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

The Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Bill 2023 is a very important bill and it has my full support. It makes amendments to the ARPANS Act and the EPBC Act. Why is this being done? People in my electorate and around the country want to know what this is all about. Basically, we have agreed to become owner-operators of nuclear-powered conventionally armed submarines. That triggered the need for a lot of new regulatory processes. Those which are currently in place prevent any nuclear power plants operating in this country. So the bill amends these two acts which have specific provisions preventing the building and construction of a nuclear power plant, a nuclear enrichment plant, a fabrication plant and a reprocessing plant.

But we are already a nuclear nation and we are 80 per cent of the way there. We could so rapidly transfer to having a civil nuclear industry which will make this whole AUKUS endeavour feasible. It would cut the time in half. It would actually allow it to happen. I will just outline some of the details of the legislation. Basically, section 10 of the ARPANS Act and sections 37, 140, 146 and 305 of the EPBC Act have those provisions preventing all those things that we need to support this. Any nation that is going to run nuclear subs needs a civil nuclear industry. Not only would we be the only country in the OECD not running civil nuclear plants; we would then have the distinct qualification of running nuclear subs but having nothing behind them. It is quite schizoid to think that we are going to embark on this endeavour with these provisions in place.

Everyone in the country, pretty much, supports AUKUS. There is a small minority that don't. People were worried about the announcement. It was off the news pages in two days. Australia is ready for nuclear. I give talks all around the country and people turn up in droves. They want to know more. They are not afraid of it unless they have been through years and years of indoctrination, with unrealistic fears equating nuclear power plants with glowing, red-hot sources of massive amounts of radiation and that waste is this huge, massive problem that no-one knows what to do about. That is not the case. There are hundreds of power plants around the world that are operating safely. There have been bad experiences in the past. Chernobyl was a Russian RBMK reactor, a very unstable reactor design from the late fifties and early sixties. It was poorly maintained and run by political diktat. Surprise, surprise: it had a meltdown. It was a disaster for those people there. Fukushima was a disaster but not because of any isotopes that were spread by the physical explosion of hydrogen gas inside the reactor vessel. Because there was intense heat from the meltdown because there was no cooling water, it formed hydrogen in the reactor vessel and blew up. It was a hydrogen gas explosion, and the people who died did at Fukushima not die from isotopes and radiation; they died from the tsunami.

But I go back to this issue. We support the AUKUS program. It was initiated by the former coalition government. We have to meet deadlines to get Rotational Force-West up and running along with the facilities at Stirling, and this bit of legislation is the most appropriate quick thing to do. In both the former Turnbull and Morrison governments for a good period of time, I used to oversee ARPANSA, which is the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. It's full of very complex regulations for our nuclear medicine sites dotted around the country, which no-one is afraid of, because they go there to get their cancer cured. We have all the systems in place for nuclear powered ships and subs to visit here already, but we need a nuclear regulator for the new subs. This will temporarily put ARPANSA in that place until a nuclear-submarine-specific regulation authority is established with separate legislation. It will be housed in the defence department. It's obviously a good system because that's how America has done it. They have had their regulator inside the defence establishment since the 1950s.

The other thing is that we are doing this because we know it will make us much more safe. It will make the Indo Pacific safer because this will give our defence capability strength. The reach of our forward capabilities will make us much more secure. But the irony of it is that it is just limiting these changes to allow them only in the defence space. What we need for our nation to be strong is sovereignty in our energy system, which we are throwing away and spending trillions of dollars to do. We are turning our energy system into a brittle, weather dependent, randomly generated, complex and variable system that needs rebuilding constantly from now on and ever after, because the renewable-alone energy transition is not feasible. We are not the first-of-its-kind country to do this transition, but, sadly for Australia, we are now the only-of-its-kind country that persists with this mirage that it's possible.

Billions of euros have been spent in Europe trying to transition countries to a renewable based system. Trillions of English pounds, trillions of US dollars have been spent, and they have all come to a screaming halt with unaffordable electricity and blackouts, like in California. One used to think that everything worked in California, but they have had regular blackouts because they got rid of their power stations. You know how woke California is and how Democrat and green focused it was. In the last lot of legislative settings the year before, California voted—157-3, I think the vote was—to actually fire up and continue operating their Diabolo Canyon nuclear reactor because they couldn't live with the blackouts anymore. There are windfarms lying idle in California because they realised they're not affordable.

Having a weather-dependent renewable energy system, which is what AEMO's plan is, is turning our system into a weather-dependent system. It's also dependent on the day-night cycle. The plans that are in AEMO's plan will cost far more than what they say. Many engineers, many bodies, including the University of Melbourne, Princeton University and the University of Queensland, have analysed what would be required for net zero using renewables and batteries alone. Well, let me tell you, it's going to cost us between seven and eight per cent of our GDP every year, forever. That is an enormous amount of money. Depending on the cost of batteries, it might be $5 trillion or up to $7 trillion. Other studies have been released by the University of Queensland. There are not enough mines and critical minerals in the world to even allow the deployment of renewables, either in wind turbines or in solar panels, in the first iteration up to 2030. In fact, from some of the figures that I read last night, we would have to use 7,000 years of mineral deposits to get all these renewables built, and the batteries. It's incredible, but we are doing it.

As I said, we are already a nuclear nation. We have run three nuclear reactors in Lucas Heights. Nuclear isotopes are developed and delivered around the South Pacific and even into the west coast of America from Lucas Heights. When the facility is up and running it supplies 27 per cent of the world's medical isotopes. Other reactors like that are now being planned for Korea and other parts of Asia. But we have huge expertise in this. We have over 1,200 scientists—or at least until some research cuts we did—working for ANSTO. We have a great regulator, ARPANSA. We have universities with engineering faculties that deliver world-class training. And nuclear power plants don't require specific nuclear physics engineers to run them, although you do have to have some.

Even in the recent Emirates build of four large nuclear reactors, in the space of time that I've been in this parliament—yes, I saw sand dunes that had bulldozers building the walls and the sites, after I got into this building—since 2013 they have built four large 1,400-megawatt reactors. And the Koreans built them. They know what to do. They hadn't stopped building nuclear reactors like America and the UK had. They have a supply chain, They have all this technology happening all the time. And do you know what? It cost them $22 billion. There was a cost overrun. There was a delay because of COVID and the GFC. But they have built four big reactors—almost the same as all the energy in New South Wales, the baseload energy—from 2013 to now, in the space of 10 years. They started from nothing in 2009. They didn't have any history of nuclear energy. Their universities didn't have the depth and the experience we have.

We have a huge diaspora of people around the world who would come back and be involved in this. We know what to do with waste management. We recycle ours, and we have agreements in place for it. We have earmarked places for final repositories. And we could become like Canada. They have 76,000 people working in their nuclear industry. They've been involved since the fifties, and 46 per cent of those jobs are high-paying jobs. But what does it allow? It allows Canada to have electricity which, when I was there, was a third of the cost that we are paying in Australia—a third—and they don't have blackouts, because they have huge amounts of baseload. They also have huge amounts of hydro. But in Ontario they have 65 per cent of their energy coming from nuclear power plants. They're like France.

So I really think the government needs to have a change in their attitude. Unfortunately, they've been misinformed, with their Rewiring the Nation and their transition plans. They got documents like the GenCost report. They got a lot of AEMO documents which I feel have led them up the garden path, given them this false idea that you could seriously do what everyone else has tried and failed. All our highly trained engineers are saying: 'You are trying to turn a variable frequency and voltage direct current, inverting it into alternating current, but at various frequencies and voltages that make the machines and all the systems that get attached to them go faulty, trigger blackouts and be weather dependent.' We're going to spend trillions of dollars. We will need to build not just Snowy Hydro 2.0 but also 14 others to backup what is being planned, and that is randomly variable. The cost of the batteries alone will be trillions of dollars and—wait for it—the plan that AEMO has put out is relying on your batteries in your house to be sucked back in. We really need to be mature and say, 'We've been given bad advice, let's reassess this.'

This bill is fine. We will supported to the hilt. We need it for the defence of the nation. But we really need an electricity grid and reliable and affordable energy to get manufacturing and a vibrant industrial base back in this country, otherwise cities and businesses will fail and cities will blackout. We'll be like Adelaide eventually—if we keep on going with this madness, that is the eventual result. Our competitors, opponents and people who have expansionary plans are laughing all the way to the bank. We sell them all our minerals wholesale at cheap prices and they send us expensive stuff that works for 10, 15 or 20 years, destroys our competitiveness and leaves businesses overseas. We really need to reconsider. To defend the nation, we need electricity and a grid that's cheap and reliable. (Time expired)

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