Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The health and safety of Australians is the top priority when Labor considers changes to nuclear and radiation safety. Labor takes radiation and nuclear safety very seriously. The bill that we are dealing with today, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015, is an amendment bill which strengthens the powers of ARPANSA, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, which is responsible for managing radiation and nuclear safety in our country. Largely, this bill follows a review by the Australian National Audit Office that was conducted in 2013-14 and, in part, also captures some of the recommendations made by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, when they conducted their periodic reviews of our regulator. There are a number of changes to the licensing arrangements administered by ARPANSA, which have the effect of improving safety and efficiency and closing a number of loopholes that have been identified by the ANAO and also pick up some of the recommendations from the IAEA.

I note the recent submissions received by the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee on the bill. There were five submitters to the bill and Labor thanks those organisations and individuals who contributed to the Senate community affairs inquiry process. I particularly want to thank the expert contributors to that process. In particular, Labor wants to acknowledge the contributions of ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the CSIRO and the supervising scientists in the Department of the Environment. Similarly, the contributions from the Department of Health were very welcome. They have always been professional and constructive when it comes to this issue. Labor also wants to put on record our thanks to Minister Nash and her office for the briefings that were provided to our shadow minister and his team.

I will discuss some, but not all, of the elements of the bill. It is a very technical bill which improves the safety of regulation in our country. I want to discuss the observation that there was general support from all of the witnesses for all of the amendments. Some concerns were raised outside the scope of the bill and outside the recommendations that have been picked up by the bill but, overall, there was general support for the bill. Engineers Australia pointed to a new safety standard that has been issued by the IAEA, and pointed out that reviews conducted by the IAEA's integrated regulatory review team of ARPANSA's activities have identified the need for strengthening the ARPANS Act. Engineers Australia said that the bill would provide:

The amendments go to clarifying the definition of a nuclear installation from nuclear waste to radioactive waste. This change is regarded as more appropriate and technically correct. The IAEA does not provide a definition of nuclear waste as all waste is captured under the definition of radioactive waste. The committee also heard evidence that there were different definitions in state and territory legislation, but it is not within the scope of this bill to deal with that. Frankly, that is a matter for states and territories to deal with.

The committee also made some commentary about ARPANSA's powers during an emergency. ANSTO discussed proposed section 41, which outlines the powers of the CEO of ARPANSA to give written directions to controlled persons. The bill reaffirms the internationally accepted principle of operator responsibility for safety, and clearly sets out that the powers of the ARPANSA CEO would only be used in the most exceptional of circumstances. ANSTO also noted that the principle of operator responsibility for safety reflects international best practice, as developed under the auspices of the IAEA, as well as being reflected in international nuclear safety treaties to which Australia is a party.

Mr Jack Dillich from ARPANSA highlighted in the inquiry that 'the proposed powers were intended to equip the regulator to address rare unforeseen circumstances'. To paraphrase, he said that this is something that would happen infrequently, if at all, but he thought it was important that those powers should be available.

I now go to a question that was raised in the Bills Digest, which I commend to the chamber. There are two issues I want to go to. The first is the change to information-gathering powers. The Bills Digest states:

… Item 29 would create a new section 44A in the ARPANS Act, providing for new information-gathering powers for the purpose of monitoring compliance with Commonwealth radiation licences. … The provision allows the CEO of ARPANSA to require that a controlled person provide information or documents, answer questions or appear before the CEO of ARPANSA to provide information, answers or documents.

It also recognises that:

… a controlled person is excused from giving the required information if giving such information would:

- be self-incriminating or expose the individual to a penalty or

- contravene an obligation under an international agreement …

It is our view that these requirements for information to be provided do seem reasonable. The bill provides that self-incriminating information may not be gathered compulsorily. The common law would provide a protection against self-incrimination. But I think having it explicitly in the bill is of use.

Finally, I want to go to the issue of changes to duration and scope of Commonwealth radiation licences. The bill brings in an opportunity to time-limit radiation licences, which is new for this act. Previously, all licences were issued for an indefinite period of time, which is something I was unaware of, but do now understand. I want to point to an interesting comment made in the Bills Digest:

… the use of time-limited licences more generally could be desirable. … An extension of this is that radiation exposure should be kept to what is strictly necessary …

Always, the intention is to limit any exposure to radiation. So we should be aiming to keep radiation exposure to what is absolutely strictly necessary. It further states:

… a requirement for licences to be renewed could be a useful trigger for a periodic assessment of whether the continued existence of the radiation source is necessary.

That is a welcome amendment to the act.

In conclusion, Labor recognises that the bill makes a number of improvements to the current legislation. We support the bill as it does improve the regulatory framework for nuclear and radiation safety and protection in our country. We are pleased to continue to work with the government in a cooperative way when reasonable legislative changes, such as this, are put forward.

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

The Greens will also be supporting the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015, for very similar reasons to those identified by Senator McLucas. It is probably a bit of a rare thing for the Australian Greens to get up and announce that we are supporting a government bill involving regulation of nuclear technology. I just wanted to point that out.

Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Are you serious? Take my temperature!

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

So much heckling. Don't make me change my mind!

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We appreciate it.

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

We are all appreciating each other today! I will put on the record a couple of comments and concerns about the narrowness of the drafting of the bill, but the fact is, as Senator McLucas has expressed, this does improve regulation of a sector that does have potential to cause enormous environmental and social harm and enormous harm to public health.

I guess it is worth acknowledging at the outset that the separation between the regulator and the regulated in this country has often been dangerously close. In instances I was following with whistleblowers at ANSTO's radioisotope facility in Sydney, we saw what extraordinarily, to my mind, amounted to regulatory capture, where whistleblowers who were trying to put on the public record the real dangers to workers' health were being attacked and eventually sacked or set aside. Under the previous government we saw some quite welcome reforms that moved the regulator more to an arm's length basis from those they were regulating. In my view this bill—not in a bit melodramatic way, but in small but important ways—continues the process of giving the regulator a freer hand at regulating this extraordinarily dangerous technology: through increasing transparency and accountability; through powers to require licence-holders to produce information; through powers to issue the improvement notices within a set time frame; and by being able to issue directions—again this goes to Senator McLucas's comments—about what happens in an emergency where the act or regulations are basically silent, where it may not be the case that ARPANSA has time to go through formal processes of issuing an instruction or direction but effectively needs to bring its expertise as a regulator to bear on an unforeseen potentially very risky or threatening event. I think those amendments are sensible. Noting ANSTO's reservations, nonetheless we are pleased to support those amendments here.

There is a very narrow definition in the bill, however, of prescribed legacy sites to which the act applies. I may take up a bit of time before we debate Senator Day's committee stage amendment to put a couple of questions to the minister and her advisers about the definition of 'prescribed legacy site' and what is in and what is out. I suspect that it is no surprise to the minister that I will be doing so. They were questions that I raised during the brief inquiry into which I teleconferenced a couple of weeks ago. I felt that I came out of the hearing without much more information than I went in with, so I am hoping that a bit of preparation and a bit of work has been done in the meantime—it would be great.

There are no specified outcomes for reducing contamination at legacy sites. So although we have a broader range of places and powers brought into ARPANSA's ambit there do not appear to be any benchmarks for, for example, dose thresholds at sites. Senator McLucas put quite correctly our ambition when it comes to ionising radiation exposure to human beings or to the wider environment. Our ambition is to minimise that exposure to the point where it is imperceptible, because the literature for so many years internationally has said that there is no safe dose. You cop a risky dose—airline pilots and air crew get a dose of ionising radiation—when you are 10 kilometres above the surface of the earth. You get a dose of ionising radiation if you stay out exposed to the sun too often. Those kinds of doses are just from being a human being alive on the planet being exposed to stray cosmic rays from time to time. But there is no safe dose. So we need to do anything at all that we can to reduce the additional doses that are being effectively forced on people, without their consent, from industrial exposure not only in the workplace—where you presume the workforce are properly trained and are given an understanding of the risks of exposure to ionising radiation—but also downstream of uranium mines.

We need to minimise these non-consensual doses of harmful ionising materials. We need to minimise it down towards zero, because any additional exposure—the way it was put to me in the literature years ago when I first came across this technology and was trying to understand what is going on at a biochemical level is that it is like machine gun fire inside the nucleus of the cell. Maybe something important gets hit; maybe it does not. But once that cancer has started or once that other damage has been done to the DNA, particularly in children or to foetuses in utero, you cannot claw it back. There is no way you can heal somebody once that damage has been done, and it takes just one decay track through one cell to cause cancer. I guess that is the literal understanding of why there is no safe dose. Yes, we are exposed to ionising radiation just in the course of our normal lives, living on a planet that is mildly radioactive. But everything we can do to force those additional exposures back towards zero is important.

People living in the vicinity of uranium mines, either operating ones or closed mines in the Alligator Rivers region in the Northern Territory, for example, are extremely distressed to read credible research from a couple of years back that showed the incidence of cancer among Aboriginal people in host communities around the closed Alligator Rivers mines in the NT that were operated in the fifties and sixties was double that of background populations or other populations in the area. That is how serious it is. I will get to the wider consequences, as I guess is probably appropriate, when we come to debating Senator Day's amendments about how this is precisely the wrong time to be ripping the lid off and opening the door to wider expansion into nuclear technology. The evidence is out there—not because the Greens say so; the industry itself is starting to front up to the consequences of just how much trouble it is in overseas. But I will hold those comments off until we get to the committee stage.

I foreshadow, to give the minister's advisers a bit of time in case the material is not immediately at hand, that I will ask to get an inventory of which existing sites are included under the amending legislation we are discussing today and which are not. My understanding, which was not changed during the inquiry of a couple of weeks ago, was that the act would not cover, for example, contaminated sites around Maralinga or other areas of nuclear weapons testing, where Australian service personnel and Aboriginal people from central and north-western Australia were bombed, were exposed to ionising radiation and to fission products in fallout by an ally. I note—as I think is appropriate in this year when we are commemorating the sacrifice of veterans in conflicts into which we have sent them—that in Australia the atomic veterans are not eligible for a gold card, because they were bombed by an ally. If they had been exposed to radiation from imperial Japanese forces or from any of the other forces that we faced during the Second World War they would be automatically eligible for a gold card. Because their exposure occurred from being bombed by nuclear weapons deployed by an ally—Australian uranium basically fired upon them in central Australia by the British government—they are not eligible. They are dying one by one; that cohort diminishes year by year. These are the sorts of risks that we are talking about. As far as I am aware—I would be delighted to be proven wrong—Maralinga and the other nuclear weapons test sites are not covered; they are not brought into the ambit of the regulator.

Port Pirie, Wild Dog, Radium Hill, Rum Jungle—radioactive contamination in this country goes back way further than most people think, certainly further than I thought. Early radium workings go back way before the development of a nuclear weapons or nuclear power industry. That, for me, is one of the reasons why it is important to remark when we see this kind of regulation coming through the Senate that nuclear accidents and nuclear contamination have a start time. Often you can pinpoint it, as they were able to pinpoint to within a few seconds the reactors at the Fukushima site on Japan's Pacific coast going into meltdown on 3 November 2011. These accidents and these contamination and exposure sites have a start date but they have no end date. There are still contamination legacy issues at Radium Hill, which was contaminated more than 100 years ago. There are still contamination issues at the—by today's standards relatively small—uranium workings in the Alligator Rivers region that were mined out, closed down and rehabilitated as far as the authorities of the day were concerned decades ago but are still leaching materials into the wider environment. Ionising radiation is invisible. It does not tell you that it is there. You cannot see it. Unless you are carrying a Geiger counter around with you, you do not know that it is there. That is why these sites are so dangerous. I am very keen to know whether any of those sites that I listed, the so-called orphan sites where state regulation is either completely absent or patently inadequate, are caught by this bill and whether they will be brought within this bill and what it would mean if they were. What are the obligations that arise?

One of the questions I put during the brief committee hearing was: why are there no cost implications in this bill? If we are going to see a higher level of accountability and a higher level of rehabilitation for these orphan contaminated sites, surely that is going to cost money. Protecting people who are cleaning up the radioactive aftertaste of these sorts of operations does cost money. It is an unavoidable consequence which is often not factored in—it is almost never factored in—at any point in the nuclear fuel chain. I was a bit curious and maybe even a bit perplexed to see that there were no cost implications with this bill, because that to me would imply that nothing is in fact going to change on the ground. Again, Minister—through you, Mr President—if I am wrong about that I would be very happy to stand corrected.

We are also interested to know about the definition of a 'prescribed legacy site', and I will go into this again a little bit in the committee stage, unless the minister wants to address these comments in her closing remarks. It is not entirely clear to me what such a site is. Is it mining, a processing facility, a research facility? In some parts of the amending legislation it is clear which sites are included. Based on their management by Commonwealth entity, the institutional jurisdiction defines whether a site is caught or not. That is reasonably clear. But what about some of these other orphan sites where ownership is not entirely clear. In the end we chose not to bring forward amendment at the committee stage to try to bring all the sites within ARPANSA's ambit as a regulator. It may in fact be a wiser course to lift the standard of state and territory regulation and to create that consistency around the country where it is lacking at the moment.

I will confine my comments to the clauses as they are outlined in the bill. I think Senator Day has actually done us a bit of a favour in bringing his amendment forward. The Greens certainly will not be supporting it, but it is a good opportunity to look at the consequences of what would happen if the chamber did support that amendment. In the meantime, I gather that this amending legislation have been in the works for a long time and that a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to bring it forward. I acknowledge the government and those public servants who brought this amending legislation forward and commend it to the chamber.

David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In case anyone needs reminding, the 1980s are over. This is significant in many ways. It means you can throw away your Walkman, your Duran Duran cassettes and your VCR. Women can give their shoulder pads and leg warmers to the Salvos, and video game enthusiasts can try something other than Space Invaders.

It also means that we can discard our outdated antinuclear views. These views have always had little to do with the facts about peaceful nuclear technologies and a lot to do with the preoccupations of people who chose the wrong side of history in the Cold War. Some of these people still inhabit this chamber from time to time. They are still fighting the Cold War, rather like those Japanese soldiers found in the Philippines in 1974 who were unaware that World War II had ended.

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015 provides a rare opportunity to turn the tide against decades of antinuclear hysteria. It is a long time since anything pro nuclear passed through the parliament. If we want to we can also take the first step towards cutting Australia's carbon dioxide emissions in half. This is the kind of result we would achieve if nuclear power flourished in this country. Those who claim climate change is an emergency but nuclear power is not the answer are the real deniers of science. It is like saying there is a fire but refusing to call the fire brigade. Nuclear is the only realistic option for replacing fossil fuels for baseload power on a large scale. Hydro might be an option in other countries, but that requires big rivers and big dams. Nuclear power has also been proven to be safe. The Fukushima disaster taught us that even when outdated reactors in earthquake zones are hit by tsunamis nobody dies.

Those who say nuclear energy would take too long, is too expensive and is a technology that is on the way out are easily disproved on all counts. France built a nuclear capacity equal to Australia's needs in 20 years. It is competitive and has no accidents. France's per capita emissions are 60 per cent lower than Australia's. If it is true that nuclear power is not and never will be economically viable, the Greens have nothing to worry about. I am not arguing that taxpayers' money should be thrown at nuclear power. The best path to cheaper electricity, the return of Australia's competitive advantage in energy production and a retention of manufacturing is to stop throwing taxpayers' money at any power generation. Our 1980s thinking means we risk being left behind. We are now the only G20 country not using nuclear energy. It is true that many reactors around the world are closing, but many more are opening. Over 60 reactors are under construction right now, and China plans another 200 by 2050. There are 400 nuclear reactors in the world, and within 10 years there will be over 500.

If any country in the world should embrace nuclear power it is Australia. We have nearly half the world's reserves of uranium, a government capable of responsibly regulating the industry over the long term, a land mass with few earthquakes or other risks plus vast, remote locations in which we could safely store nuclear waste, not that modern nuclear reactors produce a lot of waste to store anyway. Small modular reactors could be built to power regional towns and mining sites with little or no risk or waste legacy. South Australia, in particular, is in a position to take a leading role in nuclear technology that could turn around the fortunes of the entire state. Instead, we have banned both the processing of uranium into nuclear fuel and nuclear power plants. It is akin to Saudi Arabia banning oil refineries and cars.

This bill is a small step in the right direction. I would like to see it take a bigger step. If you can agree that the 1980s have ended, you will support Senator Day's amendment to the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015. This bill, even if it is amended, will not mean that people can build nuclear reactors any time soon, as there are other legal hurdles, but it will be the first step towards taking the blinkers off and demonstrating that superstition can no longer be a major plank of our energy policy.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased today to have the opportunity to sum up the second reading debate on the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015. As we have discussed, this bill amends the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998 to ensure that Australia's regulation of radiation activities remains international best practice. I thank senators for their contribution to this bill, and I note the support from the Australian Labor Party, and thank Senator McLucas for her comments, and also those of the Australian Greens through Senator Ludlam.

Radiation protection and nuclear safety are constantly evolving. International approaches and industry practice have evolved since 1998 when the act was first introduced, and Australia needs to remain at the forefront of these changes. Australia is fortunate to have a strong regulator in the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, or ARPNSA as it is more commonly known. The regulatory scheme continues to provide Australians with appropriate protections; however, as science and technology changes, the legislation and regulation needs to remain contemporary. To this end, this bill increases capacity for improved risk management and provides ARPANSA with greater powers to monitor compliance.

The amendments also support the CEO of ARPANSA to better respond in the unlikely event of an emergency. The bill enables the CEO to issue directions to licence holders to minimise any risk to people and the environment in unforeseen circumstances. All action taken by ARPANSA in response to noncompliance or to emergencies will continue to be reported quarterly and annually to the parliament. This will also be published on the ARPANSA website. This ensures that there is absolute accountability and transparency about the radiation activities being undertaken by Commonwealth agencies and about the actions taken by the regulator. Consistent with this government's commitments, the changes do not have any financial impact, nor do they increase any compliance burden for individuals, business or community organisations. The amendments simply update and improve the legislation.

I thank Senators for their contributions to debate on this bill and note the questions foreshadowed by Senator Ludlam to be dealt with in the committee stage, and I thank the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for their consideration of this legislation. I would also like to thank ARPANSA and the Department of Health for their work on preparing this legislation.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.