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

I thank the minister for citing those guidelines; I suspected that that was where he would go. That refreshingly frank restatement of the guidelines is actually the nub of the problem. What the minister just told the chamber is that the industry wants to take the material to a remote site so that, when the dump leaks, it is as far away from people as possible. He said that quite explicitly. I do not think that is even a controversial statement; it is more or less black and white. When the stuff leaks out of the container, you want it to be somewhere with low rainfall, somewhere where the groundwater table is half a mile below the surface, somewhere where there are no earthquakes, somewhere where the climate has not changed markedly in the last couple of million years and obviously somewhere a long way from people. If the thing is going to leak and the stuff is going to go all over the place, you would absolutely want that to be somewhere remote.

That gives us something of a hint as to why the government is having such difficulty selling this proposal to the Northern Territory: 'We want to take this stuff to the cattle station in Tennant Creek so that when it leaks it will be a long way from us.' I wonder whether the minister will choose to acknowledge that that is why the government is having difficulty. It is also why the Howard government had that difficulty. Senator Scullion, who has joined us, has spent a long time thinking about these very difficult intractables as well, and we have also. It is extraordinarily difficult.

How on earth do you propose that a site is so indestructible that in two ice ages the material will not have dispersed all over the place? That is exactly the question that this government is facing now. You cannot explain to the traditional owners, to the Cattlemen's Association, to the council or to any of the residents of Tennant Creek that that is the reason you are having so much difficulty selling this proposal, getting decent headlines and getting it through this chamber. It is a really difficult sell when you have to go up there and acknowledge, 'We think it's very important that, when this stuff leaks out of its container, it be a long way from us.' That is really what this debate is about.

I am not blaming the minister for this, because this government inherited an issue that was inherited by the Howard gov­ernment, by the Hawke-Keating government and by the government before that. The reason for this inheritance is that, as with the nuclear industry everywhere else around the world, we just went ahead with building these reactors and churning out various categories of intractable waste without coming up with any idea of how we were going to manage the waste products.

It is interesting and profoundly important to acknowledge that the reason for choosing a remote location is that the stuff is going to wind up out of the box that you put it in. This is less the case for the low-level waste and I freely acknowledge that. A large volume of the radioactive waste that we produce in Australia, and the stuff that the government tends to go on about in terms of cancer treatments and so on, is low-level material that will still be able to kill you in 200 or 300 years time, and after that you can take your eyes off it. This material is literally lethal. In North America they have built houses out of uranium tailings waste, for example, and the radon emissions inside those places are enormous. That has happened because people have forgotten where the tailings piles were. Thirty or 40 years after the mines have become defunct, they have quarried the stuff because the signposts have all blown over. That is the kind of issue that we face here. We need to find a strategy, find a way of passing this material onto the generation that follows us so that they can pass it on to the generation that comes after them, for tens of thousands of years. It is formidably difficult, and that is why successive governments have struggled so hard. I will tell you one thing that I am reasonably sure of: in the midst of the ambiguity of a task that difficult, one thing we certainly should not be doing is putting the stuff on a flatbed and taking it to a cattle station and then walking away.

What we have at the moment, the situation that has prevailed at Lucas Heights for the past 50 years since that reactor started churning this material out, is that it is being looked after, and we have been told that it has been looked after quite safely. I have no reason to dispute that. It is surrounded by scientists, engineers, technicians—smart people who study this stuff, who do it for a living, who look after it. Guess how many of them will be accompanying that material up to Muckaty? None. Nobody. Unless the minister would like to correct the record that the department put to me during an estimates committee last year, and probably the year before that as well when I checked, there will be rotating shifts of six security guards—two on, two off, two on, two off. There will be security guards on eight hour shifts around the clock for the next 300 years. Those are the jobs, by the way, that were promised to the people in the Barkly region. Some of the loneliest security guards in the country will be looking after that material.

But it is not the intention of the govern­ment, as far as I am aware—please correct the record if the thinking has shifted—to send any of those technicians after the waste they have produced, send any of those engineers or scientists or people who trained in the storage and condition of this waste. Not at all. This is going to be a lonely shed in the middle of nowhere, as the former science minister put it, with two security guards looking after it. That is quite some employment boost for the Barkly region! They are really looking forward to that economic development arriving in their area!

I tested these ideas a couple of times. The people who made it the most explicit, which was extremely valuable when I was working on the Pangea campaign in 1999, were the company itself. This was a consortium based in Switzerland, with money from British Nuclear Fuels and involvement from various other members of the international nuclear industry. They proposed to put up to 20 per cent of the world's high-level spent fuel—this is material that is more intractable than the slightly lower level waste that we produce in Australia from a small research reactor—on a guarded railway line and take it up to Laverton and dump it in a hole there. Their promotional video was somehow found by Friends of the Earth and leaked to the press through my colleague and good friend Robin Chapple MLC before he went into parliament in Western Australia. The video spelt out exactly why Pangea was seeking a remote site. It was really interest­ing and it is worth looking at; it is still online if senators care to track it down. With all of the preconditions that the minister read into the record before—low rainfall, low geologi­cal activity, not too many earthquakes, low water table and really simple stratified geology—when you put this stuff into a hole half a mile underground and it burns its way out of the container, you would want to be a long way from it. That is the case for remote dumping. It is a hideous concept when you consider it as starkly as that, but that is how Pangea put it in their video. There is a cute little graphic of this stuff burning its way out of one of the containers they put down there. You would want that to be a long way from a regional water table. You would not want mining operations anywhere near that for any time in the next quarter of a million years or thereabouts because presumably your fences and signposts will have blown down.

I recognise that this is not geological disposal, that what is proposed for Muckaty is not a hole in the ground half a mile below the surface. It is in fact an interim store for one of the categories of waste—the so-called long-lived intermediate level waste—to sit around for the next 200 or 300 years while people scratch their heads and work out what on earth to do with it. Maybe we will chase some of that suitable geology—which, ironically enough, as Senator Minchin acknowledged yesterday, was what Minister Crean was doing all those years ago. He was setting out to find the right kind of geology in Australia for a remote hole in the ground so that, when the stuff leaked out of its containment, it would be a long way from most people. It is a very difficult proposition to sell to people in the Barkly region that that is explicitly what is going on here. By world standards we have relatively small volumes of the really dangerous stuff that will last and be very dangerous and lethal for tens of thousands of years; but we do have some, and it is our responsibility to look after it. Looking after it does not mean sticking it behind barbed wire on a cattle station.

Australia has never really had a debate about the most appropriate management strategy. The debate we have had here in Australia has been about which remote Aboriginal community should host this stuff. In remote areas where we have starved people for resources in health care and education—the kinds of issues that Senator Scullion and Senator Crossin have been working on—who is interested in 12 million bucks, which is about $40,000 a year for 300 years? People representing the Territory know very well, as I do from a Western Australian perspective, the kinds of extraordinary disadvantage and deprivation suffered by Aboriginal communities in this country. And that again is something this government inherited. It is trying to do something about it. Some of that activity is dramatically misguided, contemplating the intervention, and some of it is helpful. But the fact is that this is the kind of economic development that these communities do not need—hosting, for a pittance and a tiny handful of jobs, material that industrial society here in Australia and everywhere else in the world has not the remotest idea what to do with. We need to get over the debate that we have had in Australia about which remote Aboriginal community should host this stuff until the end of time. That is absolutely an appalling way to continue.

We all thought, from the comments that Senator Carr was making in the run-up to the 2007 election, from the statements that he put out, from what Senator Crossin said, from things that Mr Snowdon put out at the time, that the ALP had got it, that they had spent a bit of time thinking about it. They acknowledged the difficulties that had been run into in South Australia and that there was the prospect that we would see this debate going differently. It was pretty explicit. I was really excited because it looked like we had a breakthrough. We had an opposition with some energy and some drive that, for the first time in a generation, got this issue. And look what happened right after the election. Portfolio responsibilities were taken away from Minister Carr. I strongly suspect that he would have made a much better job of this issue than Mr Martin Ferguson has, but I guess we will never get to find out. But away it went, and we are straight back on track. The Muckaty nomination will be preserved. 'We will eventually repeal the Howard government bill, and we know that that is nothing more than a cut and paste job, and away we will go.' It has become very strongly apparent since then, and it is written into every line of this bill, that nothing has been learnt at all. That is why we are in the middle of a fight. That is why this issue is back in the NT News today and in the nation's media and the ABC. We have another confrontation, and it was a needless one. I will put on the record again, as I did during my speech in the second reading, that the Australian Greens will work with the government, will work with the opposition, will work with anybody with goodwill who wants to acknowledge that this is a complex and intractable issue. This is something that is not going to go away any time soon. But the strategy of aggression and coercion has got to stop. That is the message that I have heard loud and clear in the time that I have spent in Tennant Creek and on site in Alice Springs chasing this issue around the country in committees and taking evidence from people who dispute the tenure of the land in question—and now that is being tested in the Federal Court case—and also dispute the deeper idea. Even if the Federal Court finds that, according to the requirements of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the right people have been spoken to, they dispute the idea that it should automatically be a remote Aboriginal community that has to host this material. I think that fundamental underlying premise is what needs to be very, very strongly contested.

I approached ANSTO when they gave evidence on my original bill at the end of 2008—which I think is one of the reports that Senator Sherry read from—that we should simply repeal the Howard legislation and move ahead, as the government was telling us they proposed to do at the time, with a different strategy with a bit more scientific integrity. I asked ANSTO:

... is it the case that we are looking for the stable geology and distance from groundwater sources [because] there is no form of engineered containment that can hold this material for the time periods that are required?

Mr McIntosh quite rightly replied:

For low-level waste, it is not such an issue.

And I tend to agree. I asked him:

Yes, but for the long-lived, intermediate or high-level waste, it is?

Mr McIntosh said:

Yes.

Senator Pratt asked Mr Bradley Smith, the Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies: 'What is the urge to take this to out of town and dump it on a cattle station somewhere, and what do we have to do to get it right?' I think Mr Smith's answer was actually quite instructive. He said:

The history of discussion about a facility since 1979 shows that all communities have reacted strongly, or there has been activism from communities. South Australia, three or four years ago, was a recent example. At some point a decision has to be made. I understand your argument. I am just saying that there is an obstinate fact here. We have radioactive waste. It is not stored on an optimal basis. We need a national facility or a commonwealth facility to do that. That means hard decisions have to be made.

That is code. Senator Pratt continued:

You are arguing that at some point, because there will inevitably be community opposition to such a site, the scientific factors in terms of the demand for a site are going to have to override a community mandate to locate the site.

Mr Smith, not representing the government but representing FASTS, said yes, that is what will happen. Sooner or later we are just going to have to crush somebody. We are just going to have to come through the front door and dump it. That appears to be approach that the government is committed to taking. So my question to the minister is: has the government ever assessed options for long-term storage, intermediate storage or interim storage of this material that do not involve remote dumping?