Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:15): I rise to speak on the report produced by the Legislative Council’s Environment and Planning Committee following its inquiry into nuclear prohibition. We have heard far too much old-fashioned, ill-informed scaremongering referencing nuclear. This Cold War bunker mentality must end if we are to successfully tackle the energy catastrophe we face, and this is not just a left-versus-right issue. This house has heard the, I would claim, outdated views of Ms Taylor, but her union allies hold an entirely different view, and the committee heard supportive evidence from the AWU and the CFMEU. In their submission the Australian Workers Union noted:

Unfortunately public anxiety on the dangers of nuclear power is disproportionate to historical evidence and the scientific discipline.

They continued—now, this is the AWU, remember:

Anti-nuclear … groups have proven extremely successful at fanning public indignation towards nuclear science. This has been achieved by … a focus on isolated nuclear disasters, and the linking of electricity generation—

to—

… nuclear armament.

On nuclear accidents we think of Chernobyl, a disaster caused entirely by human error and a jerry-built reactor designed and run by the communist Soviets, constructed in the 1950s. You could not get a more different scenario to the one we would have in Victoria with state-of-the-art SMR technology. The 2011 Fukushima meltdown is another favourite of the alarmists, yet the plant was built in the 1960s with critical and foreseeable design flaws, constructed on a fault line and a victim of one of the worst recorded earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan’s history, a catastrophe in which 18 500 people died. Now, the alarmists would have you believe that these people must have been victims of radiation exposure, yet the accepted death toll from Fukushima is just one. Just one person died in the only major nuclear disaster in 40 years. In fact in 2014 the World Health Organization stated that it expects no increases in miscarriages, stillbirths or physical or mental disorders in babies born after the accident.

So let us look at the realities of the energy challenges we face and the benefits of nuclear energy that Victoria must embrace if we are to decarbonise. France and Germany, for example, are neighbours with similar populations and standards of living, developed economies and significant manufacturing sectors. Yet France emits 6.9 tonnes of CO2 per capita annually and Germany 10.7 tonnes—that is a whopping 55 per cent discrepancy. How curious when one considers Germany generates 25 per cent of its energy from wind power and has a massive solar penetration of nearly 10 per cent. Germany provides its baseload power predominantly from coal with a small proportion from nuclear, whereas France produces 72 per cent of its energy from nuclear, thereby eliminating millions of tonnes of CO2 every year, and with a spotless safety record. In fact there is no country in the world that has successfully decarbonised without nuclear energy. Now, this is not an abstract future scenario, it is the reality around the world today. You can have significant wind and solar power generation, but intermittent renewables can never be the whole solution.

Victoria should be energy technology agnostic, as I am, and embrace all options, including nuclear, hydrogen, waste to energy, wave energy, carbon capture and storage, onshore conventional gas and even HELE coal, along with renewables. To do otherwise will condemn Victorians to a Third World energy supply. This is why I worked with Dr Bach and Mr Limbrick to produce a minority report highlighting the benefits of nuclear energy for Victoria. Both New South Wales and the commonwealth have found nuclear power has substantial benefits. Victoria must not be left behind. The inquiry was not asked to trumpet nuclear energy as a silver bullet for the energy challenges we face, it simply asked: should the prohibition on nuclear energy be lifted in Victoria? After hearing the extensive evidence given to the committee from a wide range of experts, the only conclusion one can come to is that the prohibition must be lifted.