Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Those who come in here to push nuclear power need to have a solution for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste. It must be safely stored for hundreds of thousands of years, and there is no permanent solution anywhere on the planet for the disposal of this waste. It's closest in Finland, but it's not yet complete after decades of planning, really long delays and huge cost. After seven decades of commercial nuclear power operations, not one nation has a final, permanent disposal site.

In 2016 the world's biggest citizens jury, in my state of South Australia, got together 350 citizens, who looked carefully at disposing of high-level waste in our state, and they said no. It cost too much, it posed a danger to future generations and South Australia's First Nations people said no. Any disposal, any plan for nuclear power and its disposal of waste, needs to have the full, prior and informed consent of First Nations people.

We have some recent experience with nuclear waste in South Australia to draw on at Kimba. Both the coalition and labour over a number of years have just spent $108 million trying to convince the citizens of Kimba to take low-level and intermediate-level waste—not even high-level waste. They divided the community, they wasted $100 million, they did not get a solution and the citizens said no. First Nations people that place, to a person, said no. People in Kimba are divided. You walk down the main street of Kimba and you will find the cost that that community paid for a poorly informed, badly designed project.

The nuclear spruikers who come into this place and push the agenda of companies that want to make a lot of money need to have a solution on nuclear waste apart from all the other problems: too slow, too expensive. The future is not nuclear. (Time expired)