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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I speak to the 114th report of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. Senators might be interested to know why I am choosing to speak on this treaty. This is a 30-year agreement that the Australian government is signing with the United States for our uranium exports. Occasionally I am asked why we speak out about uranium exports to China or to Russia or whether material is making its way to Iran but do not always take on the issue of uranium exports to a country like the United States where there is at least formal distinction between the civil and military nuclear arms. The fact also that this does lock us into a 30-year commercial arrangement that cannot be renegotiated is interesting in itself, no matter what commodity is at stake. That period of 30 years is going to take us into very interesting times. The US is our largest uranium customer and one of the reasons for that is that peak uranium in the US occurred some time ago. The United States had extensive uranium mining, caused an extraordinary amount of harm, particularly in the south-west, and worked out many of their deposits, and now they are our largest uranium customer. The agreement that has just gone through the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties which we are discussing tonight locks us into a 30-year treaty arrangement with the United States on these exports.

As I said, this is not China or Russia. The United States has had a formal distinction between civil and military nuclear arms for quite some time. It is obviously a porous border. It is the same technology being used for different ends but there is a regulatory system in the US that holds a distinction between civil and military nuclear weapons industries. Most of us in this chamber, I think, and most citizens of the world believe that nuclear weapons are obscene and should be abolished, but obviously there are much stronger differences of opinion around uranium mining. The ALP is now grappling with this issue. The conservative side of politics made its mind up quite some time ago as did the Greens. This treaty arrangement locks us into commercial uranium sales with the United States.

The debate certainly is changing and I think some members of parliament and senators have an open mind about uranium. I want to draw senators’ attention to a resolution that was passed at the September 2010 Congress of the Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who are on the side, I think, of most world citizens in seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons. They have never before, to my knowledge, taken a strong position on the issue of uranium mining. They are doctors and health practitioners who have dedicated part of their work to prevention rather than cure, prevention of the use of nuclear weapons in civil or military applications. They passed the following motion in September:

Uranium ore mining and the production of uranium oxide ... are irresponsible and represent a grave threat to health and to the environment. Both processes involve an elementary violation of human rights and their use leads to an incalculable risk for world peace and an obstacle to nuclear disarmament.

That is fairly strong language. I have no doubt that some in this building, at least, will simply disregard the words of these health professionals. I think we disregard them at our peril. Minister Martin Ferguson, some of his colleagues and some folks on the conservative benches and all the others, members of parliament and advocates who are hitching their political fortunes to this most volatile and dangerous of industries, should be warned and should listen to the words of these health professionals.

Even if every kilogram of this material is meticulously tracked and kept out of nuclear weapons—and heaven knows the US has an enormous stockpile of fissile material even though it is not producing much more at the moment—even if every kilogram goes exclusively into civil nuclear energy in the United States, which is obviously one of the first countries to adopt this technology, there are very serious problems with tying ourselves to this industry. If you get a nuclear power station wrong and you have a bad day, you have to evacuate millions of people who can then never return. People assume that Three Mile Island was a near miss and that Chernobyl was just a one-off that occurred in Russia.

In the limited time that I have left I want to mention one near miss much, much more recently in United States in 2002, which is something that I suspect most people probably have not heard of. FirstEnergy, an Ohio electric utility, was allowed to drive the deteriorating Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station dangerously close to a catastrophic accident. The regulators in the US had been persuaded to delay inspections of a vital safety component beyond a requested deadline shutdown in order to accommodate the industry rather than forcing an early shutdown to get inside the plant and see what was going on. As it happened they eventually shut the reactor down, got inside, and realised that six inches of carbon steel on top of the pressure vessel had been eaten away by boric acid and they had nearly lost that plant.

A nuclear power station is a pressure cooker containing two or three hundred tonnes of fissioning uranium. If you have a bad day at one of those plants people can never go back. This is the industry that we are in. I do not think that whether it be the United States, the enormous rapid build that is being undertaken in China at the moment, or any of the other countries that we trade this material to, people who think that this industry has its benign face and its military face and that they are somehow separate need to pay very, very close attention to the record of this industry, not what it is promising to do but what it has done and what it is doing today. There are no second chances with this unforgiving technology. This is an industry that we should be getting out of rather than getting ourselves further into. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.