Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, I would first like to commend the member for Lyne for championing this issue. I think it's incredibly important that we clearly understand that the world is changing. Australia is going to be left behind again. The technology is racing ahead. We want smart manufacturing and well-paid manufacturing jobs.

We're missing out on these opportunities because of this Dark Ages mentality. We live in this quasi belief that all the other countries that are developing small modular reactors are somehow dumber than us. All these dumb countries, dumb countries like the United Kingdom, like France, like Scandinavia, like Sweden, like Czechoslovakia, like Argentina, like Canada, like the United States, like Russia, like China—we don't know completely what their purposes are—and like Japan. We had the ambassador from Japan in on the last sitting day in parliament. We posed the question to them about where they are with nuclear, because we all hear about Fukishima. They said, 'The issue we have is that Fukishima could have stood up to two earthquakes, but it couldn't stand up to a tidal wave.' We have to get on the record that the fatalities from the Fukishima nuclear disaster were zero. No-one died in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. That was not a small modular reactor. They are large reactors, and we should be on board with making sure that we avail ourselves of the opportunities—the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars—that are coming forward in this new industry.

I was not amazed, but I think it has to be quite clear that the Australian people's concern about US nuclear submarines has been overwhelmingly non-evident. People don't care. What happens if one of these nuclear submarines comes into our port and turns on our light? Do we insist that they turn it off, because that's nuclear power lighting up our dock? What happens if someone runs an extension cord down to drill a screw in on the port or do something away from the nuclear submarine? Are you going to ban it? Where we have ended up right now is archaic.

We've got to understand that, if we are going to try to hit zero emissions, we are going to need sustainable base load power. We've seen the costs of Snowy Hydro 2.0. They're heading north of $10 billion. Renewables are incredibly expensive when you compare apples with apples—that is, 24/7 dispatchable—because they need the cost of pumped hydro, which is massive, or they need the cost of batteries, which is massive. Currently, the battery technology has no hope of delivering sustainable base load power. The quote we got in this building for how much it would cost for a battery backup at 24/7 sustainable power was $5 trillion. We don't have that money, so we have got to be smart and work around it.

Not only are they developing small modular reactors; we're also have process in Australia, such as with Professor Mark Ho, developing microreactors up to 50 megawatts. These are going to end up on Pacific islands. They're going to be all around the world, and we're going to sit back here and say we don't believe in them. It's like saying you don't believe in mobile phones, fridges or colour televisions. It's coming, and the smartest thing for us to do in this nation is get on board. In the coming months, they are going to blow up Liddell Power Station. They're not going to dismantle it; they're going to blow it up. Here is a place with transmission lines and connections. It would be the ideal spot for us to work towards having small modular reactors. Put it to the people of Muswellbrook. Tell them that their jobs stay, that everything continues on. Tell them about exactly where the technology is. I want it noted on the record that we support small modular reactors so in the future, when we get them—and they will turn up—we can refer back to this as those who were trying to make sure that Australia was on the front foot. If not, we continue on with this ridiculous process of a massive footprint of such things as wind turbines, which are disliked intensely in regional areas because of transmission lines, the footprint and the social upset they cause. Once small modular reactors come in—and they will—they will all be out of date.

I support this. I clearly put down my support of it and I tell you what: if you want to see a fight, come out to regional areas and see the fight we're having over wind towers.

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