David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to bring to the attention of the House the inquiry that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy has begun into the prerequisites for nuclear energy in Australia. I've been very impressed by the early depositions from ANSTO, which has a long history of providing medical and other isotopes around the world. In fact, when its new medical isotope facility gets up to full speed it will have the potential to provide 20 per cent of the world's medical isotopes. We have over 200 nuclear medical installations around the nation. They are all supplied by isotopes that have been developed and delivered by the Lucas Heights facility that ANSTO runs.

We have our second nuclear reactor in the Lucas Heights facility sitting peacefully only four or five kilometres away from suburbia. The initial reactor, built in the 1950s, has had 50 years of waste recycled through facilities in France and is now stored safely in a giant megacapsule. Low-level waste that has come from nuclear medicine facilities and from the Lucas Heights reactor itself is stored in what we would call industrial or agricultural sheds in the middle of suburbia. It has been kept there safely since the 1950s. We have a long history of involvement in nuclear science and nuclear technology and in the practical applications of it. We have a broad based university system with a huge amount of knowledge in this area. We have abundant supplies of nuclear material in the form of uranium, which occurs quite naturally, and we supply vast amounts of uranium externally to people around the world who use it in their power stations. We have proposed at various times creating enormous wealth for the state of South Australia and for the nation in burying low-, medium- and even high-level waste. The high-level waste was put in the too-hard basket, and it is just the low-level and medium-level waste that is being looked at.

I would like to make the most bleedingly obvious observation. If something has been stored safely in industrial sheds in barrels five kilometres from suburbia in the middle of Sydney, with a nuclear reactor on site and a second operating safely right next door, surely it is not unreasonable to think that putting a waste facility in remote Australia would be inherently very safe.

The other conundrum is that, at the moment, Australia has a prohibition on the use of nuclear technology to deliver electricity. As happens with coal-fired base-load energy generation, burning the fuel, in this case coal, creates the steam that runs the turbines that run the dynamos, the copper and magnets that generate electricity. The same happens if you have diesel generators, which are currently used in South Australia when they don't have enough base-load energy. How many irrigators and farmers are turning to diesel to generate electricity to run their pumps to produce food? Electricity and water are so expensive they've got to save money somewhere, because the cost of those two inputs is greater than the value of the crop, whether it be sugar cane or broader horticulture. The principle is the same for a petrol engine, a diesel engine or a hydroelectricity scheme, where the energy and gravity delivers through the turbines enough power to run the dynamos that then generate electricity. It is all the same principle. Nuclear energy itself doesn't generate the electricity; it heats steam. With molten salt reactors and the new technologies that are emerging with small modular reactors, they generate the heat that spins the turbines of the dynamo which generates electricity. We've seen small module reactors— (Time expired)

House adjourned at 20:00

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