SUBMISSION TO HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES STANDING COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY - INQUIRY INTO THE PREREQUISITES FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY IN AUSTRALIA

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important national forum. Before I address the committee’s terms of reference specifically, there is an important point here which unfortunately confounds the boundaries drawn; the boundaries are not wide enough to consider a Total Cost of (planetary) Ownership approach. To think of this in an Australian context is too narrow-minded, it should only be thought of in a global context, and it is all about ownership. As adults we are stewards of the future, but our children own the future. On this basis there is far more to consider than just the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission 2016 and the 2006 Switkowski nuclear energy review. It is not just about technology, economics, and public perception. This is one of the few cases I am aware of where the potential capital cost and operating cost come nowhere close to the social cost we anticipate, but can’t estimate. We all seem to know how important this is as humans but for all of our modernity, we can’t seem to place a compelling or rigorous enough value on this to drive unified rational action. Market forces are at a loss. Uniquely this time, however, we have a limited timeframe to demonstrate our competence in finding solutions to CO2 abatement and drawdown, with the penalty for failure likely to be the first global intergenerational environmental consequence experienced in human history. As I will argue, nuclear energy is the only credible key to unlocking peace and justice in the world as we know it. This is an amazingly complex cross-disciplinary problem but is totally solvable. Nuclear energy is not the whole answer, it is not the final answer, but it is a significant part of all potential answers.

I have placed a brief summary addressing the committee’s terms of reference at the end of this document. Prior to that is further context and data; the human story behind the summary.

Who are you and why should we be listening to you?

I am an unremarkable earthling who is concerned about the future of existence on this planet. My wife and I have a child who we love more than anything. We’ve known him and cheered on his existence since he was 4 x cells. Like many parents, our only want for him 11 years later is to be a happy and contributing human-being (whatever that may mean for him)…but for the first time in the history of human freedom, that may not be possible. The time to influence that future outcome is estimated to be roughly 10 years – no-one can say exactly, but it will not be 30 years. What that means to me is that if I don’t do something now, he will have no opportunity to change anything significantly in his future…and that has never happened before in the history of humankind. The weight of this potential crushes me. It drives me to this forum.

What’s the problem?

The thing that separates us from the cold vacuum of space, when compared to the earth’s diameter, is thinner than an apple’s skin. The significance of this skin to our survival (and happiness) is undisputed as is the fact that the chemistry of this layer is changing, and with it our living conditions. If we carry on with our current trajectory of insignificant action and short-sighted bickering, a series of self-sustaining climate/weather reactions will become irreversible and change the course of human history on a scale that the combined impact of all twentieth century wars could not match.

Regardless of how it happened, the air which we breathe is under threat. We already know that the quality of that air has deteriorated over time; millions suffer as a result, but we also know that temperatures, on average, are rising as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As the temperature increases, we are turning up the volume of existing problems - food security, forced and unplanned migration as a result of inundation of homes in low-lying areas, and ultimately violence over fossil fuels, shelter and water; violence between those that have and those that do not. But instead of making these connections our global politicians and business leaders continue to argue about what the impact could be on their country, on their economies, and why somebody else should do something, sometime. In the meantime we have changed precious little and get distracted very easily. I don’t want to argue, I just want to start doing something which we know will improve our chances of survival and quality of life – implement practical alternatives to burning fossil fuels now. It’s not the whole answer, but it is a significant part of all potential answers. The engineer in me says we need to start funding and managing some significant infrastructure projects now. This isn’t about our local economy, it’s about our only collective home.

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What’s your evidence?

After many years of arguing, the source of the cause doesn’t matter anymore but what we see today are the following indisputable trends:

• There is more CO2 now in the atmosphere than there has been in human history and we are increasing it by burning fossil fuels and eroding carbon sinks • Over geological time the earth has had more CO2 in its atmosphere and survived, but the scale of humanity and erosion of carbon sinks are two significantly different conditions which are unprecedented and therefore survival this time cannot be assured • The earth is getting warmer (even if we stopped producing greenhouse gases tomorrow) • Melting ice raises sea levels and displaces people • Rising temperatures disrupt food production and increases global hunger

Present Day

Potential 2050 with no change in what we do

What do you suggest?

Don’t be a bystander. The sooner we implement practical alternatives to burning fossil fuels, the sooner we will give the future back to our children and enable other solutions to flourish.

This leads us to three choices:

1. Do nothing, 2. Go with something we know and can make work better now…at least as an interim step, 3. Bet everything on popular but intermittent renewable energy sources and hope we can develop and integrate a collection of technologies to work on a national/global scale.

For the last 15-30 years we have seen the consequences of doing nothing but this is just an introduction to what the future may hold. Right now nuclear energy is the only practical alternative to burning fossil fuels. It is understandable that people will point to disasters like Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011) as reasons not to go down this road – the global reaction to Fukushima was fast, furious, but also irrational. These solid fuel uranium power plants are not the future we want. Broadly, SMR is just a smaller version of this technology. What we need instead is a type of nuclear reactor trialled successfully in the 1960s at Oak Ridge, California (this is one of the six reactor technologies that has been selected by the Generation IV International Forum for further research and development – Australia became its 14th member in 2016). Over a continuous 12-18 month period in 1969 an experimental thorium molten salt reactor (MSR) demonstrated multiple advantages:

• A thorium plant produces significantly less waste than a traditional uranium plant because it is significantly more efficient in “burning” its liquid/molten atomic fuel. It can be co-fuelled with historical nuclear waste because of this greater efficiency. • 85% of thorium waste is safe after 10 years, the remaining 15% after 300 years (compared to thousands of years for traditional solid fuel uranium plant waste products such as plutonium, americium, and curium) • A thorium plant can shut itself down via a simple frozen plug and gravity drainage mechanism that requires no people to operate and so the chances of a meltdown are almost zero (no-one can ever guarantee an outcome) • A thorium plant will produce far fewer by-products capable of being used in nuclear weapons manufacture • Because of its ingenious process and the inherent stability of a molten salt fuel, plant size is drastically reduced and capable of being modularised for large and small applications. An MSR working at atmospheric pressure is far less likely to fail catastrophically compared to a conventional solid fuel reactor which requires 100 x that pressure; this is what dramatised and immortalised the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactor failures

Thorium is abundant in the earth’s crust and is often a by-product of many mines in the world; ie. we are already producing it and throwing most of it away. It is estimated that 5 kt of thorium could power the energy needs of the entire world for a year. That could be found in the tailings of one mine.

Source: Nuclear Technology Abandoned Decades Ago Might Give Us Safer, Smaller Reactors By M. Mitchell Waldrop | February 26, 2019 All of this is in line with our energy history but we need to stop denying ourselves its natural progression and a better future; we need to move past the ignorance and emotion that keeps this solution from public discourse:

The technology exists now, even though we might need to relearn what has been put aside for opaque and likely political reasons, and it is the only credible technology capable of delivering most of the planet’s required emissions reduction goal in the required timeframe. We also need to think about how the world’s emerging electric vehicle fleet is going to be recharged. Even without considering population growth and developing nations’ natural desire to improve their quality of life, the planet’s need for energy is only increasing. We are solving for a planet that will be inhabited by 9.8 billion people by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100 (+/- 7% according to UN).

Source: European Environment Agency 2015, “PPP” means Purchasing Power Parity

Why not renewables? They have an irrevocable place but they are not a practical way to provide all of the world’s energy needs in the time required. Remember, we have a CO2 problem and a 10 year timeline. They’re too dilute, too intermittent/inefficient, too wasteful (a good solar panel may last 20 years, a battery only lasts so many recharge cycles, so where does that waste go?), and too expensive - ask Germany whether it likes paying twice as much for its energy compared to France who sources 75% of its energy needs from aging nuclear power plants. Ask Germany if it had its time again, would it spend the US$ 580 B it spent on renewables to achieve a fraction of its emissions reduction goal, or spend it on nuclear power so that it could now be a near zero carbon emissions economy?

It has been observed that prices come down with time so why don’t we just wait, but the difficulty now is that we have run out of time. We can produce battery minerals but haven’t built the plants capable of turning these minerals into useable battery storage, and batteries are still incapable of controlling power supply and responding to city-scale instantaneous demand over prolonged periods. To those who support hydropower, in a warming world, fresh water becomes more scarce so this form of energy storage and generation becomes even more exclusive and geopolitical. Pumping saltwater inland would create a raft of other issues, particularly in a country where salinity is already a problem.

A point made too seldom is that renewables consume large tracts of land and habitat putting further pressure on flora and fauna survival; it takes 400-450 x more land to produce the same amount of energy from solar as it does from a nuclear plant. Solar requires 13-17 x the materials an equivalent nuclear plant would require. Our biosphere is already shrinking at an unprecedented rate with consequences we can’t begin to imagine...until it’s too late. David Attenborough makes a strong case for the reality of this change.

Why now, Why me?

This year a sixteen year old girl from Sweden (Greta Thunberg) made me realise my personal tipping point. I don’t have to agree with everything she says, but she convinced me to be the adult I am supposed to be, a co-protector of my family and the planet’s legacy. There is no doubt our planet is reaching environmental/climatic tipping points – the West Antarctic glaciers are going to melt and there is nothing we can do to stop that (NASA). This will result in 10 ft of sea level rise alone. The question remains what are the next tipping points and when will they occur? What if it happens faster than we expect? No-one can answer those questions definitively, but we can do something about the primary cause - implement practical alternatives to burning fossil fuels now.

Don’t be fooled, this is not just about climate, or the environment, or the planet (humans will likely survive somehow); this is about stopping the violence yet to come between those who have and those that do not. It is about creating the conditions necessary for peace and justice. Throughout history, surviving has never been a time for these two things to co-exist.

I wish it was not the case, but there is no precedent to guide us here. In the interests of peace and justice we need to consider and act on the most practical and enabling solution of our time. These plants won’t build themselves and they won’t be built in a year. The scale of effort required is significant but it must also be apolitical – it cannot be political when we are talking about survival. We cannot be distracted. An “emergency” demands clarity. That word may annoy some people as it has been over-used, and an emergency is usually immediate. But what we are dealing with now can be likened to a slow burning bushfire inching its way towards your house - you know you have some time, but no way of putting it out. Sooner or later the house gets burnt. This assumes, of course, that you have somewhere to run. And if you think saving your house at the expense of your neighbours’ is a good idea, perhaps you may want to think a little harder about the human animal’s instinct for survival. Western democracy’s institution of property law pales into insignificance when crashed upon by desperation and need.

In a divided and often divisive world, what gives me hope is the three proactive events I am aware of in my lifetime that unilaterally drew people together on a national or global scale (rallying against terrorist acts is reactive, in my opinion, and therefore too late and short-lived):

1. In 1974 scientists published research suggesting that a collection of chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in many household products including aerosols and refrigerators, could be depleting the ozone layer in the atmosphere which could cause significant health issues and deaths. In 1985 this theory was proven and a hole was discovered in the ozone layer above Antarctica. By 1987 an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000, and by 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result. Source: https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed- a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/ 2. Y2K was an example of a tipping point that started being publicised more widely in 1995 and led to substantial global action to prevent a “computer disaster” in the year 2000 which was also projected to lead to potential social disaster…how real we will never know but very few people regretted the effort or the expense on 01/01/00. 3. The legalisation of same sex marriage in Australia (end 2017) demonstrated a tipping point reached in under two years where an historical issue went from impossible (and marginal) to inevitable (and mainstream) without stopping at probable. Whether you liked it or not, it got done and this is the level of collaboration and determination required now as we race to prevent more climate tipping points. Australian law currently prevents nuclear plants from being built on Australian soil. There is no credible reason for this. We need to repeat the journey from impossible to inevitable for the good of all Australians and citizens of the world. We need to back our ability to find solutions outside of politics and populism and get on with it. By way of comparison, in WW2 Australia made up 2% of the western allies fighting overseas – it would have been easy to say we’re too small to make a difference, but we made the sacrifice because the consequences of doing nothing were unthinkable, the thought of inaction shameful. There was no time for division and we were thinking of the future. I think we need to look up from our devices and remember where we came from and unite against a common enemy. This time the threat is on our soil, it’s on everyone’s soil, but it is totally solvable with will and determination. No bloodshed required.

What if we make the wrong call? We will have spent money, we will have exerted effort, but if you look around the world no-one has “the answer”. But there is no excuse for procrastinating; in Australia we have one of the highest GDP per capita but also one of the highest CO2 emissions per capita, and we are looking for infrastructure projects to ensure our future. Frankly, with further blackouts forecast this summer because our current energy providing resources are insufficient to ensure reliable supply, why wouldn’t you invest in this significant part of the emissions reduction answer? Why wouldn’t nuclear power generation become a national obsession? It’s not too late but it won’t be easy.

There is no excuse for not initiating an accelerated democratic process to find a way through to Australia’s emissions solution, contributing to the world solution. That doesn’t mean waiting until the next election in 2.5 years. By being silent we are approving inaction, platitudes, and the status quo which we know is going nowhere. This is about valuing peace and justice and demanding to leave a legacy of choices for advancement, as opposed to the bleakness of survival. We need to repeal an outdated law and then start building (and learning) our most ambitious infrastructure project ever; reliable, clean energy supply, starting with one MSR outside of Melbourne/Sydney. Even if you don’t agree with my proposed solution-starter, as citizens and parents, we need to gain control of the agenda to achieve zero CO2 emissions in 10 years. It is that clear. If it is not you, future generations will ask you why. What will your answer be?

SUMMARY ADDRESSING THE TERMS OF REFERENCE:

A prerequisite to any nuclear energy generation in Australia will start with bipartisan support of nuclear electricity generation in Australia. This means repealing an outdated law and repeating the journey from impossible to inevitable as demonstrated late in 2017. Knowledge and determination are key ingredients.

MSR (molten salt) reactors are more prospective than SMR (small modular, predominantly solid fuel) reactors. This view is made on the basis of:

a) Waste management, transport and storage – far less waste because more efficient process, ability to recycle historical nuclear waste, remains true to the original proposed nuclear fuel cycle, the use of thorium in a U233 breeding process leads to less waste required to be stored for hundreds of years, as opposed to plutonium/americium/curium waste required to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years. b) Health and safety – the nuclear industry is one of the safest in the world when you compare industry associated deaths. It has however been marred by 3 x notable solid fuel reactor failures which were poorly understood at the time and led to emotional and irrational policy decisions (most notable of which is Germany’s decision to shut down all of its nuclear power plants whilst maintaining its brown coal industry). An MSR working at atmospheric pressure is far less likely to fail catastrophically than a conventional solid fuel reactor which requires 100 x that pressure; this is what dramatised and immortalised the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactor failures. c) Environmental impacts – on the basis of materials consumed, materials wasted, and habitat disturbed to generate electricity, nuclear power is unequalled because of its energy density. France has demonstrated the viability of 75% nuclear and 25% gas/other power generation to support a first world economy and standard of living. This is a model worth aspiring toward and is the only model capable of allowing developing nations the ability to bring their standard of living to first world conditions without adding to the planet’s CO2 burden. This is in line with the natural evolution of energy consumption and understanding. d) Energy affordability and reliability – reliability is required first, affordability second when you have one of the highest GDP per capita in the world. As a resource of national security, reliability of power supply is no different to reliability of water supply. It cannot be an “optional extra” in a modern economy but it cannot be left to market forces either. Affordability may not be great to start with but the comparison between Germany and France demonstrates that over the long term, “old” WW2 nuclear power halves the cost of other power. Just imagine what “new” collaborative nuclear power could do. e) Economic feasibility – the potential capital cost and operating cost come nowhere close to the social cost we anticipate, but can’t estimate. We all seem to know how important this is as humans but for all of our modernity, we can’t seem to place a compelling or rigorous enough value on this to drive unified rational action. Market forces are at a loss. Uniquely this time, however, we have a limited timeframe to demonstrate our competence in finding solutions to CO2 abatement and drawdown, with the penalty for failure likely to be the first global intergenerational environmental consequence experienced in human history. It is not the first time we will have to start building something which we might not see the end of; ask any medieval architect charged with building a cathedral. Good design and foundations are where you start, the ceiling will be built by others. Compared to the Cologne cathedral that started construction in 1248 and finished in 1880, this should be easy. We need to marry cathedral thinking with economic feasibility in a compressed timeframe – we should expect to pay more than “market rates”. f) Community engagement – with information that is accurate, human, and hopeful, the community will be engaged. Climate change is a wake-up call to the deterioration of peace and justice, it is a matter of national security, economic prosperity, health, and the protection of families...many themes common with previous calls to war. Better nuclear power enables us to ward off this deterioration. No bloodshed required. We need to reimagine nuclear power in a way that appeals to the community which will mean undoing a lot of past misinformation and political convenience, but also embracing a changed modern context. This can be cheap and fast if there is a will to do it. See section “i” below. g) Workforce capability – others can comment. h) Security implications – much less of an issue with the use of a thorium MSR. Thorium is more abundant than uranium and, because of its place on the periodic table, does not lead to nearly as many plutonium by-products used in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has a far greater “burn efficiency” and the ability to recycle partially spent nuclear fuel and previous nuclear waste. i) National consensus – this will be a matter of political will just as the marriage equality bill was at the end of 2017. Driving consensus is very different to waiting or polling for consensus; one is politically risky, the other will likely never happen. One has to take a stand on political risk or planetary risk. j) Population growth – this will continue but is quite predictable. As developing countries evolve, their population growth will decline as all modernising economies have done. This is why we will be solving for a planet that will be inhabited by 9.8 billion people by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100 (+/- 7% according to UN). k) Future energy demand – we also need to think about how the world’s emerging electric vehicle fleet is going to be recharged. With a wholly imported transport industry, it is less likely Australia will make its own transport decisions; the world’s manufacturers and marketers are making the decision for us. It is not a question of if, but when. When and how will Australian energy supply be able to cope with this increased demand?