Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I cannot believe that we are actually here talking about nuclear power. Nuclear power makes no sense on so many fronts. It is a dangerous undertaking and can never be fully accident-free. As we have seen with Fukushima and Chernobyl, this is simply not a risk we can take for anybody living now or in the future. My people have known for many thousands of years that this poison, uranium, needs to stay in the ground and never be touched. It causes sickness and death. There is a lot of talk about next-generation nuclear reactors, but for their concept—even if they were somehow magically safe—the technology does not currently exist to scale, so it is not even an option until sometime in the future anyway. Even economists agree that nuclear is financially not viable. Investment in nuclear energy would also slow the decarbonisation of our economy and would actually increase electricity costs, which you all are always so concerned about.

Last but not least, we have absolutely no idea how to safely manage high-level nuclear waste for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Nobody knows this, probably because it's not possible to make it safe for such a long time and communicate with generations in thousands of years. The proposition of nuclear energy is dangerous: dangerous economically, dangerous for our clean energy journey, dangerous for humanity.