Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last month in my home state of Western Australia, a small amount of radioactive material went missing somewhere near the Pilbara. Under the so-called 'care' of fossil fuel giant Rio Tinto, this material fell off the back of a truck. No, you didn't hear that wrong. It fell off the back of a truck. You honestly could not make this up. Worse: this material, contained within a small capsule, remained lost in the Pilbara for a week. That was seven days in which a radioactive pellet was languishing somewhere out in the community before it was found just south of Newman. This capsule was about the size of the nail on my pinky finger, lost somewhere in 1,400-kilometre stretch of desert highway. I think the chamber can appreciate just how unlikely its recovery was, how lucky and how incredibly, absolutely unacceptable it was that it was lost to begin with.

Now, this radioactive capsule posed a serious health risk, emitting the same amount of radiation a person would be exposed to in an entire year. It had the potential to cause radiation sickness and burns to anyone who may have come in contact with it. The significant environmental risk it posed through contamination to soil or a water source is almost unbearable to think about, yet the maximum penalty under the law for such an egregious breach of safety is a mere $1,000.

Radiation Services WA, a radiation management company that services the mining industry, described the loss of this radioactive capsule as 'highly unusual'. Let's consider that. Every year around the world, there are more than 1,000 incidents of radioactive materials going missing. Here in Australia we have had 27 such incidents in the past seven years alone. Does this really qualify as highly unusual? I don't know about you, but it strikes me as frighteningly too usual. The incident forms part of a much bigger picture here in Australia: of AUKUS, of the federal government's proposed dump of nuclear waste in South Australia, of the repeated attempts to revive the nuclear power conversation. They are all connected because they all put our community at an unacceptable risk.

We need fewer nuclear projects and less reliance on nuclear technology, not more. We need far stronger safeguards around the management of nuclear material and far stricter penalties for any such breaches. We need a guarantee from our government that the community will not be exposed to this kind of risk ever again. How are we to trust them when they insist that a nuclear dump or a nuclear propelled submarine is safe when they cannot even keep radioactive materials from falling off the back of a truck?

This incident is a timely reminder of what the Greens have been saying since our very inception: nuclear is never the answer and radioactive materials pose an unacceptable danger to the community. The Greens will continue to fight to ensure that these soul-shivering radioactive incidents never occur again, that this is the very last time that the WA community is placed at such a risk.