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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-05-04 Daily Xml
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INTERNATIONAL WORKERS MEMORIAL DAY

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:11): I would like to continue my remarks of 6 April when I was speaking about International Workers Memorial Day and the contribution of workers, especially in dangerous places. Since then, we have celebrated May Day, and I commend Adelaide's May Day committee for their organisation of the rally, the workers' memorial observance and the May Day dinner.

Again, since that date, on 26 April, on behalf of the Minister for Multicultural Affairs I joined the Ukrainian community of South Australia in commemorating the 25th anniversary of the explosion which released 400 more times radiation than the Hiroshima bomb. I would like to acknowledge Mr John Dnistriansky, Mr Roman Nowosilskyj and the congregation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, and my friends Victor and Olga Gostin for their welcome. The ceremony was very moving and the singing was marvellous.

Following the Chernobyl meltdown all those years ago, thousands of workers cleared a 30 kilometre area around the plant in order to entomb it in concrete. This may yet be the fate of the Fukushima plant, as it continues to seep radiation into the surrounding environment now more than 50 days since the earthquake and tsunami.

In 1986, Chernobyl workers were exposed to high levels of radiation, with the initial explosion. An international team of more than 100 scientists appointed by the World Health Organisation has recently produced a report concluding that up to 4,000 workers are likely to have died of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident over 20 years ago.

Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental-health impact of Chernobyl as 'the largest public health problem created by the accident'. Chernobyl should have delivered a powerful lesson to the world, but in light of the nuclear disaster in Japan, it seems that these lessons have already been forgotten. With a serious situation at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant hanging over us, 25 years after Chernobyl's catastrophe, there is an apparent need to reconsider the old lessons more than ever.

At the Chernobyl anniversary, I remembered Ukrainian children affected by the reactor accident were sent to destinations around the world, including Australia, with the first 150 of those arriving in this country in 1991, sponsored by the Australia Chernobyl Children's Relief Fund. To date, this group has provided $10 million in aid and provided over 2,000 children with the opportunity to holiday in Australia. Only two of the orphans actually remain in Australia, and the rest returned to their homeland, many still maintaining contact with their host families.

It is a sobering fact that the work of the relief fund continues, only now the affected children are the offspring of the original Chernobyl survivors. This week, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) announced it would build a makeshift bulwark around the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in case aftershocks further harm the already damaged structures. In Tokyo last weekend, 21,000 unionised workers rallied on May Day to support the workers at Fukushima and called for Japan's national energy policy to be steered away from nuclear power.

Those pushing the nuclear agenda are at great pains to point out that Chernobyl and Fukushima are poles apart. This is despite both disasters being ranked at the highest possible level on the international disasters scale of nuclear incidents. I certainly hope they are right, yet as the situation continues to unfold, it is simply too early to say. Even in the best case scenario the environmental and human consequences of Fukushima will be enormous. The worst-case scenario is beyond comprehension, bearing in mind that the total fuel rod capacity of the three reactors operating at the time of the earthquake was twice that of the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor, and that does not include the radioactivity contained in the spent fuel rod pools of all six units.

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), who formed a part of the Nobel peace prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has condemned as unconscionable the Japanese government's safety standards on radiation levels at elementary and middle schools in nuclear disaster-stricken Fukushima Prefecture. The Japanese government has recently announced it is safe for schoolchildren to use playgrounds on school premises in the prefecture as long as the dose they are exposed to does not exceed 20 millisieverts over a year, but the PSR maintain that any exposure, including exposure to naturally occurring background radiation, creates an increased risk of cancer.

The accident at Fukushima is yet another reminder of the necessity of reviewing the safety of current nuclear power reactors and, more importantly, the safety of all reactors. Nuclear power is susceptible to accidents because construction and operator error will always be part of the equation.

I am proud of the Labor Party's longstanding ban on nuclear power and the policy to strictly limit the mining and export of uranium. I am also proud of our state's achievements in hosting, developing and supporting renewable energy, and of the fact that we are a national leader not only in the generation of wind power but in the exploration of geothermal power. We have shown leadership in the development of solar energy and in emerging areas such as wave energy and the production of biofuel from native micro-algae.

There have been recent high-profile assertions that nuclear energy has a viable future in this state and there has been a call to renew the nuclear debate as part of the national future planning. While debate should never be stifled, I believe these calls represent a failure of our collective imagination—a failure to imagine the risks involved and a failure to imagine how we could do things differently for future generations.

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