Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

Nuclear power is an important matter, which Senator Wong has raised in the chamber today. Carbon emissions and global warming create worldwide problems and must be acted on now. There is no more urgent matter for this country to address than climate change. I do not think I am making a revolutionary statement; it is a proposition that is now greeted with increasing enthusiasm across the industrial world. There are still a few sceptics in the government who have recently read some opinion polls and found it necessary to change their rhetoric, but they have made a political career out of this sort of climate scepticism. Even Prime Minister Howard and his government have to acknowledge the seriousness of the current situation.

Day after day we are told that there are quick fixes and that new arrangements can be made without much thought or consideration of the implications—that somehow or other a wave of the magic wand can solve the problems that we are now confronted with. The truth is that it is not possible to get quick fixes. It is not possible to come up with a quick and dirty response to the problems of climate change, despite the political urgency that the government has now discovered and despite the fact that the Prime Minister, being an extremely clever politician, feels that it is possible to seek some sort of political solution to his problems with the establishment of inquiries or by making claims that nuclear power is the answer to all our problems.

Climate change is not a matter that we can afford to take lightly and we cannot allow it to become a casualty of the Prime Minister’s self-interested politicking. The opposition simply will not allow that to happen. We are of the view that we need to examine the facts carefully. We need to analyse the government’s nuclear plans carefully and ensure that they are brought to the attention of the public.

The increasing use of nuclear power is, at the very least, a decade away according to the most enthusiastic protagonists within the government. Anyone who knows anything about this subject knows what a completely ridiculous proposition that is. The minister for finance is a self-proclaimed expert on the question. Yes, I am referring to Senator Minchin. He has made it very clear to us that he has a view of his expertise on these questions. He has made it very clear that nuclear power will not be viable in this country for at least 100 years. Yet we are being told by the minister for industry that a click of the fingers can produce nuclear power inside 10 years. That just cannot be done. Even the government sponsored report confirms that the 25 reactors that are recommended will not be up and running, by Switkowski’s estimation, until 2050. According to the most extraordinary estimations, it would take 10 to 15 years. This, as I say, is the most generous and optimistic estimate.

We know that the government’s Chief Scientist, Dr Peacock, himself a supporter of nuclear power, has said that the report presented by the Switkowski committee was unrealistic. The report, he said:

... is unrealistic in believing that a reactor could be established in as little as ten years.

He goes on to suggest to us that Mr Switkowski’s report ignored expert advice from international experts; ignored community advice; and was totally unrealistic about the nature of nuclear physics, the regulatory environment that is required and the sheer, extraordinary costs that are involved with such a proposition.

We can contrast this position being taken by the Australian government in the face of the political pressure it is now under with what is occurring in the United Kingdom. The Labour government commissioned review by Sir Nicholas Stern made it very clear that delaying action would inflict massive costs on the economy and that the world had only 10 years to act on these questions. That was his assessment. The CSIRO and the Stern review both support the urgency of the task. They argue that there must be a 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050 if we are to avoid permanent damage to the earth.

Building 25 nuclear power reactors is not the solution, nor would it be possible in the economics of the industry as we currently understand them. Posturing about such an expensive and toxic industry is not the way to go, and it is certainly not the way to go in the claims that are being made about it being possible within 10 years. The Switkowski report makes it clear that, even with 25 nuclear reactors across the nation and with the various existing programs, such as the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, greenhouse emissions would nonetheless still soar from 558 megatons in 2000 to 718 megatons in 2050. That is a 29 per cent increase. That is not a solution.

If global greenhouse pollution rose by 29 per cent by 2050 the world would probably experience a rise in global temperatures of four degrees Celsius. The CSIRO has warned that such a rise in global temperatures would seriously damage Australia’s environment and economy. It would have a serious impact on the Great Barrier Reef; it would cut water flows to cities and the Murray-Darling Basin by 48 per cent; it would increase bushfire danger across Australia; and it would move the dengue fever transmission zone down to Brisbane and possibly as far south as Sydney. Climate change is not just about people having their beachside holidays affected; the whole issue here is about preventing the serious threat to our survival on this planet.

The Economist has labelled nuclear economics as ‘dodgy’ and has pointed out that there has been a whole series of costs associated with the reactors. It is not just the cost of establishing the reactors but also the cost of shutting them down. In any assessment on these questions, you have to build on the cost of decommissioning. The British Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has found that shutting down their 20 nuclear sites is going to cost $161 billion.

We have seen the considerable costs associated with the decommissioning of our tiny research reactor at Lucas Heights. So the sort of proposition that we have been talking about here in terms of the sheer scale of what is being proposed has to be seen in its full economic context. The last reactors that were built in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada cost between $7 billion and $14 billion, even after 40 years of experience in building nuclear reactors in these countries. So there is a very substantial cost of construction. The Switkowski review does not include these recent overseas experiences and predicts the construction costs would be somewhere in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion for an Australian nuclear reactor, despite the fact that we do not have the necessary nuclear skill set to achieve such a scale of building program in this country.

There have been serious criticisms raised about the costs associated with Mr Switkowski’s report. It is quite an extraordinary situation for the government to claim that this is the solution to our problems. I have spoken directly to two nuclear physicists who were involved in the last effort to produce a nuclear reactor in Australia—the doomed proposal down at Jervis Bay. They have told me that the project was stopped because the cost of generating electricity could not possibly be justified because it was higher by up to a factor of 10 in terms of the difference between the cost of electricity generated through traditional means and through the nuclear proposal. In economic terms it just does not make sense. This is particularly important in a country where we have coal reserves in such extraordinary abundance. It just does not make sense to undermine those arrangements.

Even in countries where the opportunities for energy generation are somewhat more limited—for instance, China, where they are proposing a massive expansion in their nuclear program—the fact remains that, despite the proposals to build up to 40 new reactors, the baseload contribution of those reactors to the Chinese electricity grid is not particularly significant. For the next century we are likely to see in China a heavy reliance on coal. Just the other night their top nuclear scientist in an interview broadcast on the ABC pointed out that the proposals that are being advanced in China are totally unsuitable to countries such as Australia and that, had they the options that Australia has, it is not altogether certain that they would pursue the policies that are being pursued.

So it is extraordinary that we are being told that this nuclear fantasy is the quick fix to our global warming problems. It is the quick fix allegedly to our energy requirements. It is the quick fix to the notion that this Prime Minister is faced with in the political struggles that he is currently engaged in. That is really what it is about. It is about coming up with a quick and dirty solution to a political problem. It is not about the long-term investment in the future of the country.

So there is the cost of building a nuclear reactor. There is the mere fact that the regulatory regime would not allow it to be constructed—if it were to be done properly—within a period of probably less than 15 years. This is in spite of the fact that the amounts of money that are being spent on alternative energy generation technologies and research and development are so limited and despite the fact that we have substantial reserves of coal. You would have thought that a government would be thinking about alternative strategies than those it is proposing.

I say that especially in the circumstances where we have not been able to deal with the waste question. In this country we have been struggling with the problem of the development of a low-level nuclear waste facility. We have been struggling with that problem now in this country for well over a decade. That is a low-level waste dump to deal with the remains of the nuclear industry, as limited as it is, in this country now. We are talking about gloves, soil, watch dials and various other pieces of equipment that are being used. We have an inventory of nuclear waste in this country of a low-level nature, which essentially is made up of soil. A substantial part of that is soil from the old CSIRO site in Fishermens Bend in Victoria, which was moved from Victoria over to South Australia, and now is accumulated in South Australia with various other tools and other pieces of equipment from Lucas Heights.

This low-level material has created such a political problem in this country that it has defied the work of our best administrative minds, our best political minds, I might suggest, for probably up to 15 years. Yet we are told that we can now handle high-level—not intermediate-level—nuclear waste and we can produce the wherewithal to deal with that waste in a period when we have not even dealt with low-level waste over a 15-year cycle. I ask the question: how are we going to be able to build these power stations when we cannot even build a waste dump? It strikes me that highlights just how ludicrous the proposition has been in terms of the government’s discussions on these issues.

Then we are told that some of the government’s favourite sons—Mr Ron Walker, the former national treasurer of the Liberal Party, the bagman out of Victoria for the Liberal Party—