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

Yes. The prohibition in the EPBC Act is similar. It's a blanket prohibition on nuclear fuel being made here or in a nuclear reactor. But a nuclear reactor, as I explained this morning, uses less than five per cent enriched uranium rods, which is far less than what is in the reactor at Lucas Heights, which is a high-assay, low-enriched uranium. It's up to 19½ per cent. No-one bats an eyelid down there. But it's between three and 4.9 per cent. There is no way that can irradiate anyone in the region. Inside a pressure vessel, if you happen to be stuck inside one, you might get some radiation. But it's a nuclear kettle; that's all it is. I'm trying to demystify what is in a nuclear reactor. People shouldn't be afraid of it. Unfortunately, we have seen responses that nuclear reactors, particularly the small modular reactors, are something way off in the distant future.

As I mentioned, in Canada, Ontario Power Generation, the public utility that runs the power system and runs 22 nuclear plants in Canada, is well advanced in its plans to build a new 300-megawatt small modular reactor. It's going through its final licensing. It will be built and operating in five years. It's not off in the twenties, forties or fifties, which people on the other side seem obsessed with.

The economics of them is the other issue that they tend to criticise us about. When I was in Canada, the retail price for electricity at the electricity plug in the block of units I was staying in—I thought, 'Let's see how cheap it is in Ontario?' Have you looked at your bill lately, Mr Speaker? You might find that you're paying 35c wholesale before all the margins are added by transmission costs and those things. But it's 6½c Canadian. That's about 8c. That's a retail price at your plug in Canada, because, in Ontario, 65 per cent of their power comes from nuclear power plants. They've also got hydro. They had a green energy act doing all the things that we are doing now. It started in 2008 in Ontario, but by 2008 they'd abandoned it and repealed it because they found their cheap, reliable electricity was becoming more expensive every year. Whilst electricity is cheap when you're getting it from a wind turbine or a solar panel in the paddock or out at the massive solar farm or on your roof, to integrate it into an electricity grid and machines is very expensive, and people don't appreciate that.

The argument that is always put up is that nuclear energy is too expensive. Well, that is an absolute false assumption. Electricity in France is the cheapest in Europe, almost. The only people that get cheaper electricity are up in Sweden, and they're expanding their nuclear capabilities too. They sell into Europe. They are the biggest exporter of electricity in the world. They have 70 per cent of the energy from nuclear. They have never had a nuclear accident, which is the same as Canada. They have been involved in nuclear power plants since the 1950s and have never had an accident.

Three experienced engineers have analysed and estimated the average cost of these new SMRs—and they have lectured on these economics—and it looks to be an overnight cost of 7,200 Australian dollars, if you look at all the published data around the world. That is a far better figure than what is mentioned in the GenCost report, which hasn't even analysed nuclear for two years and won't be until the next GenCost report in two years. But it's quoted as bible.

A standing committee of this house in 2019 interrogated the GenCost report. The member for Fremantle spoke on this, but he omitted that there were many more depositions from people who actually had experience of being involved in power plants who disputed those figures. So we interrogated the CSIRO, which had their name put to that report. They said: 'We didn't actually write the report. We got this company, an engineering firm based in New South Wales and Queensland, to do it.' So we interrogated them, and they hadn't even checked with any vendors or operators of nuclear power plants. They hadn't even done their homework. They relied on one article, put out by the World Nuclear Association, and extrapolated on it. So we contacted the World Nuclear Association, and they didn't have any figures that were remotely like anything proposed in the GenCost report.

Now the GenCost report is written by a different engineering firm. There are other engineering groups that have analysed the GenCost report. A very eminent Canadian trainer and experienced engineer and a group of concerned engineers and scientists have written to AEMO, alerting them to this fact—that their projections are not accurate and are faulty. There is another group that have analysed it—the Energy Policy Institute of Australia. It is a not-for-profit, non-partisan group that analyses all energy policy. They did an economic analysis of the integrated system plan which is based on that GenCost report, and they found it totally inaccurate. The scary thing is that the integrated system plan has relied on the GenCost report in its nonconsideration of nuclear. It's been summarily dismissed.

So it is a question of getting some reliable data on the record about the cost of nuclear. Looking at recent builds in the world, Japan's last build took three years to build a huge—over 1,000 megawatts—plant. When I visited the Emirates in 2013 in my first term in parliament, they were then embarking on building their nuclear power plants. Now they have built four of them in the space of time that I have been here. They're four huge, 1,400-megawatt plants. That's almost as big as Liddell, and they have built four of them. Three of them are commissioned and running now and the fourth one is due to come online this year.

The people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analysed the cost of all these builds, and there are three standout large nuclear builds that have been running over time and over budget. They are case studies for how you shouldn't build them. They were built without full plans or full certification. They changed the plans. If you know how long it takes to get regulatory approval, you know it was a very unwise move. But, if you are building with a known plan and a known product, you are fully licensed and you have competent builders with a supply chain, they can build them very quickly.

As I said, the small modular reactors will deliver efficiencies of scale. They are all the latest generation, either generation III or generation III-plus. The old generation were built in the 1950s, generation I, and in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it was generation II, and then we went into generation III, which were built with passive safety features. So you can walk away and just turn them off and wind them down. Everyone knows the disaster that happened at Chernobyl. Those old Russian designs aren't built anymore. If you used one of them, it would be like buying a new car but getting a 1950s designed car. It was badly managed. They had no safety culture and they used it way beyond expectation. That design had inherent faults in it. That's why there was such a horrible accident.

Fukushima was a horrible accident. We admit that. But it wasn't a nuclear explosion that happened; there was a hydrogen gas explosion inside the plant because the cooling systems that were destroyed by the tsunami were knocked out. Diesel pumps flooded by the tsunami were the reason the heat in the core built up, and there was a meltdown. But, when it gets that hot, the oxygen and other things get separated from the zirconium alloy, and hydrogen is produced. When that meltdown occurred, when the hydrogen gas got exposed to air, it ignited, and that's what caused the explosion in Fukushima.

That was a Generation II plant. Plants built since then have inherent safety features, just like the Volvos that you get now have a lot of passive safety systems, just like your mobile phone is now small and much better and much more capable. Things can get smaller but more efficient, and that's what's happening in the nuclear space. These Generation III+ and the new Generation IV ones that are planned—you've heard of the Natrium reactor that Bill Gates is involved in—are of the next generation. They are incredibly safe.

I will just take this opportunity to mention where we sit in the world of nuclear. I mentioned this morning that we are incredibly well respected. We are part of the International Atomic Energy Agency membership. We sit on all the safety committees. ARPANSA regularly has Australian officers interrogating. In fact, the former head of ARPANSA, who's still finishing up the inquiry into Fukushima, is an Australian. That's how well regarded we are. We are incredibly well regulated. We have a non-proliferation office. We've signed up to all the appropriate international treaties, such that other countries trust us and know that we can regulate this technology very well.

At the moment there is a huge expansion of nuclear activity in the world, almost like a stampede. In the past it's been called a renaissance, but it's actually a stampede. Countries that are existing nuclear giants, like France, like the UK, like America, like Canada, have all announced that they are undergoing massive expansions of their nuclear plants, both large reactors and new small modular reactors. Canada are the most advanced, and they have a very equivalent regulatory structure and phenomenon of legislative similarities. They are very similar to Australia, and they would be a great model for us to follow.

Other countries around the world are getting into nuclear. Sweden has now announced, rather than retreating from nuclear, it's building more, and it's the same with Holland and, as I mentioned, with France, where there are 14 new reactors and where they're building their own small modular reactor.

President Biden has given $6 billion to maintain all the existing nuclear plants in the US, and they've got developments happening across the country as well. In California, the California legislature voted 157 to three to keep the huge nuclear reactor at Diablo Canyon running. The phenomenon they have is that they have a very large penetration of renewables in their grid, and—surprise, surprise!—they have blackouts quite regularly, like South Africa has. They have blackouts regularly. They've let their baseload coal-fired power stations decline. And that's where we're going to end up; we're going to end up like California and South Africa, where they issue notices every day about which city doesn't get electricity, like it used to be in the 1950s and 60s. It is scary.

Other countries around the world are lining up to increase the percentage of their grid to nuclear. That is something that we need to consider very seriously. We have all these coal-fired plants that are going to close because the regulations restrict their free trade and the renewable energy targets and our other legislated climate targets mean they are doomed to fail. So we need to get an adequate replacement. We can do it, but the first cab off the rank is to consider removing the ARPANS Act and the EPBC Act so that our bureaucrats can analyse things, as we have done, and businesses can look at feasibility studies. No-one will come to Australia and do it unless we remove those prohibitions. They will still have to be analysed for safety and environmental outcomes, like any other major development, but I call on this House to have a say and look at how important a civil nuclear industry is when we've got the AUKUS agreement, where we're going to run nuclear subs. We need a civil nuclear industry to support the take-up of nuclear-powered submarines. It's a critical part of infrastructure that isn't even mentioned but is going to be essential for Australia, for us to have nuclear powered subs— (Time expired)

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