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

I also join with my colleagues in thanking Senator Day for bringing this bill forward, despite the admonishment just then from Senator McLucas about this not being the time or the place. The Greens also have, from time to time, introduced amendments which would radically change the course of a particular piece of legislation. Today is as good a day as any. I am not going to support the amendment and I will explain as clearly as I can why not.

Let us start with South Australia. I think where Senator Day and I would be in firm agreement is that the South Australian economy is in deep trouble. Between the closure of advanced manufacturing for cars, the extraordinary uncertainty faced by naval shipbuilders in South Australia at the moment and, ironically enough, the uncertainty provoked by BHP's intentions on the Roxby Downs expansion you have three of the larger employers or potential employers in the state of South Australia potentially hitting the wall at the same time. I recognise, as do my South Australian colleagues, that that puts the state in a very serious predicament, one I would hope in here would be above politics.

It is without much pleasure that I would remind Senator Day and others that it was only a week or so ago that 380 employees of BHP lost their jobs. I think part of that is as a consequence of the company's decision a couple of years ago to not proceed with the expansion of the Roxby Downs open cut. Senator Day is quite right when he points out that Australia hosts a very large fraction of the world's uranium reserves but the Olympic Dam operation or the Roxby Downs site has a surprisingly large proportion of that uranium infantry at that one single site. The problem we have, which BHP discovered, is that yes, that deposit is huge, but it is very low grade and is a long way underground.

BHP's initial modelling showed that they were going to need to run the largest haul packs in the world 24/7, around the clock, for four years just to remove the overburdened before they could reach the top of the ore body, an excavation which would ultimately become the largest on the planet. For four years those diesel powered monsters would go down and down into the pit just to remove the overburdened and to put it into a temporary mountain to one side of the pitch before starting to mine marketable ore. Once we had the numbers on the size of the open cut, what it would look like, how much it would cost to access that ore body and how much radioactive waste would have been piled on the surface in 50, 60 or 70 years of the mine's life, we would be leaving, in effect, more than a cubic kilometre of very finely powdered, pulverised, carcinogenic radioactive waste on the surface. Neither the South Australian government nor the Commonwealth environmental regulators were proposing that that radioactive material should be put back in the hole at the end of mining.

I think one of the reasons that BHP ultimately decided not to proceed with the expansion—you could also argue that Roxby is a copper-gold venture which has uranium as a by-product—one of the things that killed that expansion was the very low world uranium price which had fallen from the extraordinary spike in 2007 to the point where they simply could not make the numbers add up. Now even a couple of years after that decision has been made we are still seeing companies having to let people go.

So yes, there is a lot of uranium but it may be too low grade and too deep to bring to the surface at this time. That is before you bring in the issues that have plagued that site for many years—the destruction of Aboriginal country and sacred sites, in particular the draining of the mound springs, the extraordinary consumption of water in processing operations not just for uranium but for copper, gold and other material coming out of that underground site and the fact that this is the feedstock for the global nuclear fuel chain.

Senator Day used the term 'nuclear fuel cycle'. While this probably sounds pedantic, I do not use that phrase. There is no cycle. There is no closed loop. It has never existed. It has been a dream since the 1950s that you could feed the waste products of the nuclear fuel cycle, as they were calling it then, in the form of plutonium, back into the front end at so-called breeder reactors and nobody, not even the best engineers and technologists in the world, in Russia, in Japan and in North America have ever figured out how to make it work.

You were listing before, Senator Day, the countries that operate reprocessing plants, and I am presuming you would include Japan in that list. They are not reprocessing there at the moment. It is so formidably difficult to close the loop on the 'nuclear fuel cycle' that we should not dignify it with that term. It is a one-way process for creating very low-grade uranium ores into various categories of intractable radioactive carcinogenic waste, including here in this country.

So no expansion at Roxby—and, if you are looking to one of the world's largest uranium mines to provide those jobs and that economic stability at a time of great instability in other sectors, it is the last place that you would want to look. What about if we head north to a much higher grade deposit and look to Kakadu? The Ranger uranium mine is presently on its knees. The company has just abandoned proposals to go underground and are looking at a kind of the reverse process to what they are looking at at Roxby. According to Rio Tinto, they will not be going underground at Ranger. So, effectively, you have a mine that is on its knees. They now have to have a very serious look at cleaning up 30 years of radioactive messes inside a World Heritage area, and it is not at all clear from company statements whether they have the financial resources to do that. Coming back to central South Australia, the Beverley uranium mine is looking radically uneconomic. They have been shedding people as well. The Honeymoon mine, which was opened with such fanfare a couple of years ago, is uneconomic as well.

It is not simply due to the low uranium price, but that is of course a key factor. Why is the world uranium price so low? Partly it is because of the indestructible optimism of advocates. We heard before from Senator Leyonhjelm—who put it about as well as I think I have heard it put in recent times—about that glowing, radiating enthusiasm for an industry that simply derides any opposition as emotional or irrational and says, 'We can finally kick the 1980s to one side.' I think it was very interesting, Senator Leyonhjelm, that that was your baseline, because the 1980s was this curious collision of the hangover of Three Mile Island, where the asset of a nuclear utility that had been running perfectly was converted from an asset into a multibillion dollar liability over a period of about 20 minutes, and the point where regulators were trying to decide whether or not to evacuate a million people from the site around the stricken reactor at Three Mile Island. Eventually they got that site back under control again and no human being will ever set foot inside that reactor building again.

The markets, Wall Street in particular, had already decided that the industry was simply going to be uneconomic. The writing was on the wall before 1979, except that you had this huge construction build in the pipeline from the sixties and the seventies. So the 1980s is a very interesting period to start looking at this industry, because you still had the tail end of that extraordinary construction boom of the 1970s and reactors coming on line. It was a time of enormous optimism in the industry until 1986, when engineers at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine lost control of the reactor during a very, very poorly calibrated test and blew the side out of the building. Again, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from that site. At this time the writing was very seriously on the wall.

When I go to look for the facts, not for the stuff that I guess I was indirectly accused of by both of the previous speakers—around irrationality or, 'It's just emotional' or 'You're not looking at the facts—I get my facts, which are available to everybody to evaluate, from The world nuclear industry:status report 2015. I think it has been in publication for six or seven years now, and it is an extraordinarily valuable resource. They do not bring an agenda—they would not describe themselves, I would hope, as either pro- or antinuclear—but they do put a lot of very important global data into the public domain and they update it once a year. That is why I could not help myself and I was a bit undisciplined during Senator Day's comments when he was putting onto the public record stuff that the evidence simply does not support. So let us go through this in a bit of detail.

One of the reasons that the world uranium price is so low is that inventories are piling up around the world. You had between 40 and 50 reactors in Japan offline—the entire country's nuclear fleet offline—after 3/11 and nuclear inventories simply building up around the world. The reason that they have not started up again is that, firstly, the Japanese public are aware that 160,000 radiation refugees had to be pulled out of that area and most of them will never be able to go home. I do not know how many people have visited that site, but I have. I got within 10 kilometres of the reactor into an area that had recently been opened up again. It was though the tsunami had only just happened yesterday. It was a haunting experience. There are 150,000 radiation refugees still unable to go home—nor is it likely that they will ever be able to. The Japanese public trusted the industry and were told that such a thing could never happen. So there has been a staggering betrayal of trust.

Another thing is that, yes, it had an impact on Japanese coal and gas imports, but the Japanese public realised for the first time in the postwar era that they did not need what they call the atomic mafia. The lights stayed on and the Japanese economy stayed intact. Yes, their energy imports went up, and instead of importing uranium from places like Australia, they are importing gas from places like Australia, but the lights stayed on. So there were two fundamental betrayals of trust: the industry was not needed and the industry was not safe. That has permanently changed the character of Japanese politics. Apart from, I think, one unit that went online within the last fortnight or so, the other reason that those reactors have not started up in Japan is that local authorities—prefectural and district level authorities—have a very important say in whether or not those plants get back up. So, if we are looking to Japan as a customer country for Australian uranium, we would need to look somewhere else.

France was mentioned as the country with the highest density of installation of nuclear power stations in the world. It might have been Senator Leyonhjelm—though I do not want to misquote him—who said that there had been no accidents. The record of accidents in the French nuclear industry—which I will not go into in detail now—stands for itself. But here is the thing: the French authorities are backing out of the industry. Japan was once held up as the exemplar of the nuclear economy. Pro-nuclear advocates do not talk about Japan so much anymore, but they do talk about France. But AREVA are now technically bankrupt. They were downgraded to junk standard by Standard and Poor's, and the share value plunged to a new historic low on 9 July, with a value loss of 90 per cent since 2007.

AREVA is the state-owned entity that basically does everything in relation to atomic energy, all the way through the fuel chain from mining to waste—parking and waiting and seeing. AREVA is effectively bankrupt, and the French policy now is basically around getting from 70 per cent back to less than 50 per cent nuclear. They realise that that extraordinary reliance on ageing and extremely inflexible and risky reactors in France is a dead end for their energy policy and they are looking to diversify. Where are they looking? They are not looking to fossil; they are looking to clean energy, to renewable energy. And that is what is happening elsewhere.

I refer again to the Theworld nuclear industry: status report. The industry is stuffed, colleagues. The global nuclear industry is on its knees; it is on its way out. It would be something of a tragedy, I would think, for well-meaning senators in here looking for economic diversification, looking for energy security, to look to this dead end that has never, ever lived up to its promises. Nuclear plant construction starts plunged from 15 in 2010 to three in 2014. I will quote one paragraph from that same report:

The 391 operating reactors … are 47 fewer than the 2002 peak of 438 ...

So peak nuclear was 2002—that is getting to be a while ago now. It has all been in decline since then. There are 47 fewer reactors operating now than there were then. That is a reasonably large number. The report goes on:

… the total installed capacity peaked in 2010 at 368 gigawatts before declining by 8 percent to 337 gigawatts …

So now we have basically rewound the industry by about 20 years in terms of installed capacity. Further:

Annual nuclear electricity generation reached 2,410 terawatt hours in 2014—a 2.2 percent increase over the previous year, but 9.4 percent below … peak …

My question to Senator Day is whether he would like a copy of this document. I do welcome this debate because the nuclear debate has been happening in Australia for decades and there are important reasons why the pro-nuclear side keeps losing and one of them, I would suspect, is simply overlooking the underlying fundamentals of a market that is broken and has delivered only risk, despite promising such extraordinary benefits.