Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, we do know his private views. I am sure they do not accord with the views which have been expressed by Senator Campbell. Mr Howard has come out and told us that nuclear is the only way forward for us in terms of climate change. The PM, on last Sunday’s Sixty Minutes, said:

I’m in favour of Australia developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. It’s clean and green, and in an age where we’re worried about global warming, we should be looking seriously at nuclear power as an option ... and I can’t understand why the extreme greenies oppose it.

There are a lot of people in Australia who oppose the proposition that we might have nuclear power and they are not ‘extreme greenies’. They are simply informed, concerned Australian citizens. Using a pejorative term, hoping to describe them as ultra leftists, extreme greenies or whatever, will not wash.

But the decision for us in the Northern Territory has huge implications. Whether or not the Prime Minister and his ministerial colleagues propose to site a nuclear power generating facility in the Northern Territory is immaterial. What is material is that the waste from any generating facility will come to the Northern Territory. When we were told that this nuclear waste facility would come to the Northern Territory, the government described the waste that would be brought in as low-level nuclear waste. I want to refer the House to a ministerial statement made this week by Marion Scrymgour MLA, Minister for Natural Resources, Environment and Heritage in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly. I commend this document to the House because what it does, in part, is expose the untruths which have been given to the Australian people, and particularly the people of the Northern Territory, about the question of what nuclear waste will be housed in these facilities, should they proceed.

Let us firstly talk about some of the waste. We are going to be getting back from France a whole lot of waste which has been sent over there by ANSTO under a contractual arrangement reached in 1999. In 1999 ANSTO, the operator of HIFAR, and COGEMA—now AREVA—the operator of the French plutonium factories at La Hague, signed a contract for the management of ANSTO’s research reactor’s spent fuel. The agreement envisaged the reprocessing of spent fuel from HIFAR as well as future spent fuel from the now approved replacement research reactor.

We are told by the government that the spent fuel rods will all come back to Australia in 2011. What we know is that, despite what we are told, ANSTO will continue to send shipments of spent fuel to France after 2011. COGEMA will continue to process it. The waste will continue to be returned to Australia. The return shipment of waste from spent fuel is scheduled under the contract to take place to 2015, not just to 2011. So the rush to impose these sites on the Northern Territory is based on a fib.

We need to know what sort of fuel we are talking about, and it is important that we understand this. It is not physically Australian waste material that will be returned. If you listen to the government, you would say we are getting a neat package of fuel sent back to us after it has been reprocessed. This is simply not the case. What we will get back will be a proportion of the by-product of spent fuel from every country that sends its waste to France for reprocessing, divided between the contributing countries. Each country of origin of the waste will receive a proportion of different elements from the reprocessing of the fuel. The main elements are vitrified fission product—high-level waste compacted residues, the hulls and end pieces from the metallic casings—and also high-level waste uranium and plutonium.

Let us understand this: after the reprocessing COGEMA, or AREVA, will get ownership of the recovered uranium. ANSTO, in Australia, gets back generic waste generated from the global reprocessing activities at the La Hague facility in France. La Hague reprocesses diversely sourced material, much from Russia but certainly from all over. The waste returned to Australia includes waste generated from all these sources and includes plutonium. We were not told that by this government.

We are now told this legislation will protect our interests environmentally. What we know is that we in the Northern Territory are going to be subjected to getting not only the world’s waste but, if the Commonwealth proceeds down the line of having nuclear generating facilities, all that waste product too. I can tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, even though the EPBC Act does not apply to these sites in the Northern Territory, we are opposed to this and we believe the government should change its decision. (Time expired)

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