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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-30 Daily Xml
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Radiation Protection and Control Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 25 March 2020.)

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (16:01): I take this opportunity in parliament to speak on the Radiation Protection and Control Bill 2020. Certainly radiation is a topic that can stir up fears amongst the general population, some of those unfounded. It presents us with the challenge that radiation can both cause and cure cancer. Radiation is an area of science and technology, however, where, if the risk is properly managed, the benefits to society can be immense. It is these risks that the bill seeks to regulate not only to control activities involving radiation sources but also to provide for the protection of both people and the environment.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen, who used a cathode ray tube connected to a 50-kilovolt induction coil. Roentgen discovered that these X-rays could pass through some materials, including clothes, unlike visible light, but could still expose photographic plates. Roentgen then took the first clinical X-ray, of his wife's hand, in December 1895. In 1896, less than six months after Roentgen's discovery in Germany, at the University of Adelaide Professor William Bragg was able to demonstrate X-rays in a very successful public lecture at the university in front of the governor and many citizens.

A short time later, his son Lawrence broke his arm at the elbow in an accident. Lawrence was taken into his father's laboratory in the basement of the university and had his arm X-rayed before having it reset in hospital. This turned out to be one of the first clinical X-rays taken in Australia. Later, during the early 1900s, William and Lawrence Bragg worked together as a research team and discovered and developed X-ray crystallography to view the structure of crystals at the atomic level. It was certainly the first time that had occurred and included, amongst different chemicals, diamonds. This certainly revolutionised science and medicine. For this work, in 1915 Sir William Bragg and Sir Lawrence Bragg received Australia's first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Henri Becquerel, in Paris in March 1896, searched for a similar radiation in uranium salts. To these salts, he exposed photographic plates that were wrapped in paper and put in a drawer and, again using photographic plates, he observed an image. Marie Curie, who is well known, was present at this announcement and so began her chemical investigations of radioactivity, which culminated in her discovery of new radioactive elements polonium and radium.

Since then, we have seen both the good and the bad of nuclear energy. This year itself marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, which saw two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Since then, we have seen the peaceful use of nuclear energy to create base load power in many countries throughout the world, and we are now starting to realise its potential to assist in the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Closer to home, in Australia radioactive substances are used widely and handled across a number of industries, ranging from industrial processing, mining and petroleum operations, medical and health care, and research and educational facilities. Certainly, Sir William and Sir Lawrence Bragg's achievements demonstrate the history of South Australia being at the forefront of scientific advancement, which is certainly something we can be proud of.

If you fast-forward to now, Australia's response to the COVID-19 viral pandemic, especially compared with that of other first world countries, surely must give us confidence not only in our scientists and medical officers but also in our governments and institutions that we certainly are world class and very able to adapt, develop and harness advanced technologies and one of those is nuclear technologies.

South Australia is one of only two jurisdictions in Australia where uranium mining takes place, and uranium is certainly an essential contributor to our state's economy. Olympic Dam at Roxby Downs holds the world's largest uranium deposit. Additionally, South Australia has Beverley, Four Mile and Honeymoon mines. It is certainly therefore essential that modern and effective legislation covers mining and all other aspects of radiation use to protect people and the environment.

Earlier in the week, in the discussion on GM crops, the Attorney stated how over the years the population had certainly become more educated about the topic and familiar with the significant benefits, and I think the same needs to occur in regard to our society's education about radiation. For their benefit, the two kinds of radiation that exist are non-ionising radiation and ionising radiation. Non-ionising radiation has enough energy to move atoms in a molecule around or cause them to vibrate, but not enough energy to remove electrons from the atoms.

Examples of this kind of radiation are radio and TV signals; mobile phones, including the new 5G phones; visible light; and microwaves. Ionising radiation has much more energy, so it can knock electrons out of atoms. This process is known as ionisation. Ionising radiation can affect atoms in living things, so it certainly does pose a health risk to humans by damaging tissues and potentially DNA in the genes. Ionising radiation comes from X-ray machines, cosmic particles from outer space and also radioactive elements.

Radioactive elements emit ionising radiation as their atoms undergo radioactive decay and produce alpha and beta particles and gamma rays. These gamma rays are a radiation hazard for the entire body. They can easily penetrate barriers that would usually stop alpha and beta particles. Skin can stop alpha particles and wearing clothes can stop beta particles, whereas gamma rays, because they are photons, have much more penetrating power such that to stop them requires several inches of lead or even a few feet of concrete. Because of this, gamma rays can pass quite easily through the human body. As they pass through, they can cause ionisation that would damage tissue and DNA.

Background radiation is present on earth at all times. The majority of this background radiation occurs naturally from uranium and thorium found in many locations in the earth. The human body itself contains some of these naturally occurring radioactive materials, mainly naturally occurring potassium. Cosmic radiation from space also contributes to the background radiation around us. The remainder of the radiation exposure that we experience is from human-made sources. As I explained before, the best known of these, because they play a part in medicine, are X-rays. Both X-rays and gamma rays have the same basic properties, but the X-rays have slightly lower power and therefore less penetration power than gamma rays.

If a large enough radiation exposure occurs, which exceeds a certain threshold, observable deterministic effects become apparent. These effects are radiation sickness, radiation burns and even eventually death. The radiation levels at which these occur have been well established over time. At those lower radiation levels, though, that do not cause these deterministic effects, there is a more subtle stochastic risk, which still leads to the possibility of cell mutations and maybe cancer over a person's lifetime.

This is measured in what is known as effective dosage rates and the unit of measurement is sieverts, where a cumulative dose over time of one sievert increases the risk of developing cancer by 5.5 per cent. It is based upon a linear scale. Just to put that into perspective, most average Australians are exposed to about 1.5 millisieverts each year from natural sources. Just a standard X-ray is approximately 0.1 millisievert, well less than that one sievert I mentioned before.

Because of these two effects, legislation has therefore been developed over time to protect populations, not only in South Australia but throughout the world, and protect them not only from instantaneous radiation but also the cumulative exposure that I talked about. In South Australia's case, previous legislation was developed nearly 40 years ago, in 1982, which is back in the days of the Cold War and back in the days of the nuclear arms race, times when Western democracies, led by Ronald Reagan and Thatcher, had to stare down the Soviet-led Brezhnev.

For those born after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, the worries of the world back then were certainly different from those of today. I remember protests about the threat of immediate annihilation from nuclear war and now they have been replaced by protests about the threat of climate change. There are certainly different things for people to worry about.

A few years after the legislation was introduced in 1982, in 1986 there was the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Soviet Russia. This was a 1960s design that had a meltdown caused by, it has been found, a number of factors: human error, a poor safety culture, but fundamentally flawed design. In this explosion, despite the threat of fallout over Europe, this authoritarian communist Soviet Union state chose to try to cover up the disaster. It was not until a bunch of Swedish scientists detected a significant increase in radiation levels and looked at the prevailing winds that they were able to track this back to the Ukraine and the world found out about this disaster about three days later.

Thinking about that today, we are in a similar situation where we have had a local crisis in an authoritarian communist country that has spread into what is now a global problem. This time it is a viral pandemic. Again, I think, the world has justifiable questions about the withholding of information.

In 1986 I was in England. My father, who is a nuclear physicist, had moved the family there. He was working at the University of Leeds. This fallout was coming over and consisted of various radioactive substances: iodine, caesium and strontium carried by the winds across Europe before falling back to earth via rain. This caused a fair deal of concern at the time.

I remember not being able to go outside for a number of weeks following the disaster, having to stay indoors and also not being able to drink milk. There was the worry that when the dairy cows ate the grass, they would ingest these radioactive substances and then that would find its way into the food chain. These concerns are real and I do have that firsthand lived experience of the need to have protections and controls in place for radioactive materials.

I will just say that unfortunately the Chernobyl disaster that occurred using what was flawed 1970 Soviet technology has today been used to argue against nuclear energy. Rather than doing this, I think we, as humans, should learn from these mistakes, as we have done from other disasters. In the 34 years since that disaster, technologies have certainly moved forward significantly, as have nuclear technologies.

I should say that medical technologies have come a long way since 1982 as well. When the current legislation was drafted, it was aimed at regulating X-ray tubes that had 60-kilovolt ionising sources. Now we have 10 to 20 megavolts—that is 20,000 kilovolts—medical linear accelerators, which produce high-energy X-rays that conform to the tumour's shape and they certainly destroy cancer cells whilst sparing the surrounding normal tissue that the old regulations never really envisaged.

Additionally, since 1982, in 2004 we had a national commitment that was made via the Australian Health Ministers' Conference and also the Council of Australian Governments to try to implement uniform national frameworks for radiation protection. These main initiatives have been the National Directory for Radiation Protection, which is to protect people and the environment from exposure to ionising and certain prescribed types of non-ionising radiation, and also a national Code of Practice for Security of Radiation Sources aimed at decreasing the likelihood of unauthorised access to radioactive sources by people with malicious intent.

If we look at the act itself, some of the key areas that it includes are in part 2 of the bill: the objects and key principles, which are there to ensure those national requirements that I have just mentioned have been met as well as using the general duty of care, which is in clause 53, to help clarify the application of the objects and principles to persons and their enforcement mechanisms. If I could just touch on the radiation protection principle that is mentioned in the act, it is the principle that people and the environment should be protected from unnecessary exposure to radiation through the processes of justification, limitation and optimisation.

Moving on to part 4 of the act—Radiation protection and control—this has been aimed to help reduce the administrative burdens on small business through the streamlining of the licensing, which originally had seven separate licence categories. It has now been reduced down to two licence categories in this bill: a radiation use licence and radiation management licence. In terms of activities that require a radiation management licence that are outlined in division 1 of part 4, these include testing for development purposes, mining or mineral processing, construction, establishment and control of a radiation facility, transport of radioactive material, and possession of a radioactive source.

Division 2 in that part of the act outlines activities that require a radiation use licence. These include use or handling of radioactive material and also the operation of radiation apparatus. Division 3 deals with premises and radiation sources requiring registration. These include unsealed radioactive materials, sealed radioactive sources and radiation apparatus. Registrations of this equipment will also be included on radiation management licences, which provide a single document for businesses to manage their regulatory obligations, whereas the current system requires individual registration of equipment separate from the licensing. Finally, division 4 of this part of the act outlines some prohibited activities. One of those is operations from the enrichment or conversion of uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride which of course is the next step in the nuclear fuel cycle.

Part 5 of the bill provides for new offences relating to causing radiation harm, with clause 50 relating to causing serious radiation harm, and clause 51 relating to causing radiation harm. Inclusion of harm in regulatory schemes where there is a risk of harm to human health or the environment is necessary to provide a suitable deterrent. Of the Australian states and territories, only South Australia and Western Australia do not currently have harm elements within their radiation protection legislation.

Radiation harm, of course, may occur across all aspects of radiation exposure and so it needs to be regulated by this legislation. It also includes occupational exposure, diagnostic imaging, radiotherapy, storage and transportation. It is noted that radiation harm effects may occur soon after the exposure or, as I mentioned beforehand, many years after exposure. Aside from physical harm, radiation can also cause significant harm to the environment through contamination, and so this is also countenanced in the bill itself.

If I move on to part 7, the act deals with enforcement and seeks to introduce a number of new provisions into that which allows the minister to issue orders rather than having to go off to court. They provide an alternative enforcement mechanism. The sole reason for having orders is to really mitigate and remediate harm rather than to penalise the person so that you are not having to go off to court but just trying to quickly get on top of the issue to ensure that it is dealt with, which makes it much more expedient and gets to the root of the problem.

The bill provides for three types of orders, these being radiation protection orders, reparation orders and radiation protection cessation orders. The bill also looks to amend the maximum penalties that can occur. At present, the maximum penalty for most offences under the present act is $10,000, and it is certainly currently less than penalties in equivalent acts and legislation that also seek to protect public health.

Certainly, you can see why this is grossly inadequate. It is meant to be much easier to mitigate or correct a problem rather than just get the financial penalty put in place. With respect to this act, the bill does seek to set a maximum penalty for recklessly or intentionally causing serious radiation harm. It sets that at $5 million for a body corporate and $1 million or 15 years imprisonment for an actual person.

With the few minutes I have left, I commend this bill to the house. It will provide for the ongoing security of our radioactive sources, and certainly sets out modernising the regulatory framework in order to minimise the risk to the health and safety of our community, and also maximise the benefits to the people, the environment and economy of South Australia.

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (16:21): I am very pleased to rise today in support of the Radiation Protection and Control Bill 2020. In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium. Often radiation can be categorised as ionising or non-ionising radiation. The member for Morphett did a reasonable job of summarising some of the definitions around that, so I will be relatively brief on that front.

Essentially, ionising radiation is where it has sufficient energy to dislodge electrons from an atom thus creating ions. Examples of this sort of thing might include materials that emit alpha, beta or gamma radiation, which consist of helium nuclei electrons or positrons and photons, and also X-rays, whereas non-ionising radiation does not do that. It does not knock electrons off atoms. It tends often to have much fewer significant biological impacts that may cause sort of vibrations within molecules generating heat.

In the case of UV light, it does not ionise atoms as such, but it does have an impact on chemical bonds. It modifies molecules rather than atoms. I guess what is of particular concern and particular risk for people is ionising radiation. The primary reason for that is that ionising radiation damages DNA in cells. Our cells and the cells of most living organisms have natural protective mechanisms that prevent uncontrolled cell growth.

For example, if we are talking about the gut lining along the inside of our large intestine, there are control measures in there that stop individual cells from doing their own thing and growing out of control. However, what can happen with radiation is that, as you start to accumulate changes to the DNA, there is a natural selection process going on that can ultimately lead to a particular cell gaining a growth advantage, and that is where you might start to see a cell grow uncontrollably, and that is essentially what cancer is.

Radioactive substances are used in a wide variety of industries, which include industrial processing, mining and petroleum operations, medical and healthcare research, and educational facilities. For example, a medical application could be radio treatment for cancer, so in this case you are talking about highly focused beams. Often they have a number of different beams that focus on a particular spot on the target tissue, so you have a larger absorbed dose at that particular site than you do on the surrounding tissues. You can have, I guess, a selective effect, a targeted effect, on only those cells that you wish to kill, and enough radiation targeting those cells leads to the death of those cells and that is again through DNA damage.

There are a lot of applications for radiation with the research. The member for Morphett talked about X-ray crystallography, which is an incredibly important technology and tool that is being used to determine the structures of proteins. Protein structures are really important for lots of different applications really. If you want to develop new antibiotics to target particular bacteria, then often crystal structures of essential proteins can be used to then design molecules that then can be used to interfere, perhaps, in the active site of that particular protein and stop its function.

For example, if we are talking about infectious diseases, one of the drugs that can be used to treat influenza is Tamiflu. There are two of them, but I cannot remember the other one. Essentially, they target the neuraminidase protein on the influenza virus, which is responsible for releasing that virus once it is replicated within a respiratory cell and then buds off. So, that is an example of a drug that is able to target the active side of a particular enzyme and have a therapeutic benefit.

There was also some other work that happened here locally where the structure of what was called the subtilase toxin was solved for a type of bacteria that was closely related to the bacteria that was causing haemolytic uraemic syndrome, the outbreak as part of the Garibaldi mettwurst outbreak in the early nineties.

Solving the structure of that subtilase toxin actually revealed that there was a particular groove within the centre of that protein that was responsible for cutting in half a particular human protein within certain cells that led to cell death. What was particularly interesting about that was that that discovery led to a potential tool that could be used to treat cancer, because the target of this particular toxin is a cell process that is involved in cancer as well. This work was an example of where research had set off on a particular path, looking to deal with what was a gastrointestinal infection, and then, as a result of that work, came across a potential tool that could be used in the treatment of cancer.

Once again, this is an example in research of where X-ray crystallography, which uses X-rays obviously, which is a form of radiation, is important in research. Particularly in older technologies, a lot of radioactive labels were often used for particular techniques. So if you wanted to target or look at particular genomes—you might have had a different number of genomes and you wanted to detect if a particular gene was present in there—back in the old days, they would do something called a Southern blot, where you would create a probe that was specific for a particular gene.

That probe would include dNTPs that were radioactively labelled. You would put the genomes onto nitrocellulose, and then you would block the background and then put in your radioactive probe. If it detected the target, then when you came in later to look for the radioactive decay, you would see that the genomes that had all the samples that had your target gene in it would light up, so that would be how you would use it as a tag.

Those particular methods are used less now. A lot of those radioactive probes have now been superseded by fluorescent probes; nevertheless, they had been, and still are in many cases, used in molecular biology. Of course, the process that is used to generate those probes in a southern blot or in a northern blot is polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is a methodology that I am very pleased to see a lot more people know a lot about now.

Although radioactivity has nothing to do with it, it is the technique that is used to test for the coronavirus. The coronavirus has a positive-sense RNA genome. By using an RNA extraction on your sample, you process the RNA and you convert it into DNA. You then use PCR to target a particular portion of the coronavirus genome, and when you get a positive signal it tells you that that virus is present in your sample. So there are plenty of applications in molecular biology, which is only one very small part of all the sorts of things where radiation is relevant.

The state government plays an important role in the regulation of these sorts of things, particularly for ionising radiation but also, in some cases, for non-ionising radiation. In South Australia, the Radiation Protection and Control Act 1982 administered by the Environment Protection Authority regulates activities involving radiation sources and provides for the protection of people and the environment from the harmful effects of radiation. This includes providing for the licensing of certain activities and registration of certain items and premises which involve radiation sources.

Parties that are regulated under the legislation include hospitals, dentists, veterinarians, soil analysis companies, mining companies, radiographers, radiologists and ports. South Australia is one of only two jurisdictions in Australia where uranium mining takes place, and uranium is an essential contributor to the state economy. It is therefore essential that modern and effective legislation covers both mining and all other aspects of radiation use. The act has not undergone a substantial revision since commencement in 1982.

The new act proposed in this bill will modernise radiation protection regulations in South Australia and will implement a progressive, risk-based approach that builds on and improves the current system. Key provisions of the bill seek to implement national commitments made under the Australian Health Ministers' Conference and the Council of Australian Governments in 2004 to implement a uniform national framework for radiation protection. The main national initiatives that require implementation are the National Directory for Radiation Protection and the national Code of Practice for Security of Radioactive Sources.

South Australia is amongst the last jurisdictions to make legislative changes required to implement these initiatives. This bill seeks to reduce administrative burdens on small business through the streamlining of licensing from the existing seven separate licence categories down to two licence categories: a radiation use licence and a radiation management licence.

Radiation harm offences are included in the bill to provide a significant penalty in circumstances where an individual, a group of persons or the environment is harmed or likely to be harmed by exposure to quantities of radiation beyond those lawfully permitted by the remainder of the bill. The harm penalties will also act as a deterrent for future unlawful overexposures that can cause harm. Only South Australia and Western Australia do not currently have harm elements within their radiation protection legislation.

The act currently contains no expiable offences and has no head power to prescribe expiation fees for enforcement in the regulations. As a result, enforcement of the act and regulations cannot take place without prosecution through the courts. This is an inefficient method for less serious offences under the act, as it is time consuming and expensive. It also does not provide an effective deterrent for recalcitrant licence holders who act in the knowledge that no expiation fees can be applied to them.

Under the current provisions, such an offender must instead be notified when a breach may result in court proceedings and provide them with an opportunity to correct their behaviour. If the prosecution does not proceed to court, the offender incurs no penalty and none of the costs incurred by the Environment Protection Authority in undertaking enforcement actions are recovered. The bill includes expiations for a number of offences and also allows for further expiable offences to be established via regulation.

The bill contains various expiations to act as a deterrent to noncompliance and order-making powers to make sure that the EPA has more flexible tools for obtaining compliance. The bill also provides for order-making powers that can be utilised to obtain compliance without the need for more costly court proceedings. Court proceedings are appropriate for significant offences and for applying a punishment as a deterrent to others, but achieving compliance on minor issues is much more straightforward with the use of orders.

The review of administrative decisions in the current act is upon application to the Supreme Court. A less burdensome and much more appropriate avenue for review of administrative decisions through the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal is now in place. The bill allocates jurisdiction for administrative appeals to the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

The act currently contains a series of specific offences set largely within the licensing and registration requirements and relating to unauthorised use or handling. These offences are necessary; however, they are more administrative in nature and are not linked to the harm or risk of harm that a breach of the act might present.

Inclusion of harm in regulatory schemes where there is a risk of harm to human health or the environment is necessary to provide a suitable deterrent. The application of harm provisions to the environment is reflected in the national directory's objective for radiation protection legislation 'that legislation must include the objective of protecting the health and safety of people and the environment'.

The penalty framework proposed in the bill draws on the approach taken in the Work Health and Safety Act 2013 and the Environment Protection Act 1993. The bill provides new offences relating to causing radiation harm. These offences will provide a significant penalty in circumstances where an individual, a group of persons or the environment is harmed or likely to be harmed by exposure to quantities of radiation beyond those lawfully permitted by the remainder of the bill. These provisions do not apply to matters where the harm is considered trivial.

The maximum penalties for the radiation harm offences have been set by parliamentary counsel with consideration of the nature of the legislation, the particular offences they relate to and the precedents set by other comparable legislation. Of particular relevance, sections 8 and 9 of the Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000 have a similar maximum penalty for the offences of recklessly or intentionally causing serious radiation harm of $5 million for a body corporate for the offences of construction or operation of a nuclear waste storage facility and importation or transportation of nuclear waste for delivery to a nuclear waste storage facility where the potential consequences, in the worst case scenario, are comparable.

In addition, national commitments have been made to the Australian Health Ministers Conference and the Council of Australian Governments to implement a uniform national framework for radiation protection.

This bill is an opportunity to implement the National Directory for Radiation Protection that Australian health ministers agree to implement in 2004. The national directory aims to provide nationally agreed and uniform requirements for the protection of people and the environment that meet international best practice and ensure the safety of radiation use. These relate to radiation protection principles, management requirements for radiation sources and provisions for the future adoption of documents forming part of the national directory.

In 2006, the Council of Australia Governments also agreed to a National Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Security Strategy to provide a framework to strengthen and enhance Australia's existing arrangements. This included the establishment of a national regulatory scheme for the storage, possession, use and transport of certain radiological materials to minimise the risk of such materials being misused.

A significant component of carrying out the Council of Australian Governments' decision is implementation of the Code of Practice for the Security of Radioactive Sources. The security code, as it is known, sets out various security measures that must be undertaken to maintain the security of sealed radiation sources. These security requirements have been developed based on the likelihood of unauthorised access and the consequences of malicious use.

In summary, the government is modernising radiation protection and control. This is something that has not happened to such an significant extent as it has now for a long time. I thank the minister for all his work on this. It is a challenging issue to do with substances that can potentially be quite dangerous if not handled correctly, but that at the same time have numerous and very useful, essential applications. I commend the minister for his work on this bill and commend the bill to the house.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Picton.

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