Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about nuclear power. Mr Howard tells us that nuclear power is needed in this country to deal with climate change. He says that it and so-called clean coal are the only ways to make big cuts in emissions. He also says that it is safe and clean and that it has been around for a long time. At present, 15 per cent of the world’s electricity is generated from nuclear reactors, and that has not changed much in many decades. In fact, no new reactors have been commissioned in the big nuclear power states like the United States and the United Kingdom for more than 30 years.

Global warming has given the dying nuclear industry the much needed reason to argue that it has the answer. With Australia’s vast resources of coal and gas, nuclear energy was never before contemplated in this country—that is, until Mr Howard met Mr Bush and came home insisting that we needed it. I can just imagine the conversation: Australia’s lead would encourage other countries to go nuclear and to buy our considerable reserves of uranium, making up for the inevitable demise of our coal export dollar. As a nuclear power player, Australia could get into the lucrative uranium enrichment business and then there are the vast areas of land in outback Australia just waiting to be exploited for the world’s radioactive waste.

Last week, Harold Feiveson, a senior research scientist at Princeton University, brought a reality check to this debate—this so far very one-sided debate. He said that it will be 2030 at the earliest before any renaissance of the nuclear industry is felt globally and any inroads are made on greenhouse emissions from this source. Could this possibly be the reason that Mr Howard now so vigorously resists a 2020 target? We heard ad infinitum how well Australia is doing at meeting our generous Kyoto 2010-12 target, so why is it that resistance has now emerged to a target 10 years later? Apart from the fact that even government departments say that our emissions will blow out in 2020 by over 120 per cent, we have another reason. With the usual ‘leave it to a task force but do nothing’ plan, even if huge public funding is found to build 25 nuclear reactors, they will have no effect for more than 20 years.

With two-thirds of Australians opposed to a nuclear reactor in their backyard, which is backed by all of the state governments, it may take this long just to decide on the appropriate sites, let alone have them built and operational. We know that they will have to be on the coast because reactors consume over a million litres of water every day for steaming and cooling and, with the perilous state of our water supplies, seawater is the only option—and, of course, the coast is where most Australians live. Then there is the issue of cost. Despite efficiencies in recent years, reactors are still more expensive to run than, say, wind farms. At $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion each to build, nuclear reactors will require massive public subsidies. Even the Treasurer, Mr Costello, says of nuclear power: ‘It’s got things going against it, particularly the price.’

Only one reactor has been commissioned by Western countries in the last 30 years, partly because of the cost in construction and in decommissioning. While we have had no major meltdowns in recent years, the United States is extending by 20 years the operating licences of their reactors. This delays the inevitable cost of dismantling them, but it is reasonable to ask just how safe it is to extend their life with the stroke of a legislative pen. Presumably, there is some reason to suspect that, if they are built to last 40 years, keeping them going until they are 60 is a risky business. On top of that, we are told that the likelihood of a terrorist attack has not gone away; indeed, it is said to be the reason that forces must stay in Iraq. In 1970, a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor would have been fanciful, but 9/11 taught us otherwise. Accidents and terrorist attacks are unlikely in Australia for now, but this month’s announcement that we would have our own missile defence system and the dreaded Talisman Sabre military exercise with 20,000 US troops in the pristine Queensland setting of Shoalhaven Bay, not to mention our involvement in attacking Iraq, surely makes us more of a target than we were before. Any one of the 25 proposed nuclear power plants would have to be much more attractive to your average terrorist than Loy Yang.

The prospect of more nuclear power worldwide also has very real consequences to weapons proliferation. More states than ever have nuclear weapons outside the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. North Korea was the latest to join, and the United States accuses Iran of being the next. We would argue that this is not a good time to be promoting nuclear power to counter climate change. The more nuclear material out there, particularly in countries regarded by the West as unstable, the more prospect there is of fissile material falling into the hands of non-state actors. If this were to happen, the so-called mutually assured destruction disincentive would not work, even if it ever did in a world with 27,000 nuclear weapons.

And we cannot say, as Mr Howard does on climate change, that on our own we make no difference. Australia and Canada, two of the wealthiest countries in the world, have 90 per cent of the world’s uranium. With such vast resources comes a special responsibility and yet the Prime Minister seems to be seriously contemplating selling uranium to India via the United States. India is a nuclear weapons state that refuses to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. This deal now looks likely to fail, but only because the Democrats in the United States are questioning what this means for the integrity of the NPT. Once again, Mr Howard is firmly in Mr Bush’s back pocket, doing his bidding regardless of how dangerous that might be.

We joined the United States in attacking Iraq because of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and because Saddam Hussein was said to want nuclear capabilities. Now we say nuclear reactors are the panacea to climate change. But it is not possible to decouple nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Even in the unlikely case that our uranium could be kept out of India’s nuclear bombs, it frees up uranium that would otherwise be used for power generation.

However, of all the problems with nuclear power, nothing is worse than the waste; it is the most problematic and the biggest impediment to its wide-scale use. The Yucca Mountain project in the United States state of Nevada provides a stark example. Studies of the Yucca Mountain site began in 1978. It has been dogged by political and geological doubts about its suitability. Even if it goes ahead it will only become operational in 2017.

Nevada, like South Australia, was required to host nuclear weapons testing and has huge tracts of contaminated land to show for it. It is a state that does not generate nuclear power and sees no reason why it should accept the radioactive waste from elsewhere. Yucca Mountain is indigenous land, as is the case for the low- and medium-level waste dump proposed for the Northern Territory. The Yucca Mountain repository will cost about $US100 billion, but by 2010, seven years before it is proposed to be opened, the United States will have stockpiled more waste than it can store there, so the drawn out process of finding another dump will have to start all over again. It is little wonder that Mr Bush was keen on the prospect of sending US waste to Australia.

In order for nuclear power to have any real impact on climate change it would need to grow five-fold around the world. This in turn means a five-fold increase in waste, and until this fundamental problem can be solved—if it is ever possible to solve—it would be foolhardy to continue the nuclear industry, let alone expand it. Massive cuts are needed in greenhouse emissions so concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere do not rise to a point where climate change will be catastrophic. Even cuts of 60 to 80 per cent by 2050 will result in a two degree warming of the planet which, scientists tell us, will result in more melting of icecaps, sea level rises, more storms, lower rainfall and a slow-down of the ocean currents responsible for weather patterns that make large parts of the world habitable. It only makes sense to use nuclear power if there is no alternative and we are in no hurry. But, sadly, neither is true.

There is a plethora of technologies—wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, hot rocks, wave and tidal power—and unlimited resources to power them. They can be built immediately, leave no intractable waste and are cheaper than nuclear power, provided you take into account the cost of ensuring that the extremely hot, highly radioactive waste is safely contained for hundreds of thousands of years. (Time expired)