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

Congratulations, Senator Bilyk! I just rise to make some quick observations on foreign minister Julie Bishop's comments over the last couple of days that if Australia were going to be dragged by the global community to make some kind of contribution to the task of decarbonising our economy then it was an obvious conclusion, in her view, that nuclear power would have to be brought into the energy mix. I would understand the reasoning behind Ms Bishop's statement to be that we now have 60 years of operating experience for a technology that provides utility-scale baseload electricity and, while carbon emissions from the back-end fuel chain behind fission reactors are certainly not zero, they are nonetheless a lot lower than for coal and gas. And these are quite reasonable prospects, I would add.

While Ms Bishop thinks that building fission reactors in Australia is an obvious conclusion, she also did acknowledge—and I think this is very important—that there would have to be a public debate about the idea because, for a variety of reasons, other people have come to very different conclusions.

I have noticed that some people, particularly young people, are tempted by a lot of other positions to that taken by the Greens. They agree with us on a lot of our work, nonetheless they are perplexed as to why we are as opposed to nuclear energy and all elements of the nuclear fuel chain—from mining all the way through to weapons and waste—as we are. For example, it has come up in all of the AMAs that I have done and it comes up frequently on social media, and it has come up in response to some of my contributions over the last couple of days. It can come in one of two forms: one is simply, 'Why are the Greens against science? You listen to the global climate science community. Why do you not believe that nuclear energy could play a role in a balanced energy mix? That is one. I guess the other one is the sort of George Monbiot view of the world. He is somebody who takes climate change very seriously; he is steeped in climate science and the politics of climate change and he has come to the view—I do not think I have risked paraphrasing him too crudely—that we should 'just build anything: any low- or zero-carbon form of electricity should be on the table because the crisis that we face with the climate is that serious.'

It is to the people who would hold either of those views that I want to make some quick comments today. I want to push back, gently and respectfully, on the idea that people who have formed a view that nuclear energy would be a disaster in Australia, as it has been elsewhere, is a view that we formed purely on the basis of emotion, or the fact that we are scared of radiation, or that we have some kind of emotional or, as the Prime Minister said, 'theological opposition'. I do not have a theological opposition to nuclear power, or to much else; I have a very practical series of reasons for being opposed to it.

For decades the nations that have decided to go nuclear have relied on several varieties of uranium fission plants: in pressurised water reactors, boiling water reactors or—for a small number of nations, principally Canada and India—heavy-water CANDU reactors that do not require uranium enrichment. That is the fleet of reactors that we are stuck with—the kind of reactor that went up at Chernobyl, the kind of reactor that was catastrophically wrecked at Fukushima in Japan and the kind of reactor at the Three Mile Island plant; they are all first- and second-generation uranium fission reactors.

By all means, let us have the debate. We have been having the debate in this country for nearly 60 years and there are very sound reasons why nuclear proponents keep losing that debate: it is not that the debate cannot be had or that we are proposing to censor their views; it is just that there are really sound reasons why they are not being built here and, in my view, why they simply never will be. Dr Ziggy Switkowski, at the behest of the Howard government in the last turn of the wheel in this debate, was the most recent person on the conservative side of politics who, reluctantly, was dragged to the inevitable conclusion that we need to decarbonise our electricity sector. The government said, 'The only form of electricity that seems to make sense is nuclear', so Dr Switkowski, in 2007, undertook his review for the Howard government. His conclusions broadly said that you would need—as cited by Bernard Keane in Crikey this week—a carbon price between $20 and $50 a tonne. Of course that level of carbon price means that to give nukes a step up because of how expensive they are, then you would obviously price in all the renewable energy competitors, which would very quickly run away and out compete nukes.

Let us look at the kinds of plants that are being built around the world and the catastrophic degree to which they are running behind budget and over cost. Flamanville, in France, was originally budgeted to cost $3.3 billion euros; by December of 2012, the cost had increased to $8.5 billion euros and the completion date blown out by five years. There are very similar stories elsewhere where third-generation plants are under construction or proposed for construction.

I would say to anybody who believes that opposition to nuclear energy is based solely on emotion or irrationality: just look at the data. A very good source for that is the World nuclear industry status report. The most recent one was published a couple months ago by Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt. They have been publishing these for five or six years, and they are the best source of independent data on how the industry is tracking. The statistics are actually quite forbidding and they led me to the view, quite a few years ago, that globally the commercial nuclear industry is on its knees—not through any kind of ideological obstruction, although absolutely the global anti-nuclear movement has played its part, but mostly, or partly at least, on the grounds of cost. It is ruinously expensive to build in the kinds of redundant safety systems that you need to have a reasonable chance of a fissioning uranium reactor not blowing itself all over the landscape. Certainly the industry believes it has got better at it over recent decades, but that is one of the principle reasons why it is so expensive to build these plants: on a bad day entire regions can get depopulated—whether it is from a tsunami-earthquake combination, whether it is from a failed engineering experiment as was the case in Chernobyl or whether it is from faulty instrumentation or operator error as at Three Mile Island. If you cut the cooling systems from a fissioning reactor, you risk a meltdown which compromises the reactor's containment system and can then lead to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people. It is that serious. That is why these things are so expensive.

According the World nuclear industry status report, the IEA—the International Energy Agency—cites:

… during 2000-13 global investment in power plants was split between renewables (57 percent), fossil fuels (40 percent) and nuclear power (3 percent).

It is actually kind of over, and the opportunities are very, very rapidly dwindling for the industry to take off here in Australia. Part of the reason for that is that renewable energy technologies are quite simply eating them alive. They are small, fast, easy to deploy, cheap, much less labour-intensive and you can bring them onto the grid—either small distributive micro grids or fit them into large grids—much more easily than the multi-gigawatt scale of nuclear power plants. Again, this is not the Greens' view—although it is something that I am very strongly supportive of and optimistic about—this is just what the data says. The investment that is going into clean energy around the world compared to faltering and ultimately failing investment in nuclear really tells the story.

Those who take issue with the Greens' objection to the current generation of nuclear power plants that have proven themselves basically to be obsolete say: 'What about what is coming next? What about thorium? What about molten salt? What about maybe even fusion plants? What about what might just be on the horizon? Why would you oppose those before you have even seen them tested?' Two things come to mind. Firstly, this technology does not exist yet. Nobody has built any of these things at anything approaching a commercial scale, despite tens of billions of dollars of development funding, so it is not through lack of trying. Optimistically these things are really decades away, if they could magically appear at all, and as anybody following climate science even peripherally will know we do not have decades. This challenge is upon us now, which is why it is all the more impressive seeing renewable deployment accelerating so rapidly and outpacing fossil and nuclear. Secondly, I am not an engineer, but to me all of these sound like absurdly expensive and complex ways to boil water. With the probable exception of fusion plants, all of these exotic technologies do nothing more than bring water up to boiling point, making it hot enough to raise steam to spin a turbine.

There are many reasons why we take these positions, one of them simply being the unavoidable weapons link. The reason why so much investment has been poured into nukes over recent decades is that the technology for enrichment, or fuel reprocessing, is precisely the same as the technology you need if you are enriching or reprocessing for nuclear weapons. That is why it is absurd to see our own Future Fund still very heavily invested in nuclear weapons—in it up to its neck, in fact. But also there is the fact that the Red Cross recently conducted a poll that indicated that eight of 10 Australians say it is time to ban nuclear weapons. I think we need to really take heed of the fact that popular opinion is very strongly against this technology as much as the markets.

I want to also acknowledge that it is 30 years this week since former Senator Jo Vallentine was elected to this place on a platform of nuclear disarmament. (Time expired)