Nuclear Energy

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (11:29): I move:

That this house—

(a) acknowledges that South Australia is where 25 per cent of the world's uranium is found, and that our state holds 80 per cent of Australia's known uranium reserves;

(b) acknowledges the groundbreaking AUKUS agreement which will see the construction of nuclear-powered submarines at the Osborne shipyards, noting that this will see the development of nuclear skills which could in turn leverage a civil nuclear industry;

(c) acknowledges that base load zero emissions nuclear power is critical to decarbonise globally and that many countries around the world are already using base load zero emissions nuclear power;

(d) acknowledges that inherent grid stability which is provided by base load zero emissions nuclear power;

(e) notes that Australia is the only G20 country with a blanket ban on base load zero emissions nuclear power and that this poses a risk to decarbonisation targets at state and federal level;

(f) notes that active participation in various stages of the nuclear fuel cycle could present multiple economic opportunities for South Australia;

(g) supports base load zero emissions nuclear power being considered as part of a source-agnostic pathway to clear, zero emissions energy production; and

(h) supports a non-ideological, open-minded investigation into the potential for a civil nuclear industry, including energy generation, in South Australia.

I move this motion because I believe that South Australia, and Australia, has moved in a very significant direction in recent years. The support for nuclear power generation and, in fact, participation in the whole nuclear fuel cycle, has expanded and grown significantly in our community. I think that is largely being driven by community sentiment around a realistic pathway to net zero in 2050.

There are other reasons for it as well: an increasing acceptance of the safety of nuclear energy production, and participation across the broader fuel cycle. I believe, and I lead a party that believes, that South Australia is standing at a point in time when we can participate in a more active way in the nuclear fuel cycle. This has been a journey for many people in society, and it has been a journey for me and for many people in my party as well.

Yesterday, in my budget reply speech, I foreshadowed that a future Liberal government would have a second chapter, so to speak, of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, which was headed by former Governor Kevin Scarce in 2015-16. That new chapter, a royal commission 2.0, would have, in many ways, quite narrow terms of reference: to see if there is opportunity that has come from advanced technological changes since 2015-16; a change in community sentiment; and, of course, new activities and occurrences, such as the historic bipartisan AUKUS agreement, which will see nuclear-powered submarines constructed at Osborne on the edge of Adelaide in the coming decades.

The landscape has changed, my sentiment has changed, the sentiment of many in the community has changed and the technology has changed, so now could very well be the time for the state of South Australia to participate more openly in the nuclear fuel cycle.

There is a range of poll figures out there, and as this debate occurs at a federal level in the coming weeks and months we will find more statistics put on the table, we will discover more polling and we will find out more about community sentiment. However, there is no doubt that in the research I have seen undertaken independently by third parties, industry groups and the like, support for nuclear power generation in Australia has moved from around 20 per cent to 25 per cent in our community to about 50 per cent in our community. That is a dramatic shift, a dramatic shift in community sentiment.

I believe, and the Liberal Party believes, that it is time for South Australia, and our nation, but particularly South Australia, to have a mature discussion about what participation in the nuclear fuel cycle looks like and what nuclear energy readiness looks like. What do we need to do now in terms of community engagement, in terms of infrastructure, and in terms of planning, to participate at some point down the track in activity across the nuclear fuel cycle?

The change leads us to a point where this parliament should, I believe, undertake an investigation into what South Australia is doing. Yes, there is an opportunity perhaps in the future to have a royal commission, and that is an election commitment that is on the table but, in fact, this work could very well start much sooner. That is why this motion is being put forward by the opposition, as a goad to action, for the parliament and to the government, but for the broader South Australian community to have this debate, this discussion, this conversation, this non-ideological conversation about what the opportunities are here.

South Australia is navigating an energy trilemma: energy security, emissions reduction, and energy affordability. We know there is an opportunity to talk about how much nuclear energy will cost us to establish it in this nation. This is a debate we will have. Peter Dutton has put that on the table and there is going to be a very clear level of product differentiation between the two major federal parties, the parties of government at federal level, when we move towards the federal election.

I think that debate started today in a very specific, very focused way with Mr Dutton putting on the table what the Coalition's nuclear energy policy looks like in a tangible way, where small modular reactors could be sited, what support and engagement with communities will look like, and what the benefits will be for those communities. Today marks a very significant day for our nation in that there is enough information now on the table for that conversation, that debate, and that election issue—because it will be an election issue—to be fought, to be discussed, to be debated from now until the federal election and, I suspect, well beyond that. I think there are very significant opportunities for South Australia to be involved in that debate, in that discussion.

When it comes to energy policy, we believe in being highly agnostic as to what is on the table in terms of zero emissions and energy outcomes for the future. There is a place for wind and solar, absolutely a significant place. South Australia does not only lead the nation but in many ways we lead the world in regard to the penetration of wind and solar power generation. There are other options—hydro-electric power in some parts of our nation, pumped hydro in others—and there are continual technological advancements that are bringing other things onto the table. I believe that hydrogen is a fuel of the future. I simply do not know what that looks like and when that will be a viable option in the future.

The Labor government has an agenda around hydrogen but we have significant questions around its viability and whether it could result in significant taxpayer expenditure on an initiative which is not proven and does not have the support of industry—because, from the conversations I have had, it clearly does not, and there is significant scepticism there. Labor has on the table a mode of energy production, being hydrogen, that is unproven and questionable. We are saying that nuclear energy should be on the table as well as an option. It should be discussed, it should be explored, and it should be investigated.

Some of this work has happened, and some of it happened with the previous royal commission but, in terms of technological advancement, we are light years removed from Kevin Scarce's royal commission. That did foundational work, but technology moves quickly. Community sentiments move surprisingly quickly with regard to this issue. I say 'surprisingly' because I am surprised at the way things have moved away from where they were 10 or so years ago. There is now an opportunity to build on the evidence base we have from the past.

I am on the public record questioning some aspects of the 2015-16 royal commission. I questioned whether South Australia should put up its hand and say, 'We'll take nuclear waste from the world.' I was uncomfortable with that at the time; I am still uncomfortable with that being the sole purpose or our sole participation in the nuclear fuel cycle beyond just uranium mining and extraction in this state—I think we can do more than that. I am not the expert, though, so I believe we should bring experts together to dig into this, to investigate it, to get further evidence on the table, to analyse where the technological solutions are today and where they are likely to be in the near future, and to move forward from there. That is why this motion is on the table.

This state I do believe stands at the precipice of something quite significant, something quite great in terms of our contribution to our national security when it comes to our participation in the AUKUS agreement. We have a lot of heavy lifting to do, but it is nation-building stuff and it is national security related. We talk a lot about the economic benefits of the AUKUS agreement and shipbuilding more broadly, and they are important, they are critical, they are a fundamental part of what South Australia is all about, but we are also playing a critical role in our nation's national security. We do not talk about that quite as much, and I think we should talk more about it. I think that will be part of building our state's participation and desire to participate in the activities around AUKUS, knowing that we can proudly be part of our nation's national security—we are the defence state.

Sometimes I think we should push ourselves to think about more than just the jobs that flow from that, but about what we are doing for our nation as well. With AUKUS on the table, with South Australia's promising participation in the AUKUS construction project, there is also an opportunity to look at civil nuclear energy and a broader civil nuclear skills sector in this state and in the nation more broadly.

I travelled to the Rolls-Royce facility, the nuclear energy and manufacturing precinct in the city of Derby in England just last week. I spent time talking about the skills side of things with regard to AUKUS, the direction of the technology more broadly (the technology around reactors) and looked at a broad landscape of opportunities for countries that are participating in the nuclear sector more broadly—everything from traditional large-scale nuclear power generation, which I do not think has a place in Australia today at least, through small modular reactors to advanced modular reactors, right through to almost science fiction based ideas around reactors in space providing power to activities in space, given the duration of longevity that those sorts of energy sources require. Sounds like science fiction at the moment. Will it be in five or 10 years' time? Most likely not!

When I was in Derby it was very clear that the amount of research and development going into small modular reactors is nothing like I had ever seen before—600 scientists and research officials working on this project. There is significant opportunity here. I am a more recent convert to it in many ways, a convert because of the changing landscape, the changing community sentiment. My desire to see a sustainable sensible pathway to net zero, with various targets along the way—I am certainly not in the business of walking away from 2030 or other interim targets—I think is a powerful goal to action for our state.

This is about grid stability, it is about potential long-term affordability, it is about being open-minded and non-ideological about an issue which is at the forefront of thinking across the Western world at the moment. There is an opportunity here for South Australia to be involved in this discussion in a mature way, to be part of our national security effort at a national level but also to do significant things for energy production in our state and in our nation. I commend this motion to the house.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (11:44): I move to amend the motion as follows:

In paragraph (b), remove all of the words after 'Shipyards'.

In paragraph (c), remove the words 'base load zero emissions' and replace with 'low emissions' (in both occurrences).

Remove paragraphs (d) to (h) inclusive.

Insert new paragraph:

(d) condemns the Speirs opposition and the federal Liberal National Coalition for floating vague proposals about nuclear energy without providing any compelling commercial or technical justification and for failing to heed the findings of the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission and other inquiries.

I heard the Leader of the Opposition today on radio saying that the Scarce royal commission did not consider nuclear generation as an issue. That is not true: it did, and it ruled it out. What concerns me about the opposition's rush to support Peter Dutton, which I understand from a party political perspective—they want to support their colleagues and their friends in Canberra—is the lack of research and the danger that it can cause investment in South Australia and the recklessness of not even knowing the basic facts.

The amendments that I have moved I think give us a number of points that I wish to make. The Malinauskas government takes an agnostic view on nuclear energy and agrees with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that nuclear energy is one of many technologies the world needs to employ to address the harms of climate change. We agree with the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on the mitigation of climate change that:

Nuclear power is considered strategic for some countries, while others plan to reach their mitigation targets without additional nuclear power.

Recent nuclear projects in North America and Europe:

…have been marked by delays and cost overruns. Construction times have exceeded 13-15 years, and cost has surpassed three to four times initial budget estimates.

It goes on to say:

Some countries have a lot of renewable energy, whereas others do not, and other energy sources, such as nuclear power or fossil energy in which CO₂ emissions are captured and stored…can also contribute to low-carbon energy systems.

We are one of those countries with bountiful renewable energy. Australia cannot afford the risk of opting for nuclear when there is no commercial viability or business case. There is a high risk that nuclear would not be delivered until years after all coal-fired power plants have closed. So the only way this plan of members opposite to build nuclear reactors is to keep coal-fired power stations open longer, and I suspect that is the actual plan.

The most recent real-world examples include the US Voglte unit in Georgia, which was $US17 billion over budget and cost $US31 billion, and that was seven years late. In Finland, the Olkiluoto unit 3 was reportedly €8 billion over budget at €11 billion, and was 12 years late. In the United Kingdom, Hinckley Point C plant is under construction and running over budget by about £16 billion at £31 billion to £34 billion (in constant 2015 pounds), and about six years late. In France, the Flamaville 3 plant had an estimated cost of €3.3 billion in 2007 when construction started. In 2020, the estimated cost had grown to €19 billion and was scheduled to be operational by 2012. It has finally been given approval for it to load fuel now in 2024.

This government accepts the findings of Australia's leading scientific organisation, CSIRO, in its GenCost 2023-24 report. That report found for Australia the cheapest form of new electricity generation is to build renewables. This includes the cost for sufficient transmission and storage to reach up to a 90 per cent share of generation.

The CSIRO estimated that small modular reactors, which are yet to be built anywhere outside of Russia or China, would have the highest capital cost of any generation technology. Large nuclear reactor capital costs would be more expensive than solar (large scale, rooftop or thermal), wind (onshore or offshore), gas (open cycle, closed cycle or with carbon capture storage), and hydrogen.

The amendment of the phrase 'base load zero emissions' to 'low emissions' acknowledges two facts: firstly, that every technology involves some form of emissions, at least in the construction phase, including nuclear; secondly, that nuclear is not widely used for base load generation. As I will describe later in more detail, large base load generation is not compatible with renewables, particularly in South Australia. Why? And this is the point that my colleagues opposite forget. They claim hydrogen as a percentage unit of cost is more expensive than nuclear, but hydrogen is a peaking source, not a base load source, so it comes on and off to firm, potentially at 10 per cent of the time, and even less than some other generators operating at a 2 per cent operational factor within the market.

What members opposite want to do is entrench expensive costs 24/7. Given the CSIRO report of the cost of nuclear energy, and given its base load nature, that would be pricing in to everyone's bills those costs in perpetuity. This is what they have not thought through. You cannot say a peaker is more expensive than a base load generator without saying if that base load generator has high costs that are baked in 24/7 into our costs. I think that is where the debate of my friend, the shadow minister for energy, falls over.

In the GenCost report, CSIRO estimates that a nuclear plant would have a capacity factor of 53 per cent. That is an Australian-wide context, including the Eastern States where rooftop solar provides a far lower proportion of supply than in South Australia. Here it would seldom be needed, but we would be paying those costs anyway. That is, we would be paying for the capital costs, and the entrenched base load costs of that expensive generation when we did not need it. That is what members opposite are seeking to employ.

Nuclear plants do not turn on and off. Therefore, it would condemn South Australians to either pay for extremely expensive power supply at some times when it is not needed or it would force the shutdown of rooftop solar on South Australian households, so the excess supply could be absorbed. Either outcome would be a considerable cost burden on South Australians.

I want to finish on this point. I would be for nuclear power if it were cheaper. I would be for it if it made economic sense. The thing about hydrogen versus nuclear that my colleagues on the other side refuse to accept is that hydrogen is not one form of use. The government's aspirations for hydrogen are not just in generation. The government's aspirations for hydrogen are the decarbonisation of value-added products like copper and iron ore to green iron, because hydrogen can be used to remove the oxides and beneficiate iron oxides to green iron.

Nuclear power will have its role. It will have its role in our defence capabilities through propulsion systems. I do not think this has been thought through by members opposite.

I am concerned about the space reactors that I just heard the Leader of the Opposition talking about having in five to 10 years. I am not sure where he heard that from. If that is the level of detail the opposition is taking to this, God help us all. God help us all. I suspect that members were pretty shocked by the Leader of the Opposition's remarks in the house about his space reactors.

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (11:55): I rise to support the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. He makes the point at the outset that acknowledges that South Australia is where 25 per cent of the world's uranium is found. It holds 80 per cent of Australia's uranium resources. South Australia is already part of the nuclear fuel cycle, and it underpins the livelihoods of so many people who work in those mines: Olympic Dam, Four Mile, Honeymoon and Beverley. Not only that, but that uranium is exported to the world and powers nuclear power plants worldwide in jurisdictions that have the benefit of nuclear power. I will touch on that later.

In terms of nuclear, that has the basis for an understanding here in South Australia. As I have said before in this house, my father was born during World War II and studied post World War II. He actually did his doctorate and PhD in nuclear physics. At the time, Australia was looking to develop a nuclear industry and he saw opportunity there. Instead, because we are blessed with so much coal in this country, coal took priority over nuclear and so he never got the opportunity to have the interest in a nuclear industry here in Australia that, as we go forward, is now occurring right here in South Australia.

The impetus for that, of course, is the groundbreaking AUKUS agreement where we are going to have nuclear submarines based at Port Adelaide, at Osborne. We hear about, and rightly so, what a massive undertaking that is, but also about the skills that that will bring to the nation—of course, the skills that are required but also the high-paying jobs that go with it.

But, of course, Australia already has skills in the nuclear domain, even in the domain of building and operating nuclear reactors. We have built and operated nuclear reactors at Lucas Heights in Sydney. We built that nuclear reactor three times, in fact, over the course. That provides world-leading nuclear medicines to the world. We already have, because of that, established regulatory frameworks. We have ARPANSA, which is world-leading as well, so we already understand that.

It has to take into account the handling of waste, but certainly with the nuclear submarines we are going to have to consider the handling and disposal of that high-level radioactive waste. We are going to have our Australian submariners sleeping next to these nuclear reactors. As a country, we have moved quite rapidly. I think you can understand that many Australians can see the need for the submarines and are supportive of it.

I think it is worth making the point around these nuclear submarines, because a lot of the time—as we will shift later on into a discussion about the civil nuclear debate—we talk about the cost. The country, Australia as a nation, made the decision instead of spending $90 billion on conventionally powered submarines to spend over $360 billion on nuclear-powered submarines, and instead of having 12 to have eight. It makes the point that the economic cost is one consideration but there are also other important factors that go into that decision-making, especially from a national security perspective.

You look at what the utility of it is, what its likely detection rate is and what its posture is, so it is not just the economics. It looks at the overall system, because we talk about the defence force overall: air, land and sea. That is just one part of a defence system. I think later on when we get into the civil nuclear electricity, we have to look at it from a system perspective as well.

The other point to make, of course, is that both the UK and the US, our partners in AUKUS, not only have a military nuclear industry but also have a civilian nuclear industry, and the interflow between those is vitally important to sustain both. Australia would be the only country trying to undertake a nuclear military capability absent of a civil capability and the reinforcement that would provide.

Looking at the worldwide civilian nuclear industry and the move towards net zero, when we look at reliable, stable systems that need base load power with zero emissions or low emissions the technologies available at the moment are hydro, geothermal or nuclear. When you look at the South Australian perspective, when you look at the Australian perspective, we do not have the vast hydro resources that other countries have. We do not have the geothermal that others have, and so what option do we have as a country if we want to have low emission base load power, if not to look to nuclear?

We need to understand why that is the case. I have talked about how the announcement around AUKUS shows the acceptance and the understanding of nuclear. The reasons may be manifest, but there is a broad acceptance. Certainly, when you also look at South Australia's energy transition, we are at the forefront of having a low carbon emission electricity system, but what we are seeing is that that has coincided and been manifest with power prices skyrocketing.

We have lived through the removal of our base load coal-fired power station in Port Augusta with no replacement, and since then bills have been skyrocketing, without a dedicated plan to try to replace that base load power. We have had blackouts. We have had the statewide blackout and we are continually under threat of blackouts.

It is a real issue, but underlying that, which households would have seen, it is also our commercial and industrial bases that are suffering. They have said that their system security costs have escalated by over 200 per cent since 2016. All these costs are borne because the system is intermittent and has lost that base load power that provides steady power for it.

What we see is a real cost that not only households are feeling but commercial and industrial as well. The energy minister moves an amendment condemning the opposition for having a view on nuclear energy because, he said, there is no compelling commercial or technical justification. Tell that to all the households whose bills have gone up. Tell that to all the industries whose bills have gone up, who are finding it hard to compete nationally or globally. That is why there needs to be a discussion around that.

That discussion, of course, does not say we just want 100 per cent nuclear. It is looking at a range and a mix of technologies. The scale and complexity of the energy transition is at such a scale that all options should be on the table, rather than this renewables-only push, which we see is associated with prices escalating. It is looking to see what technology is there. Nuclear is certainly in a conversation looking at what role that could play.

In fact, it is very complementary to renewables. The minister talks about base load power not being able to run with renewables. In fact, it would be very complementary to the renewables. With nuclear, the actual running costs are very low, because the fuel costs are not high, which does allow nuclear stations to run over prolonged periods. Talking to experts, I have talked about how it looks in the context of South Australia, where there are high periods of solar and wind and then those wind droughts either on days or even during the day.

Nuclear can run alongside that and provide great support. It means that the system does not need to be overbuilt. The hydrogen plan of the government relies on a massive overbuilding of energy. It takes so much extra energy in to create the hydrogen because it is a very energy intensive process, much more than the energy out, and so a lot of energy is required for that. That is why the Liberal opposition has announced that it will undertake a royal commission looking into how nuclear can play a role to make sure our economy and our standard of living is strong going into the decades ahead.

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (12:05): I will also add a few words to this debate. Obviously, I rise to support the amendment. In some ways, this argument has been done to death, to say that we need to investigate again and again. When does it finish in the Australian context? When you look at the Australian context, report after report indicates that we do not need base load nuclear power in this country. We do not need it because of the expense associated with nuclear power. Nuclear power is not the cheap option.

The energy minister mentioned what has happened overseas—not all projects but a lot of projects in the Western world—where there have been massive cost overruns. There have been massive delays when it comes to the building of projects. Hinkley Point C is one of the classics. It is a nuclear power plant being built in a country with a long history of nuclear power dating back to the 1950s. Initially, I think a French company was involved and then a Chinese company, also with histories of building nuclear power.

I think the minister might have got wrong the amount of money that it has now blown out to. I think it is now up to $A90 billion. That is a massive blowout from where it started, and it is still not online after years of development. As the minister said, you can point to numerous other examples around the world where there have been these big cost blowouts when it comes to nuclear.

In this country, we have the CSIRO. They do their GenCost annual report looking at the levelised cost of electricity, and they have come out and indicated that nuclear in the Australian context is the most expensive form of electricity. I want to emphasise the Australian context because we have so many other opportunities. Nuclear is nowhere near the front of the queue when it comes to how we respond to the need to provide reliable energy, affordable energy, and energy that is low emission or zero emission.

I am not someone who has a reflex attitude towards nuclear power. In my electorate I have the largest uranium mine in the country and one of the largest in the world. I have another potential uranium mine that is going to be developed, a leachate mine about 20-odd kilometres to the south of Whyalla. I have been supportive of that project because of the jobs that it will generate. Clearly I am a supporter of Olympic Dam and the benefits that it generates at that multimetal mine for the state, and obviously one of the things it produces is uranium.

There are countries overseas that do not have the same energy choices that we have. Nuclear is going to be part of their mix, and rightly so. There are other countries where there is sunk capital. They went in this direction many years ago, they have a history of nuclear power and they have existing nuclear power plants.

It is interesting when you look at the cost curves of different forms of electricity production. When you look at renewables, those cost curves are absolutely amazing. The cost of renewables, both wind and solar—especially solar photovoltaic, not so much solar thermal—have come down massively, and we have batteries now following the same cost curve. I am not saying that batteries at this stage are a substitute and the way that we need to be storing all our electricity, but it will have an increasing role because of the amount of research that is going on in that particular area.

There are other options as well in Australia. There are literally thousands of potential pumped hydro sites in Australia, according to the Australian National University study on what sites were available. Of course, in this state we are looking to use green hydrogen to drive a peaking station. If it was the case that through the day electricity was at a constant price, and a high price, you would not be going down the hydrogen path. But there are times in this state where wholesale electricity is incredibly cheap, so it makes sense to use that incredibly cheap electricity to drive electrolysers to produce hydrogen for a peaking power station. As the minister said, hydrogen has a whole range of uses, so that is why we should be going down that particular path and taking that first-move advantage.

I have mentioned the CSIRO, our peak body. Of course, they were attacked because there are some people in the Coalition who are quite hostile to science, and they are especially hostile to the science around climate change—I prefer to call it global warming—so there is that hostility in the Coalition, federally. Indeed, this whole announcement about the sites today, and a bit more detail about nuclear power plants, has been an interesting one. Here is a Coalition at the national level and the Liberal Party at this level, and anything that is not nailed down they are very keen to privatise. Of course, the plants—

Mr Patterson: What about ForestrySA, SAGASCO and land tax?

Mr HUGHES: We did not privatise ETSA, the big one. You should never be forgiven for that. Playford would have turned in his grave given the actions taken by the Liberal Party. I have to say, when it came to Playford's nationalisation of electricity in this state he was ably supported by the Chifley Labor government that provided the financial wherewithal to carry out that nationalisation, so it was a great example of nation-building.

The issue now is that the federal government, when it comes to their nuclear proposal—which is largely a fantasy proposal, and it is all about another agenda—when it comes to their nuclear fantasy, it is going to be publicly owned. And why is that? Because the private sector in this country, in the context that we have, will not go anywhere near it. All the big energy providers in this country have indicated that nuclear is not part of their options for the future.

But the real agenda at a national level is about the divisions within the Coalition when it comes to the future pathway, and going nuclear is just a backdoor way of retaining fossil fuel energy sources in this country for many additional years. That is going to come at a real cost, as these often old, clapped-out coal-fired power stations struggle in the future. And what will we see? A national government that will subsidise them. They will keep using dirty sources of energy for many years to come because, if this nuclear fantasy ever comes to fruition, we are talking about sometime in the 2040s.

It is interesting once again, at that federal level, the change in positions, because originally they were talking about the modular reactors, none of which exist commercially at the moment anywhere in the Western world. You have one in Argentina, once again there was a cost blowout; you have one or two in China; and you have one or two in Russia. These modular reactors that people talk about are not there. One of the arguments about modular reactors—and there is a scale issue here—is that it will be cheaper. Well, it is not. As to the levelised cost of electricity, all the estimates that have been done indicate that it is actually going to be dearer. The leading proponent in the United States, I am not sure if it is called the NuScale project, has now collapsed with litigation everywhere, so it does not exactly—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member needs to wind up please.

Mr HUGHES: I will wind up with one comment. The head of the International Energy Agency was here in Australia recently. It is a very pro-nuclear body and they accepted——

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member, winding up means concluding.

Mr HUGHES: —that in South Australia it makes no sense.

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (12:15): The debate this morning has served some useful purpose, if only to see that we have the minister putting some aspects of a view of sorts on the public record. What we have heard clearly is that there is a clear choice ahead. The Malinauskas Labor government has just made it clear that the government is against nuclear energy development in the state. It has put it clearly. You got a very clear statement there from the minister.

I think the attitude of the government to this debate is disappointing—that is my view about it, it is disappointing—and I go a step further to say that the attitude of the government is irresponsible in this space. That is in the context of what we have started to hear, which is the embryonic development of a scare campaign that links curiosity about nuclear energy to an inevitable extension of coal-fired power in the country. If one is going to feed into informing the other, we are going to have a scare campaign from Labor that is going to say, 'Don't be curious about nuclear energy, because somehow that is inevitably associated with extending coal-fired power.'

We have that debate separately, let's not waste too much time this morning. We have got a bit of a glimpse of what might be coming. What we see clearly is that Labor is against nuclear energy and it is against a curiosity in this space that has dated back for decades as we know. So what we have got to do first of all clearly is to tackle the necessity to clear the air in the context of the debate about uranium, about nuclear fuel development of electrical power in this state. There is going to be a clear divide, because you have denial on the government side of any real prospect of anything being progressed and on this side you have a pathway towards curiosity to learning, to confidence, to development of a way forward in the future.

It is really disappointing in the extreme to see the government coming along and flipping the motion of the leader to condemn the opposition for coming up with a proposal to explore something that South Australia has the most significant resources of anywhere in the world, and by some extraordinary margin. But we are not allowed to do that for risk of being condemned by this government for doing so.

Apart from what we have seen and heard about now as this embryonic scare campaign, what the government has further done in its response to this motion today is to draw attention to the completely wrong-headed approach that it has taken now for the better part of the last 20 years in this space driven by what is a fortress SA parochialism-based debate about energy generation.

It said to the people of South Australia, 'Don't think too much about reliability, about cost and about the future of the way we fit into the energy cycle in the country. We're going to make sure that we shut off connection as far as needs doing in order to make sure it's island South Australia, and we'll have this variety of energy sources that will keep the lights on, possibly, but we'll do that via this parochialism debate.' That is just completely wrongheaded from the start.

We know that any worthwhile debate about the generation of energy in a network system such as Australia, let alone by the time you start looking at analogies around the world, depends enormously on areas playing to their strengths and on interconnection to ensure that we have a rational approach to reliability and to cost efficiency. It has been put by the minister, 'You have to understand the difference between firming and base load, and this is all a wrong cost analysis,' and we all have to understand the great wisdom of the government's foray into hydrogen for this reason as distinguished by that, and that is why it is okay to talk about hydrogen every day of the week, but heaven forbid anyone talk about nuclear power generation.

Parochialism has got to go. Parochialism has got to stop. We have to be able to have a rational debate that is free from ideology. We have to be able to encourage those who would study science in our schools and our universities, let alone those who would come here to learn about what the best practice in the world is on energy generation. You have to be able to free them up to be able to say, 'Come here and you're going to be in an environment where we can innovate, we can learn and we can develop all aspects of the energy generation cycle, and we're not going to be hit by political arguments left, right and centre the whole way along.'

The motion in its original form gives this parliament today an opportunity to say, 'We are going to chart a new course and we are going to explore all aspects of the fuel cycle.' That includes what we know we are brilliant at in this state: exploration, extraction and milling; exporting uranium and the further processing and manufacture; electricity generation, which has occupied the bulk of the debate here today; and the management, storage and disposal of waste.

Of course, that comes in the context of paragraph (b) of the original motion, which has survived the more or less comprehensive surgery that the government wants to put in terms of its amendment, because the government is at least willing to acknowledge the groundbreaking AUKUS agreement which is going to see the construction of nuclear-powered submarines at the Osborne shipyards. They are endorsing that, at least. So they are happy for us to have a degree of curiosity, engagement and innovation to that degree, but I suspect that there is far too much infection of ideology that remains over on that side.

The course that we have to chart is not to be thwarted by these condemnations that the government is going to place over any proposal to head into the future, but to speak up for doing away with all those outdated ideological debates. We were really close, going back to the middle of last century. The Gorton government got very close to the establishment of a nuclear power plant. We had a debate that was based on cost at that point. It was a competition between nuclear and coal, and we didn't go down the energy generation path at that point. Unfortunately, we all know that the eighties were preoccupied by the nuclear disarmament debate and we have been stuck in a kind of Back to the Future mould in which the possibility to explore in the usual scientific, innovative way has been forestalled far too much.

We must get back onto a footing where South Australia can play to its advantage, where being curious and innovative and confident is not against the rules because there is a government and a public debate that are willing to promote it. The Minerals Council of Australia has been calling for the rethink on the ban on nuclear power now for the better part of the last generation. The history in Australia, let alone South Australia, is well documented in terms of where we have been.

To get back to the beginning of these short remarks, I am left informed as to the sort of scares that we are going to see now coming from the other side against the exploration of this important topic. It ought to be noted today that the government, in taking the approach that it has to this motion and amending it in the way it has, condemning a proposal for further consideration, has charted a course that is not only disappointing, it is irresponsible. It needs to be called out, and I support the motion in its original form.

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (12:25): The Malinauskas government has maintained a clear and consistent position on nuclear energy. The position is that nuclear energy has a role in the global campaign to address climate change; however, in Australia, and particularly in South Australia, the cost of deploying nuclear makes it completely unviable. There are no businesses here clamouring to invest in nuclear. In this nation, and particularly in this state, there are plentiful resources for renewable energy and short to long-term duration energy storage. That is the pathway to cleaner, more affordable, reliable energy.

In contrast, the Liberal Party has flip-flopped around when it comes to energy policy. The South Australian Liberals refused to support the recommendations of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission but are back here now with a half-baked call to go nuclear. The muddle-headedness is even more evident at the federal level, where the Coalition had some 22 energy policies during their near decade in office but failed to land even one coherent and accepted policy.

Let us never forget the former Prime Minister, ScoMo, bringing coal into the parliament and telling us not to be afraid or describing our big battery as the 'big banana'. To be honest, the Liberals' energy policy reads more like a Roald Dahl novel: there is 'Scotty and the giant banana', and there is 'Peter Dutton and the nuclear power factory'. During this dismal period, some in the Coalition did support nuclear, but it was ruled out on multiple occasions by Coalition cabinet members as being too expensive.

Now, we have pledges of a pro-nuclear policy from the federal Coalition but no detail on cost or who would pay and when they would be built and turned on. This is against the backdrop of the Coalition stepping away from interim targets to get to a net zero emissions future. This is from a party and a leader that went about recently saying, 'If you don't know, vote no.' Well, we do not know. In the case of the Voice, there was actually information there for those who wanted to look. In this case, there is nothing there. It is a hollow call.

Consider how the Coalition has flip-flopped on the type of reactor they propose. Last year, Liberal leader Peter Dutton was repeatedly calling for small modular reactors, or SMRs for short. Now, the Coalition seems to be saying that modern, large-scale reactors would be required. The state opposition is a half-step behind their federal colleagues, as they seem to be still calling for SMRs. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there are more than 70 SMR designs at different stages of development, from the conceptual phase to licensing and construction of a first-of-a-kind facility, but there are no actual SMRs anywhere in the world except outside Russia and China.

In the Russian Arctic Circle, the Akademik Lomonosov is powering the small settlement of Pevek. It is basically a barge with an SMR adapted from the type of nuclear reactors used to power icebreaker ships. Construction of the ship started in 2007, and the 70-megawatt generator began full commercial operation in 2020. The final cost, at an estimated $US700 million, was nearly three times the initial budget.

In China, the nuclear power plant in Shidao Bay, Shandong province, began commercial operation in December 2023. It is the first fourth-generation plant: a 200-megawatt helium-cooled pebble-bed reactor. Multiple delays were encountered. While small, it is not clear whether it is actually an SMR in the modular sense. A genuine Chinese SMR has been under development since 2010: the Changjiang 125-megawatt SMR on the island of Hainan. It is in advanced stages of construction and has the advantage of being co-located with larger, traditional reactors.

In democratic countries, the most advanced SMR remains stuck at the design stage. Founded in 2007, the NuScale Power Corporation SMR has not yet completed regulatory approvals by US authorities. Lauded as being at the front of the pack, it suffered a major setback in November 2023 when its flagship project in Utah collapsed because of high costs and technical issues. In January 2024, NuScale announced that nearly one-third of its staff would be made redundant. Also in the US, Westinghouse has submitted a pre-application plan to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Westinghouse anticipates its design will be certified by 2027. This would be followed, it says, by site-specific licensing and construction on the first unit toward the end of the decade.

The member for Black is very excited about a Rolls-Royce SMR. Again, there is no such thing. Rolls-Royce is in step 2 of a three-step process for generic design assessment by the UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation. After step 3 it would still need site-specific assessments before construction could start on any actual SMR. It has only got as far as agreeing with the University of Sheffield to start building prototypes for SMR modules.

In Canada, Ontario Power Generation is planning an SMR which has yet to receive state and federal approvals. It has set a target to be operational by 2036. In Argentina, an SMR project was launched in 1984—a year before I was born—but shelved until 2006. Concrete was poured in 2014, but progress stalled in 2018-19 over contract disputes. Construction has resumed under new contracts signed in 2021. So this is a project that has already been going for close to 40 years with not a single day's operation to show for it. These are track records in countries that actually have established nuclear industries. Imagine how much longer the delays would be here in Australia.

Rather than chasing something that does not exist, the Malinauskas government's involvement in the nuclear sector is in the support of uranium mining. We know there are many countries that cannot develop renewables and where nuclear can assist with decarbonisation. We are proud to support them, but our involvement stops at that raw material stage. We do not have the ability to convert or enrich the uranium so that it can be used as fuel. Nuclear plants do not run on uranium oxide.

According to the World Nuclear Association, many of the modern large-scale nuclear reactors now being contemplated, and more than half of the SMRs now being designed, will need a more enriched fuel than is currently used in the older fleet of reactors. This fuel is called high-assay low-enriched uranium. Rather than enriching uranium so that it consists of about 5 per cent of the U-235 isotope, which is at the heart of nuclear fission and is used in older reactors, this is enriched to between 5 per cent and 20 per cent.

Where is the enrichment done? The World Nuclear Association says that there are only two countries that produce commercial high-assay low-enriched uranium. These countries are Russia and China. So rather than nuclear creating a more reliable energy system in Australia, it would create new risks to reliability because we do not have the sovereign capability to make our own fuel and, at least at the moment, that risk centres on two countries with whom we do not have a stable trading relationship.

The federal Coalition has foreshadowed that its nuclear policy will include keeping coal-fired power stations running for longer until nuclear is built and operating. This would cause terrible damage to the environment. It would undermine international trade prospects for Australia's exporters as the world moves to establish carbon border adjustment mechanisms. It would also create yet more of a cost burden on Australian taxpayers.

The coal-fired power stations are old and, like all machines, would require major maintenance to keep them going a bit longer. Consider that New South Wales has put $225 million a year on the table to keep coal generator Eraring for just some of the time for two extra years because they are running behind on building sufficient new generation capacity. Imagine that burden on taxpayers being replicated at every coal-fired power station in the country and for years and years, not just the two-year hurdle identified in New South Wales. That is what the member for Black is asking for: expensive, unreliable, unnecessary energy. That is why I support the amendments to this motion.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (12:35): I rise to support the leader's original motion:

That this house—

(a) acknowledges that South Australia is where 25 per cent of the world's uranium is found, and that our state holds 80 per cent of Australia's known uranium reserves;

(b) acknowledges the groundbreaking AUKUS agreement which will see the construction of nuclear-powered submarines at the Osborne shipyards, noting that this will see the development of nuclear skills which could in turn leverage a civil nuclear industry;

(c) acknowledges that base load zero emissions nuclear power is critical to decarbonise globally and that many countries around the world are already using base load zero emissions nuclear power;

(d) acknowledges that inherent grid stability which is provided by base load zero emissions nuclear power;

(e) notes that Australia is the only G20 country with a blanket ban on base load zero emissions nuclear power and that this poses a risk to decarbonisation targets at state and federal level;

(f) notes that active participation in various stages of the nuclear fuel cycle could present multiple economic opportunities for South Australia;

(g) supports base load zero emissions nuclear power being considered as part of a source-agnostic pathway to clear, zero emissions energy production; and

(h) supports a non-ideological, open-minded investigation into the potential for a civil nuclear industry, including energy generation, in South Australia.

I note that Peter Dutton, our federal Liberal leader, has outlined a path for nuclear and potential sites for nuclear power plants across the state.

I want to get back to the very simple issue that we do mine a lot of uranium in South Australia and that many thousands of people have had the experience of being involved, whether at Roxby Downs, Honeymoon, Beverley or Four Mile. My son works for Redpath Mining and he completed about a year last year working at Roxby Downs, working on the surface and down hole, and he is currently working at a lead, silver and zinc mine out of Mount Isa. If he is not on a plane, he will be on a plane soon, coming back to Adelaide after his swing.

What the mining industry and the uranium mining industry do is support many people, many families right across this state and this country. To decarbonise to zero emissions by 2050 we do need nuclear base load power.

We have the scare campaigns put up everywhere. We have the minister admitting today that the multibillion dollar hydrogen plan is looking at generating 10 per cent peaking power for the state. That is a terrifying thought when you think that the unrecognised technology to build an industrial-sized plant that the government is looking at building for $593 million—and as we see over time that component that comes in that $593 million gets less and less and less—is to be used as a peaking station. Apart from that, we will need 1,500 clean square kilometres of land—so we will probably need anywhere up to 3,000 square kilometres—to put all the solar panels on to generate the energy to be transferred to the hydrogen.

Not only that but there are the thousands of wind turbines and the many, many square kilometres they will take up to generate that power, and I am informed there can be up to an 80 per cent loss from that renewable power through to hydrogen. This for potentially 10 per cent of the state's power?

We should be moving to where we have nuclear power as a base load, and I would think you would have it running at about 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the state's needs. That is how it works; like a coal-fired power station, it sits there running all the time. Obviously, in the background you have your wind and solar—and we have much wind and solar in this state, and that is well regarded—but it is not base load power.

We use a lot of gas as firming power, which can be switched on immediately and get on with that peaking, but that industry has been under threat, as well, from interest groups. The Tiwi Islanders have tried to stop the extra exploration north of Darwin, and there are the Aboriginal groups that tried to stop the Scarborough project off Western Australia. The simple fact is that we will need gas for at least three decades as a transition power moving into the future.

I heard the story about the plant in New South Wales that the government is putting money into. The issue is that the government is putting money into it because financiers have been scared off of financing these things. They are literally falling down; I have heard of bits of sheds falling down, bits of plant. In the meantime, we see solar and wind generation being subsidised.

The whole issue here, as far as base load power in this state goes—whatever power we generate, whether it is wind or solar and obviously gas power when we need it—is that we need more interconnection. We have certainly built our side of the interconnector heading towards New South Wales; we have the Heywood interconnector that goes down through my electorate towards the Victorian border, and we also have Murraylink, an underground connector up in the Riverland. They are vital connectors.

I found out only the other day that there is one major powerline in my area that is not even energised, which intrigued me. This is not just Stobie poles, this is the big poles. I am not sure whether it is a 132 kilovolt line—I would have to check on that—but I found it interesting to learn that that one is not even activated. We do need to get on, we do need to get involved, because the sooner we start the sooner we can have a result with nuclear power. Yes, it does take some time.

I went to Finland, France and England when we had the nuclear royal commission here on storing nuclear waste, and talked to the experts in Canada, while we were in London. We went to Manchester, near the Lakes District, where there are 120 tonnes of plutonium sitting on the surface. There are hundreds and hundreds of tonnes, probably thousands of tonnes, of spent nuclear rods and waste material sitting on the surface because people are still getting to the final development phases of putting that waste underground.

The beauty of it is that people like the Finns have legislation in place where they have to store their spent rods. I saw some great work they were doing in putting the spent rods 500 metres down encased in a steel tube which was then encased in a copper tube. They were looking at autonomous vehicles to put that material down 500 metres. They used bentonite clay and cement to hold it in, and then there was a whole heap of rock towards the surface and more cement and clay. The engineers, after about the third blocking process, start to roll their eyes.

Yes, there is some work to do there. Other countries put a production facility in place where they can reduce those spent rods down to about 20 per cent of their size. There is plenty of work going on. On visiting France, it was interesting to see the nuclear power station sitting there with vineyards right up to the outside fence, and canola crops, which shows that it can be done.

If we are serious about decarbonisation in this state, and especially as we are obviously getting further involved in the nuclear industry with the nuclear submarines and we will have to take the responsibility of storing spent fuel—we missed that opportunity that was quoted as somewhere around $680 billion during the fuel cycle royal commission—we have a great opportunity in this state to not only be leaders here in Australia but to be world leaders working on that total nuclear fuel cycle.

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (12:45): It gives me great pleasure, first of all, to see this member's motion and then to obviously support it in every shape, aspect and fashion. One of the things that I think is quite fascinating about this area, and the reason I wanted to speak to it, is that there is a gaping hole in what I think is the argument.

This whole philosophy of carbon and climate change is not actually being driven by the business world. You might say, 'Who cares?' The fact is that the actual business world is following and the business world is acting upon it, but it is being driven by science, and the science is being led and pushed and coerced by governments worldwide, and that is fine, it may all stack up really well.

But one of the things I will pose is that governments and bureaucracies picking golden eggs are probably one of the worst sectors in the world to do so because they fail more times than they actually win, and the private investing world, the share markets of the world, the share markets of Australia, the big businesses of Australia, have a really strong emphasis to be on the right side of the equation rather than the wrong.

One of the things about this proposal with nuclear is that it actually fills in a great, gaping hole in renewable energy where we do not have good answers. The good answers are in trying to fill the gaps between sun energy, wind energy, and when there is no energy. We have seen some beautiful, big million-dollar batteries that have thorium and every other rare earth in the world in them. They cannot find enough of it, and they want to dig up the Limestone Coast to try to find some rare earths that came from a volcanic eruption millions of years ago that may be really good for this process, but what is missing in this is that that technology of battery, and potentially no technology existing around recycling as yet, does not really fill in the gaps that the wind and the sun energy does not cater for when either of those two are missing.

What then happens is that we see government saying, 'But we will have a gas turbine that sits there in the wings waiting for there to be no wind and no sun. We will have this big battery that cost millions of dollars that will give us a couple of hours of relief, at this stage'—maybe it is more than that, but we know it is not days. We know that if there is no sun on days and there is no wind on days, we have no alternative but to use gas turbines and then, in today's technology, we are using diesel generators as well.

What gets lost is that we know what the government has done, and South Australia has led the way in solar, and we know that solar energy, as those on the other side and those who are really in favour of this process say, is a cheap form of electricity. In fact, it is even an expensive form of electricity when they oversupply and kill the grid, and the grid collapses because of oversupply. Then we have home batteries and some other storage means, and then we are looking at other options like hydrogen, but the fact is that this hydrogen idea—that hydrogen is the answer—has not actually been done.

We cannot copy anyone else. We want to be frontrunners in this. We want to be world leaders. I welcome that, but who is to say that we will be a world leader. Who says we are a world leader in this space? But if we get it wrong it hurts. It actually comes back and hurts us in the hip pocket. It means that we will have a system and a grid that is not only not reliable but one of the most expensive in the world. That is a fact too. Go and tell me how many other countries in the world have electricity prices like South Australia or Australia, in the perspective of being more expensive. There are a few maybe, but they are few and far between because we are hell-bent on recognising that we are at the forefront, a leader in solar development and solar rollout.

Just so everyone knows how we got there: when our lifestyle in the 1980s went through the roof and we wanted air conditioning and transpirators in our houses, the grid could not cope with all this air conditioning during a heatwave. The answer was solar. Then they advocated lots of solar units and paying these people 40ȼ, I think it was, to attract them into the solar space. It worked really well because it was a bargain, a great initiative. But, it actually overworked, and it is still overworking because we can cook the grid.

I say thank you to the oppositions of not only the state government but also the federal government for their serious consideration in this area, recognising that despite the battery, the gap fillers and the sources of energy that we require when there is no wind and there is no sun, nuclear energy is tried, proven and tested. You cannot walk away from that.

When the other side of the government says that you cannot put nuclear into this space because it is perhaps not even renewable or it is dangerous, how can they even talk about submarines? How can submarines even come on to their radar? They say, 'We'll have nuclear submarines in this state.' Not only will we have them, we are going to build them. Yet, we may even be able to get away with modular nuclear radiation rather than just big ones—I am not even sure. Maybe that could be a retrospective backdown by the opposition governments in that we might not need these big plants. Maybe we need what they call small micronuclear plants that we see in submarines and aircraft carriers, and the like, producing electricity in the grid, filling in the gaps, like we see diesel generators and the gas turbines filling in the gaps in our grid.

I do not think I have to ask the Liberal opposition, but certainly other side of the house and those opposed to nuclear are saying that it is expensive. It is almost a mischievous 'expensive'. Why is it mischievous? What they will do is compare a megawatt of power from a wind turbine, they will compare a megawatt of power from solar and say that nuclear is three, four, five, ten times, maybe even more expensive. But these renewables are only wonderful when there is wind and sun.

Turn it around and say, 'Well, there is no wind and sun', and you will find that nuclear does stack up, because your battery certainly does not do it and hydrogen has not been proven. You do not even know how you are going to produce the hydrogen and at what expense. How much hydrogen do you have to store if you are going to use hydrogen as a back-up network for one, two or three days of no wind and perhaps no sun?

These are the sorts of elements that I hope the governments of today, the bureaucrats who sit behind and are governing and working through climate change, carbon and carbon being the enemy, can see in the light of day and say, yes, we can get there, but we have to do it with what is proven, tried and tested. The arguments have to be balanced.

It is not solar against nuclear. It is a battery against nuclear, it is a two-hour battery against nuclear. It is a hydrogen plant of stored hydrogen against nuclear. It is not the same. You cannot measure the two. In the dark hours of night, when there is no wind, guess what? There is no solar and no wind in the system, but you can turn on a nuclear switch and you can produce power reliably. The rest of the world is doing it, and we should follow suit.

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (12:53): I thank those who have made contributions and dismissed the government's nonsensical amendments to this motion, which really gutted its purpose and are a clear indication that the Labor Party of South Australia is anti-nuclear. They are anti-nuclear in South Australia. They do not want any debate in this. It is important that South Australians know this, because the Premier presents an impression that he is supportive of nuclear power and he is, anywhere but in Australia.

There is an opportunity to have this discussion, this debate, this conversation with our community, get evidence on the table and understand what the opportunities are for South Australia. The government, the Labor Party in South Australia, has rejected that and it is important that South Australians know that. I look forward to seeing the outcome of this vote and being able to continue this conversation with my federal colleagues, with sensible crossbench contributions involved as well.

The house divided on the amendment:

Ayes 23

Noes 13

Majority 10

AYES

NOES

PAIRS

Amendment thus carried; motion as amended carried.

Sitting suspended from 12:59 to 14:00.