Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

On the website of the International Atomic Energy Agency, there is a quote that says:

A State lacking control of nuclear material and activities may risk becoming the target of non-State actors involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology or in clandestine nuclear-related activities.

That is the worst-case scenario with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Amendment Bill 2006. The legislation gives the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation the scope to handle, manage or store radioactive materials but also to deal with radioactive waste from Commonwealth entities or, in the worst-case scenario, if there were an accident or if a dirty bomb were used in an attack, it would allow ANSTO to assist state and federal authorities without limitations.

The bill goes some way to implementing—despite the fact that the government has not yet ratified it—the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, particularly article 2, which makes it illegal not only for anyone to possess radioactive material or to possess a device with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury or substantial damage to property or to the environment but also to use radioactive material or to damage a nuclear facility to cause a release of radioactive material. They are all, obviously, very sensible measures. However, Labor is concerned—and I am concerned—that in allowing ANSTO more scope to deal with radioactive waste, the Lucas Heights reactor and the land around it will become a de facto radioactive waste repository. I grew up in the Sutherland Shire and I did not take a particular interest in ANSTO, the reactor and the area around it. However, since I was a child, the area around Lucas Heights has become very much more populous than it was 30 years ago and a lot of families who live in that Menai, Illawong, Bangor and Woronora Heights area are worried about the potential for ANSTO, which is right in their backyard, to become a de facto repository for all sorts of radioactive waste. That is why Labor’s deputy leader moved a second reading amendment to this legislation that picks up on some of these issues about storing nuclear waste around Australia.

Before the last election, the government promised that there would not be a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory. That has changed quite dramatically—in fact, completely—since the election, and the government will impose a nuclear waste dump on the Northern Territory. To the people who live around the reactor, around Lucas Heights, any assurances that they have been given that this legislation will not encourage more and longer term storage around the reactor is probably pretty meaningless, given what is happening in the Northern Territory.

This bill, in conjunction with the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management (Related Amendments) Bill 2005, protects ANSTO from legal action and allows them to transport radioactive material from any Commonwealth entity or its contractor to Lucas Heights. Unlike the Sutherland Shire Council, which took successful action against ANSTO in the New South Wales Land and Environment Court in 1991-92, local residents will have absolutely no legal recourse under this bill to oppose more waste being transported to Lucas Heights. They will also have no way of preventing Lucas Heights from becoming a major storage facility for ANSTO. People in the Sutherland Shire area in particular are worried about this.

The majority of the waste that is held at the facility at the moment is of pretty low grade, but people who are raising their families near the reactor are worried about the fact that in the last 18 months there have been 13 separate recorded safety breaches at ANSTO, including the incident of a worker who was exposed to abnormally high levels of radiation. Earlier this year there were four incidents reported in just one week, including radioactive material spilling onto one worker’s clothes and another worker getting such material in their eye and, further, taking in a small amount of gas. Fortunately, none of these workers were seriously injured. The response of the minister was something that would have done Joh Bjelke-Petersen proud: ‘Don’t you worry about that.’ It was quite concerning and it does not give local residents any comfort that the government will consult with residents about what role the reactor at Lucas Heights will play as a storage facility into the future.

As I said, just as the government has refused to consult local residents around Lucas Heights about the role that the reactor facility will play in waste disposal or waste storage, there has been an absolutely appalling lack of consultation with the residents of the Northern Territory about what will happen with the storage facility there. The Minister for Education, Science and Training said in her second reading speech on this bill:

The Commonwealth’s resolve to establish the Commonwealth radioactive waste management facility in the Northern Territory for this purpose was made abundantly clear by the enactment of the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act in 2005.

I do not know whether it was. What Northern Territory residents were told very clearly before the last federal election, in particular by the member for Solomon, was that there would be no such facility in the Northern Territory. Even after the election, the member for Solomon said:

There’s not going to be a national nuclear waste facility in the Northern Territory ... That was the commitment undertaken in the lead-up to the federal election and I haven’t heard anything apart from that view expressed since that election.

He could not have been listening too well to his colleagues. It is a breathtaking broken promise to the people of the Northern Territory. They were promised very clearly before the election that such a facility would not be established in the Northern Territory. Since the election everything has changed.

In February the Minister for Foreign Affairs said that we need medium- and high-level storage as well. I think the people of the Northern Territory are pretty worried about the potential for high-level storage. The opposition of the residents, community organisations and the government of the Northern Territory has been fierce. They believe that they were lied to. In a public statement made last year, the Central Land Council also expressed their opposition. They said:

The traditional owners are concerned about safety and the future security of a nuclear waste dump, the waste being transported on the roads that they use every day, the negative impact on businesses ... the impact on their traditional country and the ability to hunt and get bush tucker, pollution of the water in the event of an accident and the future for their grandchildren.

I think there are many Australians who would understand that concern for the future of their grandchildren. It is really the fundamental flaw with nuclear power as a power source. The long-term problem of safely and securely disposing of waste, I think, makes this power source something that we should not be pursuing in Australia.

At one stage the government wanted to force a nuclear waste dump on South Australia. Fortunately, the South Australian government was successful in challenging the federal government. This bill makes it very difficult for state governments and the community to make these sorts of challenges. If the government does push ahead with its plans to impose a nuclear waste dump on the Northern Territory, it will be able to. There will not be anything that the Territory government or the community can do to prevent it.

It has been the Prime Minister’s dream for many years now to establish a nuclear industry in Australia—not just a mining and extraction industry; he talks constantly about downstream processing and perhaps even nuclear power for Australia. I think it was the head of the Sierra Club in the US who said that talking about using nuclear power as a way of dealing with pollution and global warming is like saying that you are going to take up smoking crack cocaine because you want to give up cigarettes. The point he makes is a very good one. It is an absolutely disingenuous intellectual argument to say that you will deal with one very serious environmental hazard, global warming, by creating waste that is dangerous to the people who are exposed to it and that is potentially able to enter the nuclear weapons cycle. You will create this waste that will hang around for hundreds of thousands of years. We cannot predict what Australia is going to be like in 500 years, let alone 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000.

While there is a substantial debate in the Labor Party at the moment about the mining of uranium—and there have been for many years a variety of views in the Labor Party about the mining of uranium—there is one thing that we are absolutely 100 per cent clearly agreed on, and that is that we oppose a nuclear power industry in this country. There is very good reason for that. There are all of the economic arguments against it. It is not an economical way of generating power for us.

Aside from the issues that I have mentioned—dealing with waste, the potential security threats of having this waste available and the lack of economic argument for nuclear power—the other reason I feel very strongly about this is that there are so many things that we could be doing better when it comes to sustainable energy sources. There are so many ways that we could be tackling global warming and Australia’s future energy needs that we are not doing. To say that we have a problem with greenhouse, for the Prime Minister to admit that and to reach, as his first solution, for the most potentially polluting alternative—polluting in a different way—is illogical. There is no logical follow-on from the proposition that because we have an environmental problem we should move right on to nuclear energy as the solution to that.

The film An Inconvenient Truth, which was shown here on Monday night, went through many of the many environmental effects that we are facing: the ice caps melting; the extreme weather events—I think that is what people are calling them; the size of storms; the effects they are having; the economic damage that they are causing; the potential that water levels will rise and what that means for environmental refugees, I guess you would call them; the effect that temperature changes are having on our flora and fauna; and the fact that we are losing species at a rate of knots because their environments are being altered and made uninhabitable for these creatures. Obviously these things are of concern to anyone who follows the issue, but the idea that the logical response to global warming is nuclear power is, I think, stunningly short-sighted. For a start, we could look at a national emissions trading system in Australia. We could sign on to the Kyoto protocol and start to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We could change some of the ways that we live our individual lives: change the environmental footprint that each of us leaves.

It takes about 10,000 years for high-level radioactive waste to be broken down. The notion that we can guarantee the political stability of this country, let alone its environmental stability, for that long or anything approaching it—even half that time; even 10 per cent of that time—I think is highly optimistic. It is also curious, when we are looking around—or the Prime Minister seems to be looking around—for alternative energy sources, that so very little support is given to renewable energy. Australia could and should be a world leader in renewable energy sources and renewable energy technology. We have the environment to do it, and the fact that we are missing this opportunity and instead are looking around for highly polluting, highly expensive, highly inefficient sources of power, like nuclear power, really is beyond belief.

ANSTO has said that, for a nuclear power industry to be viable in Australia, there would need to be at least three nuclear power plants built, preferably on the east coast. I challenge every member of the coalition who refuses to speak up against a nuclear power industry in Australia to tell us where these reactors are going to go. Where are these three reactors going to go? Under the Prime Minister’s desired plan, the east coast of Australia—the most populous part of Australia—would get three nuclear reactors and all of the associated waste that goes with a nuclear power industry. I think the Australian public deserves to know where those reactors would go under the Prime Minister’s plan. Certainly, if the broken promise to the people of the Northern Territory is any guide, even people who are told that they will not be getting a nuclear reactor in their backyard would be very sceptical about that promise if it were made to them.

This government has been completely unwilling to consult local communities about the disposal of nuclear waste. It has been unwilling to allow state or territory governments or major community representatives to have any say in the establishment of a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory. Why would Australians be confident that they would be consulted about the location of any nuclear power plants? Why would they be confident even if they were told that they were not getting a power plant in their backyard?

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