Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It was nearly two months ago. I would like to ask a question that, again, the minister referred to obliquely in his second reading speech, about the case for remoteness, which we have heard a lot of here in Australia and around the world when it comes to final disposal of radioactive waste. Why exactly is it that the industry is so keen and that the government is following this lead on a remote site? I can certainly understand the arguments for why you would want to bring various categories of radio­active waste together into one place or two or three places—the so-called argument for centralisation—where properly qualified people can look after it, repackage it and so on when that is required. But the case dramatically has not been made for why that particular site should be remote. The minister addressed that issue to some degree in his second reading speech, where he quoted some of the guidelines—I think you were quoting the IAEA—but simply repeating guidelines does not actually justify the argument as to why the industry is so keen for this material to be placed as far from centres of population as possible.

This is a question that I have dedicated quite a bit of time to. If I genuinely believed that the best thing to do was to put this material on rail cars and take it to a sheep station, I would not be wasting my time arguing the matter; I would have spent most of my time making sure that the govern­ment's consultation processes were adequate so that we could get on with finding an appropriate location somewhere out in the bush. However, right from the time that I was working on the Pangea proposal to bring a substantial fraction of the whole world's radioactive waste to Aboriginal country to the east of Laverton in the Savory Basin in my home state of Western Australia, I have been intrigued as to the interest of the international nuclear industry, led by a Swiss consortium, for a remote site in particular.

There are two broad categories of waste we are discussing here and I do not think the government has necessarily made a particularly good case for the remote storage of low-level waste. For example, the minister addressed the Mount Walton East intractable waste facility in Western Australia, which takes, among other chemically toxic materials and other intractables, low-level radioactive wastes—gloves, medical equip­ment and so on—from the WA health sector, spent sources, engineering uses in the mining industry and so on. That material is taken to a remote location out in the desert and dropped down a hole, and that is presumably its final resting place.

As I said in my speech in the second reading debate, that material can be lethal for 300 or 400 years, after which the half-lives of most of the isotopes in question have faded away to background levels and that material can, effectively, be safely walked away from. It will not be by any measure different to the material before it was activated and made radioactive in the first place. In the instance of sources or materials that were generated from radioactive waste that do have further uses in engineering in the mining sector, you could say that the radiation has basically faded away to levels that would not be detected above the background level.

But, of course, that is not the only material that the government propose to take to Muckaty. When you preserved that nomination and explicitly named it in the legislation that we are debating today, you were also proposing to take waste which would be classified as high-level in the first few weeks and months after it is removed from the Lucas Heights reactor, past and present. Then, after a certain period of time of cooling, it is classified as long-lived intermediate-level waste. According to the international guidelines, which you can quote to me again if you like, that material is suitable for deep geological disposal—for burial—and that, of course, is not what is proposed at Muckaty at all, unless the plan has changed radically since the last time I asked departmental officials about it. The spent fuel in the reactor cores will be disassembled from Sydney and taken to whatever remote site ends up being used for the interim—and I will address during this debate exactly how long that interim is proposed to be.

Returning to the issue of remoteness, if this material has been in Sydney for 50 years, as some of it has, in a shed being looked after by people who are qualified in radiation waste management—that is what they do for a living—why exactly is the Western Australian government determined to place radioactive waste at a central remote site? I can understand centralising and bringing the material together, but why exactly to a remote site?

To give the chamber some idea of the thinking behind this, and let's make this explicit, in 2005 the former science minister Brendan Nelson asked:

… why on earth can't people in the middle of nowhere have low level and intermediate level waste?

His successor in the science portfolio, Julie Bishop—who I think I probably misquoted in my second reading speech the other day—noted that all sites on the government's shortlist were 'some distance from any form of civilisation'. What a remarkably enlight­ened comment! That did not go down all that well in the sites that were under discussion, in places like Tennant Creek. The member for Canning, Don Randall, said in the House during the debate:

… no-one, to speak of, lives there. It has a very sparse population. Barely anyone lives in that arid and desolate part of the Northern Territory.

So clearly the argument here is to get it as far away from people as possible.

Of course, the question that comes from that is: why exactly do you want to remove this material as far as possible from the centres where the decisions are made—and how do you explain that to the people who live where you propose to take it? Beyond the remarks the minister already made in his second reading speech—and I have the guidelines in front of me; you can read them if you wish, Minister, but I am fairly familiar with what you were reading from before—I wonder whether he would care to address exactly what the case is for remote storage, which I acknowledge is not centralised storage.