Ross Lightfoot (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Senate is considering the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Amendment Bill 2006. Only 20 million people reside in Australia, a country which is the same size as the mainland of the United States of America, where there are 260 million people. The coast of Australia has one of the most centralised populations of any coast in the world. Nearly 90 per cent of the people in Australia live around the coast, particularly in the capital cities of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin and Hobart. Australia is made up mostly of old and stable geological rocks. Electricity in Australia is predominantly produced from coal, gas and diesel—all fossil fuels. Some renewables operate in Australia—solar, hydro, wind and biofuels. Nuclear power is the only possible alternative to the power generators that emit CO and other greenhouse gases. Why? Nuclear is green; nuclear is clean. Nuclear power is the only economical alternative that can produce enough electricity to satisfy the great demand in Australia, which is expected to double in 25 years.

As someone who has been involved in the search for uranium over many years, I do not believe that uranium in its natural state as an ore, uranium as upgraded and value-added UO or spent uranium from nuclear power stations is at all dangerous. If it is handled in the right way it is no more dangerous than coal, no more dangerous than nickel, no more dangerous than lead and no more dangerous than beach sands from which radioactive monazite is mined.

This bill will give ANSTO an effective role in managing mid-level and high-level nuclear waste. Currently, there is no such facility. Would my colleagues opposite recommend, say, Indonesia? Indonesia, which is led by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, one of the greatest leaders Indonesia has ever had, is geologically unstable. Do the other side want to put our waste and the world’s waste in Papua New Guinea? Papua New Guinea is not only geologically unstable but, at times, perhaps through no fault of its own, it has also been politically unstable. Should nuclear waste go to Solomon Islands? The answer is, of course, a deafening no. Should it go a little closer to the eastern states of Australia, in Vanuatu? The answer, of course, is no.

Nuclear waste should in fact go to a place that is geologically stable, that has some of the world’s oldest rocks and that has no subterranean water movement—a country that is one of the five oldest continuous democracies in the world. We understand through our tertiary institutes, and through training in those institutes, that nuclear waste can be stored only in a country that is geologically stable, that has old rocks, that has no water movement and that has been led by stable governments for the last 105 years—and that country, of course, is Australia.

There is one other thing that adds to the proposition and the attractiveness of Australia for a nuclear or high-level waste repository and that is, of course, that we have wide open spaces. In one million square miles in Western Australia we have just over two million people living. Of those two million people, 75 per cent live in the Perth metropolitan area, in that narrow strip between Yanchep-Two Rocks in the north and down to Bunbury in the south—1.5 million people, three-quarters of the whole population of that million square miles, live there.

The current act, inadvertently, restricts ANSTO and its redoubtable expertise in assisting other Commonwealth agencies which produce radioactive waste—hospitals, some universities, and of course Lucas Heights. With the establishment of the repository facility in the Northern Territory, a state-of-the-art repository, it will be important for ANSTO to be able to condition and make safe waste from the other Commonwealth agencies before it is transported to the proposed repository in the Northern Territory.

The Northern Territory has around 100,000 people in it. It is a lot better place to put uranium waste—or partly-spent uranium, as most of it will be—than leaving it at Lucas Heights. Lucas Heights now is a suburb that one might call an inner Sydney suburb. I have been to several nuclear facilities around the world, not just Lucas Heights. How many people in here have been to inspect Lucas Heights? I certainly have. I have been to Calvert Cliffs, a 2,000-megawatt plant, sitting on the very edge of Chesapeake Bay, arguably the most environmentally sensitive area in the United States. Two thousand megawatts of electricity is produced there. It is put into the Baltimore gas and electric grid at US3.5c a kilowatt-hour. What an achievement that is: US3.5c a kilowatt-hour from a nuclear power plant. I have also been to one near Bristol in the United Kingdom. I have not just been and had a look at it; I have been inside, into the reactor chambers, peered down through that hazy, mesmeric blue colour of the heavy water in which the uranium rods are. I have also been to one in southern Taiwan and had a look at that facility, which is run in an exemplary fashion.

I have also been to Argentina, to a place called Bariloche. It is the most beautiful place on earth. Sitting there is a nuclear facility from which we bought our new INVAP reactors that replaced the old HIFAR reactors at Lucas Heights. It is a beautiful place, Bariloche, at the foot of the alps in Patagonia. No problems with these people with storing radioactive waste. No problem with making money out of these facilities. The one that we bought from INVAP in Bariloche in Argentina is state of the art, sourced from the best possible materials and the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art nuclear facilities around the world.

Waste is currently treated safely, and has been for generations, in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, in Russia, China and Japan. China incidentally is planning 36 more nuclear power plants. What is going to happen to us in Australia if we are the only developed country in the world that does not have a nuclear power plant? What is going to happen to us if we become the biggest exporters of uranium in the world, the biggest exporter of UO? That is not where the money is, incidentally; the money is in converting that UO into fuel rods or fuel balls, or some type of uranium that can be immediately used in reactors. What is going to happen to us if Canada gets the jump? What is going to happen to us if—because the world price becomes so high and we become so restrictive because of the patently and obviously stupid three-mines policy of the Labor Party—other countries are forced to source their material from, say, Africa or other unstable parts of the world?

France gets 79 per cent of its power from nuclear energy. No-one stops drinking French champagne—when they can afford it; I cannot, not on a backbencher’s salary; if I had a minister’s salary, yes, I could afford to drink it—or eating any of the food products from France, which are amongst the best in the world, because of that. I happen to believe that the south-west of Western Australia and Tasmania have magnificent food, but France does too. No-one says they are not going to drink French champagne or eat French food because 79 per cent of France’s electricity is nuclear powered. Sweden—a country that the successive Labor parties in state parliament in Western Australia and in the federal parliament have admired so much—derives 50 per cent of its power from nuclear. About six or seven years ago in Sweden, , the Labor Party said that if they got into power they were going to do away with nuclear. Not only did they not do away with it, they increased the production of nuclear power from 48 per cent to 51 per cent. That is how reliant on nuclear power is one of the most innovative and clever countries in the world and how much it believes in nuclear power.

It is imperative that ANSTO, with its highly experienced and professional staff, handle and make safe all our radioactive material sourced in Australia, whether it be from the universities, from hospitals or whether it be material that may be intercepted from points of entry into Australia, such as potential terrorists bringing radioactive material into Australia for nefarious reasons.

We will also meet our obligations under the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism in Australia with a responsible, state-of-the-art Northern Territory nuclear waste repository. Consideration had to be given to ensuring that the public of Australia was reliably informed that waste or spent fuel from Lucas Heights was not stored indefinitely in what is now an inner Sydney suburb and that residents feel that radioactive waste is transported in a proper fashion to the proposed repository in the Northern Territory when and if that takes place. The main waste, however, from the Lucas Heights facility will be returned to INVAP in Argentina from where it will then go to Canada, and the supplies of the research reactor, for further processing.

The radioactive waste currently at ANSTO, including old waste from ANSTO—some of which has been there since the early 1960s, nearly 50 years ago—is to be transported in special accident-proof containers to the proposed repository in the Northern Territory and out of the inappropriate temporary storage at Lucas Heights. Passage of the bill into law is absolutely essential if we are to set an example to other countries in our region and to secure the support of Australians, who reap immense benefits from radioactive isotopes used in medicine and other radioactive activities.

Power demand is expected to increase by three per cent per annum by 2020. Fossil fuels contribute to 80 per cent of the world’s energy production—84 per cent from coal in Australia alone. Australia has the largest known reserves of uranium. Australia is one of the largest producers of uranium, behind Canada. We have the biggest uranium reserves in the world bar none. Uranium contributes to 40 per cent of our energy exports. The major importers are the United States, the UK, the European Union and Asia. Japan and South Korea are becoming major buyers. Australia is about the only developed nation not moving towards electricity generated from nuclear power. I am a global warming sceptic, but I do know one thing—billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, or CO, emissions go into the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. The pH of those oceans ranges from between 8.2 and 8.3—with 7, as everyone knows, being a neutral pH. Those three oceans sequester fully one-third of all the CO emissions in the world. Those CO emissions change the pH factor and produce a more acidic environment—but not much more. Over the past 10 years the pH factor has become 0.1 per cent more acidic. If anything is going to cause coral bleaching, it is going to be the production of carbonic acid as a result of the sequestration of carbon out of the air by our oceans. That would be disastrous for Australia.

If the Greens, or those in the Labor Party who have sentiments similar to the Greens, want to stop global warming or the alteration of our oceans and our coral, they should firstly get behind this ANSTO repository plan for the Northern Territory. It will be state of the art; it will be the best in the world. Secondly, they should get behind the Prime Minister, who wants to move to the cleanest, greenest and most economically viable method of producing electricity outside the so-called ‘dirty energy’ from which we produce our electricity now. Let’s switch to nuclear. Nuclear is a worry to a lot of people, but I am sure that, once they find out how good, how clean, and how economic it can be and how it can advance the status of living of this wonderful country, those who have some apprehension will also support the Prime Minister in his drive to nuclear. I thank the Senate.