Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

When the Leader of the Opposition came to Diggers and Dealers in Kalgoorlie in August last year to meet with mining industry people, as we drove into town, there was a banner on one of the main intersections on Hammond Street. The banner said 'Kalgoorlie-Boulder welcomes Peter Dutton and welcomes nuclear energy'. There are towns out there and there are people across my electorate who welcome nuclear energy because they can see the benefits of it. But it's not only that; in the seat of O'Connor, we've got three uranium deposits—Australia does mine uranium; we export it to the rest of the world—that are waiting to be exploited. One of them, Deep Yellow's Mulga Rock, is permitted and ready to go. They are in the process of preparing that mine for operation. So we will see uranium being mined in O'Connor. It'll be trucked through Kalgoorlie and then through to South Australia, where it will be exported out of the Port of Adelaide, which is already accredited. We export a significant amount of uranium out of Adelaide.

An honourable member interjecting—

That's right. So we mine uranium and we export it. But not only that; we have an extraordinary storage site in the electorate of O'Connor at Sandy Ridge, which is about halfway between Coolgardie and Southern Cross. It's one of the most geologically stable parts of the planet's surface. It is fully permanent. It is permanent to accept low-level nuclear waste. There was the planned site in South Australia at Kimba which fell over, but the site at Sandy Ridge is permanent to take low-level nuclear waste and is ready to go.

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