Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm just going to respond to a few of the things that the member for Sturt was saying in relation to the Annual climate change statement 2023 which raises the question of how Australia makes progress towards its commitment to net zero by 2050—a commitment made by the current government. It wasn't something that the former government had any strong interest in, and the member for Sturt has just come and talked exclusively about how nuclear energy is required to get there. He said a few things that I think should be rebutted, and the first is around having a debate.

I'm going to give him the debate that he asked for, and it's just one of many debates that have occurred on this issue. In fact, it's pretty much an ongoing conversation. There was a Ziggy Switkowski review under the Howard government in 2006. There was a royal commission, I think, in South Australia. There have been multiple committee inquiries. In fact, in the last parliament there was an inquiry that the former government caused to be undertaken by the Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy that the member for Warringah and I were on. I was deputy chair of the committee. It was chaired by the opposition's energy spokesperson. It was on the viability of civilian nuclear energy, and it concluded that it wasn't viable at this stage. I think all it could bring itself to say from the point of view of the government members was that this idea of small modular reactors should be kept somewhere on the blackboard to be thought about from time to time. But there were no steps taken by the former government to deal with the very sensible EPBC prohibition of civilian nuclear power in Australia. That was put in place under the Howard government. Again, there were no steps by the former government to do that—just as there were no steps taken further down the path of nuclear energy, just as there was no actual national energy policy of any kind. We have been watching the Nemesis program, and it is a reminder of the terrible knot that the former government got itself into around the National Energy Guarantee. The NEG was probably the closest thing they got to a national policy. There were 22 energy policies that they toyed with. I think the NEG was the one they got closest to and failed to deliver.

Now that they're in opposition, of course, the energy policy they have is to bring in nuclear. One of the reasons you don't take the prohibition away is that the first thing you would need, if you were to contemplate civilian nuclear in this country, would be the whole apparatus that would go around governing it. I'd encourage the member for Sturt and anyone else who thinks that would be a good idea to go and look at the annual budget for that regulation and all the associated agencies in the United States. It runs to tens upon tens upon tens of millions of dollars. That's the first thing you'd have to do. Then, of course, you'd have the nuclear white-shoe brigade sniffing around for every little bit of money they could get for all of these wild pilot projects and other kinds of wild goose chases, frankly.

The member for Sturt belled the cat. He argued against himself, I thought, pretty well when he mentioned that nuclear technology hasn't changed in 70 years. It's not a new industry. We've been told over and over again for literally the last 30 years that the next amazing magic generation of nuclear technology will arrive and will be safe, cheap and all of these other things, and it just doesn't occur. Renewable energy and those related technologies provide the starkest contrast that you can imagine, because the improvement in the learning curve, in efficiency, in technology and in the cost curve are there for all to see. The stuff keeps getting cheaper, and it keeps getting better and more effective.

Nuclear just hasn't been that kind of technology. It's no good pointing the finger and trying to blame other people for it. That's just the nature of the beast. The fascination that those opposite have developed—or have been sucked into, in my view—around small modular reactors is part of that problem. We looked at that very closely in the inquiry I talked about before. The CSIRO GenCost analysis showed that small modular reactors are not going to be all that different in their exorbitant capital costs and operating costs than the existing, larger-scale nuclear technology. Since the time we had that inquiry, some of the darlings of the SMR fantasists, like the NuScale project in the United States, have literally fallen apart. We had that inquiry, and the chair—now the opposition energy spokesperson—and other nuclear devotees were falling over themselves to get NuScale to present to us. And they did. They gave evidence to that inquiry, and they put forward all of the usual pie-in-the-sky nuclear vendor claims about how little it would cost and the price at which NuScale would be able to deliver nuclear-generated electricity.

Then, as the next few years went on, between 2019 and now there were a series of updates. Every update, the project timeline went out by another two or three years, the capital costs went up by another few billion and the operating costs went up by several tens of dollars per megawatt hour until, eventually—not that long ago, because it was late last year—NuScale went 'poof!' and disappeared. The project fell over because it was, frankly, not viable. They gave an update to the market. Capital costs had gone up by 2½. Operating costs and the delivery price of electricity, even with the subsidy that the new Inflation Reduction Act of the Biden administration provided, still put it at an exorbitant cost. That cost is not faintly comparable to what is being delivered by wind and solar at about exactly the same cost as what you'd get from coal or gas, but it does have incredibly long and uncertain timelines and massive capital costs.

That's the reality of the SMR fantasy. It doesn't exist. People can make whatever claims they want about it. This is a darling project of the member for Fairfax. Someone might want to go back through Hansard and do a search on NuScale and the member for Fairfax. My God, there will be love letters about NuScale and what a wonderful thing it's going to turn out to be in every one of those leather-bound volumes that we get in our offices or that are in the bookshelves around here. That project is defunct. That project has gone because it didn't stack up. That's the reality of nuclear. The member for Sturt thinks that it's a clever thing for Australia to waste time, money, energy and hopes on nuclear technology. It's a bizarre proposition, and it seems to be the only proposition when it comes to the energy emissions reduction strategy that those opposite have—a technology that is ferociously expensive and that takes a long time. If Australia were to entertain the lunacy of civilian nuclear power, we would not see a single watt generated from that technology inside of 15 years. That's the reality of it. By that time, it would be, what, 2038, and 2050 would be only a decade away. But it would be ferociously expensive. It's inflexible, and it's not what our evolving energy system needs.

And it comes with all these risks. Again, I don't know why the member for Sturt was so blithe or flippant about the risks of nuclear technology. We have seen in the current conflict in Ukraine the largest nuclear reactor in that country, Zaporizhzhia, on a number of occasions in jeopardy because of the nature of the conflict, with the possibility that its power supply would be interdicted. If that were to happen, if they were to lose the ability to run their cooling systems, we would basically get Chernobyl all over again. People said, when Three Mile Island happened, 'That'll never happen again,' and then, after Chernobyl, 'That'll never happen again.' Then, of course, we had Fukushima, in the incredibly technologically savvy, developed and sophisticated country of Japan, where they're now putting tonnes and tonnes of irradiated water into the Pacific Ocean because there's nothing else that they're going to do. The clean-up for Fukushima will run for another 25 years. It's going to be $600 billion-plus by the time it's finished. That is the reality.

You can have the nuclear fantasy, the nuclear dreamland, where suddenly a technology, after 70 years, becomes miraculously cheap and safe in a way that it has never proved to be—it's an industry that, after those 70 years, doesn't have anywhere to put the high-level waste that gets produced; there is still nowhere on earth that that gets stored—or you can have sanity. You can have renewable energy and energy efficiency and storage and all the things that the Albanese Labor government is putting in place as we chart a path towards net zero by 2050.

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