Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to continue my remarks on the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Amendment Bill 2006. It was some time ago when I started to speak on this bill. I think I got about four minutes into my speech before the debate was adjourned for question time that day. I see some degree of irony in the fact that this bill has come on for continuation of the second reading debate today, just after the report into nuclear power has been released. This report is known as the Switkowski report. I think most people have picked up on the fact that this is a report from a hand-picked committee designed to produce a predetermined outcome. I want to come back to that issue in a moment but I firstly want to make some comments about the bill that is before the parliament. This legislation makes a number of changes to the act and, for the most part, we do not disagree with the government’s proposals.

Certainly, a key feature of the legislation is that it will enable ANSTO to manage our nuclear waste in a more sensible and more efficient manner. One of the issues that have arisen—and it is a fact that people in the government did not pick up on this some time ago—is that under the current legislative framework ANSTO does not have the legal authority to manage all of the nuclear waste in this country. There are real questions about whether or not it can manage all of the waste that it produces at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and at its other facilities—the cyclotrons.

I think everyone who has followed this debate knows that the spent fuel rods from Lucas Heights are currently sent overseas to France for reprocessing. In the past some of that material has been sent to facilities at Sellafield in the UK. A key part of the agreement to have that nuclear waste processed overseas is that eventually it returns to Australia. That will commence in a few years time—I think the date is around 2011 or 2012—when the waste from the old reactor at Lucas Heights, known as the HIFAR, will commence to be returned to Australia. That waste has to be stored somewhere. Where the waste will eventually be stored has always been a major issue in the ongoing debate about Australia’s nuclear industry.

The technical problem that has arisen—and I am no scientist, but this is how I understand it—is that when the waste is taken overseas and reprocessed in France by Cogema it gets mixed up with a whole lot of other waste material that is being reprocessed, maybe from other reactors. So in a technical sense it is not exactly the same waste that we sent over there in the first place. So this amending legislation will ensure that in the future there will be no disputing ANSTO’s capacity to receive that waste back and to store it.

We agree with that. It is a valid exercise of the parliament’s power to make amending legislation to deal with that circumstance. But what is more important in this debate is that this highlights the government’s failure to properly address a range of nuclear issues that have been on foot, at least going back to the early 1990s. We have always known that the Lucas Heights reactor was eventually going to have to be shut down. It is planned to be shut down in the next year or two when the new OPAL reactor is fully commissioned.

Back in 1993 the Keating government commissioned an inquiry which produced a report on whether or not there should be a new reactor built and, if so, where it should be located. I want to refer to this inquiry report. It was the report of the Research Reactor Review, August 1993, Future reaction. It is otherwise known as the McKinnon report because the committee was chaired by Professor Ken McKinnon. Firstly, in its findings on the issue of waste storage and disposal, the report stated:

A crucial issue is the final disposal of high level waste which depends upon identification of a site and investigation of its characteristics. A solution to this problem is essential and necessary well prior to any future decision about a new reactor.

Secondly, the review committee went on to state:

If a decision were to be made to construct a new reactor, it would not necessarily best be placed at Lucas Heights. An appropriate site would best be decided after exhaustive search, taking into account community views.

I draw attention to those two findings of the McKinnon report because they go to the heart of what is at issue in the current discussion about nuclear power in this country. What the McKinnon report was saying was that before the government makes any decision about whether it needs a new research reactor, let alone a power reactor—the committee was only looking at a new research reactor—there should be clear evidence that the issue of waste had been resolved, that a location for a waste facility in this country had been determined.

In 1997, after this government had only been in power for a year or so, the then minister for science, Mr McGauran, announced that there would be a new reactor built at Lucas Heights to replace the HIFAR. There was never any proper investigation of alternative sites. This Senate, this parliament, conducted a number of inquiries. I chaired one of them. But every time we sought to get information from the government as to whether or not it had considered alternative sites to Lucas Heights we were told either that that was confidential information or that it was an irrelevant issue. Indeed, as we found out later, one of the reasons the government could not tell us where those sites were that had been looked at was that that might scare the people who lived in the communities in those areas. The second point about that decision is that it was made when no investigation had been conducted into the location of a waste facility. So the government made a major decision without any consideration of the recommendations in the McKinnon review.

I have spoken about this on many occasions and I do not want to go into too much detail again now. But we now see the same approach being repeated; it is a rerun of that history. What did we see with the government’s decision to locate the proposed waste facility in the Northern Territory? First of all, we saw the government decide that it would be located in South Australia—that was its preferred location. In South Australia at the time that that was announced not only did the state Labor government say they would not accept it but the state Liberal Party said they would not accept it either. The Liberal Party opposition in South Australia said: ‘Not in our backyard. We’ve had enough of the nuclear industry in South Australia,’ with the mines that they have there now and the problems that occurred after the nuclear testing at Maralinga after World War II. So, when the Liberal Party in South Australia said they were not going to have a waste dump in their state, the Liberal-National Party government federally said, ‘Okay, they don’t want one, so we’re not going to give them one.’ The government then said it would be built on Commonwealth land.

Since then, the government have announced that it will be located in the Northern Territory. They still have not told us exactly where it will be in the Northern Territory. They have named a number of sites, and people have had to go through various processes to drag the details out of the government as to which actual sites they are considering. Of course, before the last federal election, promises had been made that under no circumstances would a nuclear waste dump be located in the Northern Territory, including, as I understand it, by Senator Scullion from the Northern Territory. But that was all jettisoned after the election. Once the government had won, they very quickly changed their mind, Senator Scullion’s interests were pushed to one side and the Northern Territory is going to have the waste dump. Actually, I would not necessarily argue that it is not a suitable place to have a nuclear waste facility; I can think of quite a number of other places in this country that might be suitable. But the point is that at no stage have the government ever considered the interests of the people of those communities, just as they never took any notice of the interests of the communities of the Sutherland shire when they made their announcement about the replacement reactor at Lucas Heights.

So we now move to what has happened in the last few weeks. The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, has decided that nuclear power should be on the agenda. According to him, we should consider building nuclear power plants around Australia. That is an interesting proposal because it was only a couple of years ago that the government put legislation through this parliament to establish the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency—ARPANSA, as it is known. If you have a look at the legislation that established ARPANSA you will notice that it specifically excludes a range of nuclear facilities from the list that the agency is able to license—in other words, the head of ARPANSA, Dr Loy, is prevented from licensing certain nuclear facilities. And one of the nuclear facilities that he is prevented from licensing is a nuclear power plant.

So what we have had is this issue being thrown out there into the community by the current government and a report commissioned. Yet it was only a couple of years ago that this government put through this parliament the ARPANSA legislation, which regulates the nuclear industry in this country. It is confined to the research reactor plus some other facilities such as cyclotrons. The government said that it would not entertain the idea of nuclear power plants and it would not entertain the idea of enrichment. Indeed, Minister Minchin himself has said that time and time again. Yet we have this phoney debate being put up by the Prime Minister as his response to the major issue of climate change. So whilst we support this legislation, because it makes technical changes to the act that are required, this government has a lot to answer for in its failure to involve the community in its decision making with regard to the nuclear industry.