Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

Climate change and our energy future is a serious economic, social and environmental issue for Australia.

According to leading scientists, a 4°C rise could result in thousands of deaths in Australia each year from heat-related diseases, a 148% increase in bushfires, a rise in the frequency of natural disasters and the loss of our treasured natural icons, such as the great barrier reef, Kakadu wetlands and the upland forests in Australia’s Wet Tropics, as well as our alpine habitats. More than 16,000 species of animals and plants are at risk of disappearing, including one in four mammals and one in eight birds. There will be less rainfall, higher evaporation and increased drought, resulting in more strain on our rivers and dams, reduction in agriculture production and increased food prices.

While the Government have only recently admitted that climate change is happening and has serious consequences for Australia and the planet, the Australian Democrats have been campaigning on this issue for years.

In May 2001, the Senate tabled the Democrat chaired report The Heat is on: Australia’s Greenhouse Future, which reported on the progress and adequacy of Australia’s policies to reduce global warming. This report was critical of the lack of action to date, and made 106 recommendations in areas of transport, emissions trading, carbon and the land, energy use and supply, climate change and Kyoto.

Three years later the Government released its Energy White Paper (EWP) in 2004. The Energy White Paper set out the Government’s strategy for Australia’s future energy development. As with White Papers in general, it was a declaration of intent, or a blueprint, of how future energy goals will be met.

A senate committee examined the budgetary and environmental implications of the Government’s Energy White Paper. Tabled in 2005 the Democrat chaired report Lurching Forward, Looking Back, found that the plan outlined in the Energy White Paper did not go far enough and lacks a viable time-frame for success.

The report found that the Energy White Paper did not contain effective planning for the future needs of the Australian community in energy supply, greenhouse gas emission reductions or alternative renewable energy development.

Specifically the report argued that energy related emissions are increasing at an alarming rate, yet there are no expressed policies in the Energy White Paper that will address this issue and rein in emissions.

The report made a small number of achievable recommendations, none of which have been implemented.

Now fast forward to 4 June 2006.

The Prime Minister proclaims that he will shortly announce a review on nuclear energy. He states and I quote “Concerns about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, the rising costs of energy and the possible availability of a cheaper source of fuel, will form the basis of our arguments for this debate.”

Nuclear energy was not a consideration in the Government’s energy white paper tabled two years earlier.

Now suddenly after a visit with US President George Bush the Prime Minister is talking about nuclear power.

Now some may say I am being cynical, but it is hard not to be cynical.

Because once we saw the terms of reference for the nuclear inquiry it became obvious that the Prime Minister was not so interested in nuclear power or greenhouse gas abatement. No. Rather the terms of references suggest that the Prime Minister is more interested in making money, and dirty money at that.

This inquiry is about convincing Australians that we should expand uranium mining and enrich uranium.

The Prime Minister told media that and I quote “Australia holds up to 40 of the world’s known low-cost, recoverable uranium reserves and there is significant potential for Australia to increase and add value to our uranium extraction and exports”, and “I’ve always maintained that holding the reserve of uranium that we do, it is foolish to see ourselves as simply an exporter of uranium.”

We also read last Friday that the Government’s Uranium Industry Framework had expanded its terms of reference.

It is clear that expanding uranium mines, enriching the uranium, sending the enriched uranium to China and India for leasing, and then bringing back the waste is the first part of Prime Minister Howard’s plan.

The crucial factor the Prime Minister has conveniently ignored is that uranium mining and enrichment generates significant greenhouse emissions. Uranium enrichment in the US alone (where 20% of electricity is generated from nuclear power) releases 14 million tonnes of CO² pa.

Uranium enrichment also produces a massive amount of chemical waste. For every tonne of natural uranium mined and enriched for use in a nuclear reactor, gives about 130 kg of enriched fuel, leaving 870 kg of waste. The bulk (96%) of the byproduct from enrichment is depleted uranium (DU), for which there are few applications; the United States Department of Energy alone has 470,000 tonnes in store. There is about 1.2 million tonnes of DU now stored around the world.

The Prime Minister’s plan also includes taking back high-level nuclear waste, possibly including US nuclear weapons waste, and making Australia the nuclear waste dump of the world. So not only will we end up with millions of tonnes of chemical waste from enrichment, but we will have high-level long-lived waste from nuclear power plants around the world. The Government can’t even safely store Australia’s current production of waste from Lucas Heights and from medical uses.

The PM’s suggestion that exporting non-enriched uranium is analogous to exporting wool as a raw product is outrageous to say the least.

Turning wool into knitted garments doesn’t leave a pile of intractable waste behind. In any case, the Government, in ten years has been unable to stem the loss of a textile industry here, or to build markets for wool in the face of synthetics.

The Democrats are not opposed to having the nuclear power debate, primarily because we know that empirical evidence shows that nuclear power is not economically, socially and environmentally acceptable as a means to address climate change.

However, we are opposed to a nuclear power debate in the absence of looking at other energy sources.

The Democrats believe that the Prime Minister is misleading people with his narrow ‘debate’ on nuclear power.

Ignoring other energy sources assumes nuclear power is the only option to address climate change.

The Prime Minister claims that he is interested in a mature debate and not to have and I quote “such a stupidly emotional debate about it”.

Besides the fact that I object to the Prime Minister referring to anyone who puts up facts and figures that opposes his views as “stupidly emotional”, I would argue that the Prime Minister himself has failed to provide the Australian public with a “mature debate”.

The Democrats and others believe that the debate on nuclear power must be within the broader energy debate, or real issue of finding the cleanest and safest way to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be lost.

This is why we support the Greens motion to examine Australia’s future sustainability and secure energy supply.

As outlined in the terms of reference, the Government needs to consider the short, medium, and long-term greenhouse gas abatements targets and goals.

While the Government has finally started recognising that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia by 60% levels by 2050, rather than act now, this Government seems to be deliberately delaying action in the hope that nuclear and or so called clean coal will be our saviour.

It is not possible for a nuclear power industry or clean coal technology to be developed in time to combat climate change.

It would take 10 to 15 years for nuclear power to be generated. US reactors commissioned in the 1970’s took 20 years with ongoing delays.

And it would take equally similar time to establish operational and economically viable clean coal technology.

What are the Government’s plans in the short-term?

The joint ACF and business roundtable for climate change report The Business Case for Early Action showed that if action on climate change is delayed it becomes more expensive for business and the wider Australian economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The report concluded that you need long-term inspirational goals coupled with short-term binding targets as a milestone. That we need to accelerate efforts to manage energy and reduce emissions – not stall them.

The joint WWF and gas industry report Options for Moving Towards a Lower Emissions Future showed that costs can be minimised by immediately setting an emissions target, that results can be achieved with today’s electricity generation technology and knowledge about energy efficiency, and that the cost would be between $0.43 - $2 week per person each year to 2030. The report again emphasised the importance of setting targets.

We also need to look at the mix of energy supply that could feasibly meet Australia’s energy intensity requirements. As I mentioned before nuclear power and clean coal technology would not be viable for another 15 – 20 years.

We need to be looking now at mix of energy options.

Renewable energy already supplies 19% of the world’s electricity, compared to nuclear’s 16%.

Around the world the rate of increase in renewables is nearly 30 percent for wind, 20 percent for solar, and only 0.6 percent for nuclear.

The UN Governmental Panel on Climate change have stated the renewable energy could meet most of the of the world’s energy demand by 2100.

AGL, Frontier Economics and WWF-Australia undertook a pragmatic economic evaluation of how to using low and zero greenhouse gas emission electricity generating technology to achieve a realistic target by 2030 consistent with the greenhouse gas reductions advocated by climate scientists.

Australia has the perfect climate and geography to support a big increase in renewable energy, and combined with gas, could better meet our energy needs in the future than expensive nuclear power with all its serious waste, security and de-commissioning problems.

Cost is another key component of the energy renewable debate. Evidence, including the recent report commissioned by ANSTO, shows that a nuclear power industry is expensive, and is not viable without Government subsidies.

We already know nuclear power can be as cheap as coal if the cost of storing the waste or decommissioning the reactor is not taken into account. We also know that coal is currently cheaper than wind and solar but only because the cost of CO² emissions is ignored.

Research shows that every dollar spent on nuclear power is diverting private and public investment from cheaper and cleaner markets such as renewable sources. A proper inquiry must take into account all the costs.

Issues such as reliability, safety and security must also be taken into account.

Waste storage is still a huge headache for the big nuclear power generators and cannot be said to be either safe or acceptable to the public.

Annually about 12,000 to 14,000 tonnes of spent fuel are produced by power reactors worldwide.

Not a single depository exists anywhere in the world for the disposal of high level waste from nuclear power. This is waste that is radioactive for hundreds and thousands of years.

The recent leaks at Lucas Heights demonstrated the risks of dealing with any part of the nuclear cycle. No worksite or workplace is free from accidents and accidents do happen.

Let’s not forget Chernobyl and its estimated 270,000 cancer and 93,000 fatal cancer cases or the 200,000 deaths in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus or the billion dollar costs of relocating people and abandoning farmland.

And more modern nuclear power stations are not accident free either.

In the past 6 years nuclear reactor accidents have led to life threatening radioactive exposure in the Tokai-mura facility and Onagawa facility in Japan, and Dounreay and Sellafield in the UK.

This is not scaremonger, these are facts.

The Government also needs to seriously identify policy adjustments required to stimulate clean energy markets.

For example while renewable energy markets are increasing around the rest of the developed world Australia currently gets only 8 percent of its electricity from renewable energy down from 10 percent in 1999 due to increases in coal fired power. This is much lower than the 12 percent promised by the Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets. Investment in renewable energy will now stall from 2007 because the Government refuses to expand the Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets.

In refusing to sign Kyoto Australia has also missed out on being part of a global emissions trading scheme. The Australian Greenhouse Office developed an emission trading system years ago which sat gathering dust while our emissions soared.

Action is needed now. There are immediate solutions in existing renewable technology, gas and energy efficiency. The Democrats believe that renewable energy technologies are more efficient than nuclear, are clean, abundant, generate no toxic waste, no terrorist potential, and are a much more realistic and economic proposition for greenhouse reduction.

If the Prime Minister wants a mature debate then let’s have all the cards on the table, including alternatives to nuclear power. Let’s have a broad energy inquiry so Australians can judge for themselves whether nuclear is the way to go or the debate is yet another Government excuse for failing to tackle greenhouse emissions.