John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Alternatives to fossil fuelled energy sources are much in the news these days, especially as the risks arising from global warming driven by carbon dioxide pollution become ever more apparent. I have previously spoken in this place about Professor David Mills and his development of large-scale solar energy collectors to replace the burning of coal in existing power stations and for constructing new zero-emission power stations that use no fossil fuels.

I have been privileged to see for myself the construction of Professor Mills’s revolutionary solar thermal power collector at Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley—work that led to the establishment of a very successful solar power company in the United States of America. I must point out that this important industry, based on Australian technology, was driven off-shore by the hostility of the Howard government, controlled as it was then—and as the opposition is now—by entrenched climate change deniers unwilling to contemplate any change to the dominance of fossil fuels for the generation of electricity. Indeed, as we know, the present Leader of the Opposition, wilfully denying the very compelling evidence, continues to enforce within the opposition his destructive fantasy that carbon dioxide driven climate change is, as he says, absolute crap.

Australia has a sunny climate that is well suited to the use of solar energy for year-round electricity generation and, given the will, many of our energy needs could quickly be met by renewable energy from this source. In the view of internationally recognised experts such as Professor Mills, solar thermal electricity could be a large part of that supply.

While Australia has the advantage of access to solar energy, many Northern Hemisphere countries are less well endowed and, as a consequence, have devoted large resources to the development of other sources of power. Prime amongst these is the earthly exploitation of the energetic process that powers the sun—nuclear fusion. Technically, nuclear fusion differs from nuclear fission, which was developed in the 1940s, in that rather than splitting heavy atoms like uranium, nuclear fusion involves the fusion of atoms of light elements such as hydrogen to form heavier elements such as helium. Both of these processes release vast quantities of energy, with the practical difference being that while nuclear fission reactors are comparatively easy to engineer, only in the last decade have scientists and engineers overcome the very considerable technical difficulties involved in designing a workable nuclear fusion reactor.

While operating nuclear fission reactors may contain over 100 tonnes of uranium mixed with long lived radioactive waste that may, as experienced at Chernobyl, accidentally end up poisoning thousands of square kilometres of countryside for centuries, nuclear fusion reactors cannot undergo a runaway chain reaction and in operation contain no more than a few grams of radioactive materials that have short half lives. As well, fusion reactors cannot be readily used to manufacture plutonium for nuclear weapons. And rather than uranium, the fuel for fusion reactors is largely the abundant non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium that can be readily extracted from sea or tap water by distillation.

Although there are problems with the small radioactive inventory that may be held in future fusion power plants and with radioactivity induced in reactor components, these issues pale into insignificance compared with those with existing fission reactors. For these reasons and others, the governments of the United States, the European Community, Japan, Russia, South Korea, India and China agreed in 2006 to combine resources to construct an experimental fusion reactor in the south of France, to be completed by 2018.

ITER or the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is intended to be followed by DEMO, the demonstration power plant that will produce sufficient fusion heat to drive a large base-load power station. The likely success of DEMO could make electricity available from fusion energy within the foreseeable future.

Although leading Australian researchers urged the Howard government to join this most important international collaboration, typically that government refused to participate—a further example of a regular failure to understand or support important scientific research projects, in this case one that has great potential to benefit both this country and the other nations of the world.

Finally, I call on the opposition not to ruin yet another important opportunity for our environment and our economy, and to support a bipartisan approach to carbon pricing in the national interest.