Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can hear some chirping from those in the cheap seats up the back, but I'm not going to pay much attention to them. I'll say this to the member for Sturt: we already have a nuclear reactor in Australia, at Lucas Heights in Sydney. It's currently producing really important compounds that help treat and detect cancers and other medical instruments. It's a really important industry. I've been there, and I've stood over our OPAL reactor and peered down into an incredible piece of engineering and technology and a really important part of our medical industry.

What we are talking about here is not whether or not we should have that sort of technology being developed. We're not talking about whether or not we're going to move towards nuclear powered submarines. We are talking about this fantasy that keeps being brought up by the National Party that, somehow, nuclear energy makes any sense whatsoever for the Australian energy market. I think the most compelling truth of the fantasy that is constantly being brought up by the National Party—and now, it appears, the new, young, dynamic aspects of the Liberal Party—is: if they were so keen on having a nuclear reactor to power our energy sector, you would've thought that maybe in the last decade, when these characters were on the treasury bench, they would've taken at least one step towards thinking about, maybe, potentially, sometime, building a nuclear reactor—but they didn't. They didn't go near it because it makes absolutely no financial sense whatsoever.

We clearly have nuclear technology in this country. We've had it for decades. That's not the question. The question is: for our energy sector, does it make one skerrick of sense to have a nuclear reactor powering our homes and powering our industry? The answer is no. Why? Because the thing is so expensive. If we were going to buy a large-scale nuclear reactor we would have to do things like upskill our engineering workforce. We would need to train nuclear scientists to not just deal with a nuclear reactor but deal with an energy-creating nuclear reactor. This has been the direct advice from ANSTO; they were very clear that, in their current capability, they would need to upskill and potentially import for the first few years a whole range of skills we currently don't have in Australia—that's not to say it's impossible; it's just part of the process—not to mention building this thing, which would take at least 10 to 12 years. Nuclear reactors rarely get built before they are scheduled to be completed. In America right now, especially for the small modular reactors, all the time lines are being pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. It's just not feasible. We're talking about a technology that will not be created in the next 10 to 15 years, when we talk about the capability gap and construction costs. That's for a large-scale reactor.

Then these characters like to drone on about small modular reactors, which are in prototype form around the world. They're not there. There's no SMR that's been constructed in a factory and rolled out across multiple sites that's saving people millions and millions of dollars in construction and ongoing fees. It just doesn't exist yet. Now, that's not to say that at some stage we shouldn't have a look at SMRs; sure, let's have a look at them once they've been rolled out and we know they can operate safely, they can be managed and they actually save costs. According to their own report done by the CSIRO—not when we were in government but when these were people were in government—the CSIRO made it clear that small modular reactors are still more expensive than, or as expensive as, the large-scale reactors, and way more expensive than renewables.

Don't listen to the drivel that these people come into this place with, pretending that all of a sudden they've got this really fantastic, new whiz-bang idea. In the 10 years they had a chance to help shape our energy market, all they did at each and every stage was fight renewable energy being brought into the market. They did not do one thing to pursue the course of nuclear energy—not one. They didn't do it because they know it doesn't make sense. Unless they want Australian taxpayers' bills to skyrocket, they should drop this fantasy and focus on renewables because that's our future.

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