demand for reactors is at unprecedented levels.

He then talked about the fact that Singapore and Vietnam are the only countries in our region that do not have research reactors—and approval now has been given to Vietnam to develop one. He then talked about the use of synroc and so on and then went on to make this point:

... we have to get serious about increased support for nuclear science and technology research and capacity building.

The logical focus for that increased support is the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) where facilities, equipment and knowledge are already concentrated and highly specialised.

I can see considerable merit in establishing and properly funding a post graduate nuclear technology school under the auspices of the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering, a cooperative venture between ANSTO and all the Australian universities.

An annual intake of 10 to 12 science and engineering graduates from Australian universities would be a big step forward in building Australia’s nuclear knowledge and skills base for the future—a skills base that is essential for Australia to properly engage with the UN, its allies and the region to make the world’s nuclear industry even safer.

Those comments are encapsulated in a broader series of comments where he and the Leader of the Opposition have argued that the current situation of non-proliferation treaties is, in a word, parlous. It has been broken in one part of the world after another; it is disintegrating. There is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to put that back together. Part of Labor’s program is to kick-start the process under a diplomatic initiative—using the core work done by the Canberra commission in the last Labor government—to put nuclear non-proliferation at the very core of the world’s concerns and to toughen up those provisions.

That is extremely important, but the broader context here is it is only now that the demand is becoming increasingly evident for Australia’s uranium. We produce 38 per cent of the world’s uranium as it is, but with the further extension of Roxby Downs and others it will become greater. If you look at the 10- or 20-year period they are running on from here, the production of Australian uranium is not our only concern. If you look backward—and the fresh look at this that has been taken in the last year has been quite extraordinary—we have had 30 years that have effectively been a dark night in terms of looking at these things in any really fundamental, rational, dispassionate way.

This is a dangerous process to try to harness some of the fundamental forces of power within our universe. We cannot pull the sun in too close because it will just crisp us; it is a nuclear furnace. What was tapped at the end of World War II to be used as weapons of mass destruction eventually gave rise to the nuclear industry that we have. The first major installations built in the United States in 1962 or so were big, dirty, nasty, energy-hungry nuclear facilities whose by-products could potentially last for a half-life of 10,000 years plus, and in some cases hundreds of thousands of years. Their reputation, quite rightly, was really bad.

But we also had a period of intense emotional reaction to and debate on the very idea of these things—and it is still a condition today; it is here in the debate we have seen in this chamber—rather than a balanced and scientific approach to it and a recognition of the fact that the damage done to the world by our other technologies is absolutely immense. You have to put some comparators into place. But, because there has been that dark night where it has not been looked at clearly or cleverly enough, people working for ANSTO have not stood up and argued publicly for the validity and the significance and the power and the utility of their work. They have been too afraid to do it. They got stomped on by the media because of Dr Helen Caldicott leading a campaign that focused on nuclear residue, its poisonous nature, its waste, the four minutes to midnight argument and so on. At the time she effectively sent a message—although she denied it in evidence to the committee—to the young Australian people that they really had nothing to do but to prepare to fight against nuclear weaponry and so on.

The change in making those facilities safer in the last 30 years has been enormous, but Australia, by and large, has simply been a backwater with regard to this. That is why the member for Batman put forward the proposal, which I understand has now been taken up, to build that engineering facility. It is a case of trying to rebuild capacity that we will need if we are to have a bigger role in the world and if we are to ensure that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is as operative and as effective as we can make it. We also asked to ensure that we push along innovation and research in this area on a fundamental basis. If you are not in it, you cannot control it, which is the whole basis of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We also ask those countries which did not take the nuclear weapons route but were able to use nuclear capacity or supply it to do so in a responsible way.

We are now at the stage where we have got generation 3 reactors worldwide. The fourth-generation and fifth-generation reactors are coming into play. We know that the problem in fourth-generation reactors of a meltdown from the core can be contained within the vessel. We know that in fifth-generation reactors, particularly in pebble-bed reactors, you simply do not have that problem at all. There has been an immense march forward.

We also know that because of the increased demand for nuclear generation—an industry which, and this is not well appreciated under the current manner in which it operates, will only run for about 60 years, given world resources in uranium because of the use-once approach—two things of great significance have happened. The first is something the Russians have done. They have used plutonium, including from the warheads they demolished, as part of SALT II. They have taken that and they have been reprocessing and reusing that plutonium, effectively gobbling it up. In waste management terms, that is enormously significant. Here are a series of proposals put forward by the Americans which open up the way in which that can happen. Effectively, they say that one of the ways forward to make this a more sustainable industry over time, and a more effective and safer one, is to allow not only the reprocessing of that plutonium material but also the reutilisation of it.

Therefore, the second thing of great significance is to do with the major waste problem. Through advances that have been made for clients with regard to the waste generated from existing reactors, the fundamental thing is this: instead of 10,000 years or a couple of hundred thousand years, we are looking at a development where we need to store this material, and we can store it in synroc, for 200 or 300 years. The parameters of what is happening because of the technological changes are great. I support the work that ANSTO has done, and the extension of its capacity to be our safety insurer Australia wide. I hope it will develop to become a stronger organisation that is wider and deeper for the benefit of the Australian community as a whole. (Time expired)

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