Japanese cruiser Iwate

Transcription

I want to talk to you tonight about Fukushima, what happened there. There's been so much distortion and disinformation that I'd like to set the record straight and I want to begin by talking about the Fukushima Daiichi reactor. Daiichi means "number one". It's a complex, it's not a reactor itself. In Fukushima Daiichi, which is on the eastern coast of Tohoku in the prefecture of Fukushima, there are 6 reactors all lined up in a line, we can see the square buildings there. Now that's only one of the assets of the Tokyo Electric Power Company which is the largest public company in Japan, and ladies and gentlemen, it's the largest electricity utility in the world. Not only do they have those six reactors, they have another, Fukushima Daini, which is number two Fukushima, which is further north from there and they have four reactors there and then over on the Japan Sea coast they have Kashiwasaki Kariwa, another 7 reactors there. So that's a total of seventeen reactors, seventeen out of the fleet of fifty-four reactors in Japan. One has to wonder why the Japanese are so enthusiastic about nuclear power, after all, they got atom-bombed twice. Well, I won't go into that much, except to say that President Dwight Eisenhower began a program after developing nuclear weapons in America to turn around and try and find some useful use for nuclear energy, this terribly, awesomely destructive force. And he began a thing called "Atoms for Peace" in the early 1950's. And through a tremendously powerful and persuasive public relations exercise, managed to persuade the Japanese that "you really need nuclear power" and he used quite a lot of characters there. Nakasone was a former prime minister. Nakasone when he was a young man was the principal proponent of nuclear power in Japan in the early 'fifties. The reason for it was that Japan has always felt that they lacked self-sufficiency in energy, and they wanted to get self-sufficiency. The way the so-called Nuclear Village in Japan persuaded the people that nuclear energy was the way to go was that "we don't have to import coal or gas or other energy sources, we can simply make nuclear energy with reactors and close the fuel cycle by developing fast breeder reactors and re-processing, and we don't have to bring in any more uranium". This hasn't worked, and in my own opinion it won't work. It hasn't worked in other countries, and it won't work in Japan. Indeed, there isn't one functioning fast-breeder reactor in the world today. There are a couple of prototype ones, there's one in India, there's one in Russia, France had two, Phenix and Superphenix, Japan had Monju and Joyo. Monju is a fast-breeder reactor in which, unfortunately, they've had a series of accidents, and the last one was where a gantry, about to put newly enriched uranium fuel, plutonium mixed oxide fuel into the reactor, fell into the reactor, weighing tonnes, they couldn't get it out, the thing was closed down and the man in charge of the reactor committed suicide. So that's kind of the end of that story. What happened at Fukushima Daiichi is that ... we all know about the 11th of March last year. It was a cold, grey overcast day in Japan, quite calm, but during the morning, that day, there were repeated earthquakes in Northern Honshu. They were being felt in Tokyo too, as far as Osaka and Kobe and Yokohama as well, but the main ones were occurring off the coast, the eastern coast of Fukushima. They built up in force, until around 2:30, one of the mothers of all earthquakes, force 9 on the Richter scale, exploded in the subterranean plates, about 300 kilometres off Fukushima, to an extent that a seismic atmospheric monitoring station in Taiwan picked it up as a vibration in the ionosphere, it was so intense. The reactors seemed to withstand that series of earthquakes. They were jolted, shaken, but they seemed to be alright. Until the tsunami, the tidal wave, at around 2:40-2:45. At this time, kids were coming out of their classrooms, little Japanese children at primary school, wearing their neat uniforms with their mushroom hats, all lining up in lines to get into buses or to get picked up by their parents to go home, right across the prefecture. Wives and mothers were coming home with their shopping, other people were beginning to round up their shifts at the manufacturing plants. Farmers were beginning to put their stock in the sheds, as it was still very cold as I said. And suddenly this enormous tidal wave, in fact it was two tidal waves in conjunction, travelling at the speed of a jet aircraft, about 500 kilometres an hour, 600 kilometres an hour, came in, and as it came towards the shore, it's a very steep coast there it goes down thousands of feet, into what is called the Oyashio current, which comes from Hokkaido, very cold, full of fish, but a huge current, and this, as it came towards the shore built up energy. I swim at Bondi every morning, and you can see the waves there, you can tell when they're dumpers, when they're really coming in and they're going to damage you and chuck you on the beach. And it came in and inundated the whole of the Sanriku coast, which is Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, right up the coast of northern Honshu, and as you know devastated enormous amounts of buildings, it killed 20,000 people trying to flee. They had some warning, but not enough. Some of the kids had already been picked up from school and were taken inland. There were some warnings, by public telephone, and the Japanese have a very sophisticated mobile telephone system, and that was being used. So some escaped, but many, many, many did not. The ones who weren't smashed up against buildings were carried inland, and then many of them washed out to sea. There's a piece of footage I've seen which hasn't appeared on the repeated series of television you've seen in Australia, of the wave coming in, inundating all those plastic hothouses, and sweeping fishing boats under bridges and smashing them up, all that stuff. But this is a very poignant shot of, long distance shot of people labouring up the hill towards the camera and there's a bloke in a wheelchair who's struggling, and little kids, and they're all just washed away. Taken away in the reflux of the water going out to sea. Shortly after all this, and you know the events, the sequence of events, the generators that had the emergency power were inundated with water, and just before that happened, the whole of the grid, the power grid in the Tohoku region, the grid went out. So suddenly, they had no electricity to drive the pumps to keep the reactors cool, and the water inundated the emergency generators so they couldn't kick in. This is what the reactor looks like. It's been said, not very truthfully, by the nuclear industry that "this is a very old reactor. We don't build them like this anymore". Ladies and gentlemen, that's nonsense. A third of the American fleet of 104 reactors are this design, from General Electric. They're called boiling water reactors. They have one circuit of water that goes in through the reactor, out, flashes into steam through the steam generator, drives turbines, drives generators, develops electricity. This one, there are six of them at Fukushima Daiichi, number one was built in 1970 by General Electric. Two, three, four were built later on in the 'seventies by General Electric, Hitachi, Toshiba. Hitachi and Toshiba are two enormously powerful companies in Japan, and General Electric helped with that, so did French company Areva, they were involved with this too ... and five and six are the same thing. Now another myth is that "there isn't much radiation coming out of these reactors, and anyway, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two bombs dropped, and the radiation dispersed". Well, it did disperse much more quickly there, because in Little Boy and Fat Man, the two uranium, enriched uranium and plutonium bombs dropped on those two cities, there were only about 15-20 kilograms of enriched uranium, nuclear material in those bombs. Now when they went off, that fissioned and most people were killed by kinetic force and by heat. And not for some time did the Americans admit that there was also a thing called "radiation sickness" that was happening there too. People, well after the blast, who didn't have marks on them, were getting sick and dying from losing their hair, the red platelets in their blood coagulating, diminishing, getting sick in the stomach, having all sorts of illnesses. Some survived, many did not. They died. Not for some time did the authorities admit that there was such a thing. It was Wilfred Bertrand, an Australian journalist who's been much maligned in my view by Bob Menzies as a Communist and a supporter of Stalin. He was none of those things. He was the first journalist to go to Hiroshima. He went in there against the orders of General MacArthur, because all the journo's had to go on Battleship Missouri to witness the surrender by the Japanese to the American forces, but instead he jumped on a train and made his way to Hiroshima, and recorded what was going on. The complete devastation from this atom bomb, and the way the people were, those who were still alive, were dying. The trouble is, to make the comparison though, Fukushima has in one reactor, I'll move on to the next slide. In one reactor, it's like a pear shape. This is the containment here, the reactor core which contains about 70 tonnes of enriched uranium. Enriched in the isotope 235, to 3%. And it's surrounded by the containment vessel which is made of steel, and underneath you've got the Wet Well, a condensation chamber, where the water, after going through the reactor, is taken down to that condensation chamber, which is a great big donut around the whole building. It turns back into water, and then is resurrected and brought back into the cycle again. Flashes into steam and keeps the generators turning. That is still basically what reactors are. The other kind of reactor is a pressurised water reactor which actually has two circuits, one circuit goes through the reactor core, and gets radioactive. The other one goes through a heat exchanger and takes the steam into turbines and generators, but it is not radioactive, so you can work on all that back end of the reactor without getting irradiated. You often see great cooling towers, usually an iconic view of nuclear power, said with some sonorous over-voice from the announcer, with great big cooling towers with steam coming off the tops. Well, all that is is the condensation chamber. It's got nothing to do with the reactor itself. In fact at Morwell in Victoria, the brown coal fields, you see those things all over the place. But that's what it looks like. Oh, I'll come to that later. So the reactors, what happened inside three of them, three out of six of them.. two of them were closed dowm, they were in cold shutdown, numbers five and six. Number four was offline because it was just having a whole lot of irradiated fuel, spent fuel, put back into its cooling pond, which is this thing up here. An extraordinarily vulnerable position. Why put a cooling pond which has so much irradiated fuel in it, right up above the reactor? It seems very close. Well the reason is because it's easy to use a gantry to take out the spent fuel rods from the outside of the core, take them up, across and put them in the pool. It's a matter of utility. The trouble is, it's very exposed. In reactor number four, it was full of spent fuel, only just been put there, and it shook and shook and actually created cracks in the vessel which are still being assessed today and it's very dangerous. Then in one, two and three, the water fell, turned into steam and the enormous heat at 1200 degrees centigrade, rising up to 2000 degrees centigrade, was reacting with the zirconium in the cladding in the rods, forming hydrogen and zirconium oxide. Now hydrogen as you know is a very flammable gas, and in three of the reactors, one, two and three, it exploded, and blew the tops off the reactors. It was pandemonium then at the reactors because TEPCO has a "safety culture", propaganda if you like, to suggest that these reactors were safe. To such an extent that they never talked about radiation to the Japanese people. They provided as did all the other nine utility companies in Japan with reactors, they provided money for jobs, tax relief, kindergartens, schools, roads, hospitals. It was a form of institutionalised bribery to get the people in the regions where reactors were going to be built used to having reactors "and they're safe". You know the Japanese love comic strips and comic books. Manga. There was a very tragic Manga that was created, it was drawn after the Fukushima explosions, for little kids of between two and about six (years). And it showed "Mr Reactor". He had a bad tummy ache, and that was alright, provided he only farted. That's put in basic language. But if he did a poo, then you were in trouble and you had to get under your desk. It's that kind of propaganda that the Japanese were using to try and convince kids that it was alright. Reactors blew, huge clouds of radiation. The first, fortunately, went out to sea. But when the wind swung around, the 12th, 13th of March, they came back to the north-west, and a huge cloud of radiation containing Iodine 131, Cesium 137, Strontium 90, Plutonium 239, and many other actinides, and radioactive toxins were blowing across north-eastern Honshu. There was a huge storm, a rain storm, around the 14th or 15th of March which pushed all that radiation down onto the tops of the mountains, and when my wife and I went there in October, to go up to the region, we were warned not now, not ever could you go bushwalking in those lovely mountains in Fukushima, because they were radioactive. But they were not the only things that were radioactive. Rice fields were just about to, let's see we're coming into Summer so the Spring plantings had been planted. Rice was there. A lot of livestock in the region too, in Fukushima and Iwate and Miyagi. One of the tragedies of what happened was that this was one of the richest agricultural areas of Japan. We talk about Kobe beef and how beautiful that is. It comes from Kobe in the south-west of Honshu, but the beef from Fukushima is much better. So the locals claim. It's beautifully bred, every beef cow has a certificate of authenticity. There are goats, there are sheep. There's a lot of cats and dogs of course, they're mostly pets. These all had to be left behind when the government reluctantly decided against the advice of TEPCO which was obfuscating the whole issue, that people within a 10 kilometre radius had to leave. Then they upped that to a 20 kilometre radius. Every day appeared in the daily press in Tokyo, this map, showing the concentric circles where the reactors are and what the so-called radiation levels are in these regions. You'll notice it goes down to Tokyo. Tokyo there. They're talking about milliSieverts. A milliSievert is a measurement of radiation, of what is permitted in the human body, according to the authorities. It's measured in terms of a standard man, of about 70 kilograms and about 5 feet 8 or nine inches tall. In Australia I think they'd be a bit bigger than that. But that is supposed to be, and 20 milliSieverts a year is the maximum dosage that man can have and not get some kind of radiation cancer. The trouble is, kids of 3-5 kilograms are having the same criteria applied to them. Now what the Dickens is this all about? Not only that, but the Japanese government was now in panic mode, and it was upping the level. These maps which appeared every day, they always had a footnote saying "this is well below the radiation level you need to worry about", ignoring what is now, I think, an established fact in radiation science that there is "no minimum dose of radiation". It's a bit like smoking. Some smokers never get lung cancer. Other smokers do, and some people who never smoked get lung cancer. Radiation. You might be hit by Cesium 137 and Iodine whatever. You might never get sick from cancer from that radiation, but the chances that you will, increase. It depends on your psychology. It depends on your genetic structure. It depends on your physical health, and your susceptibility to cancer. What we suspect, in the nuclear-skeptical industry as I'm a part of, what we suspect is that the nuclear industry has been able to disingenuously say that "there have been no fatalities from radiation at Fukushima, therefore, it's safe". Just as there were no fatalities at Three Mile Island in 1979. There were no fatalities at Calder Hall in Britain in 1956. They tend to avoid Kyshtym which is near Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union probably the worst nuclear accident. Worse than Chernobyl, worse than Fukushima where the Russians, the Soviet union had a bomb factory, and were producing weapons from Plutonium 239, and they had the Plutonium in trenches, in this, it's really a slave labour town. All these indentured people brought in by Stalin to make nuclear weapons. It was the height of the Cold War, late in the 'fifties. And there was an explosion. Not a nuclear explosion, but a lot of the plutonium blew up and many, many, many thousands of people died. It didn't come out immediately because of the Soviet Union putting a clamp on the whole thing, but in fact it happened, only later that people realised what an enormous catastrophe that was. Not just in the number of people who had died, but in the long-term genetic effects of that as well. With Chernobyl there is still an enormous amount of controversy about how many people died. The estimates go from one optimistic figure of about 8,000 deaths, I think that was put together by the World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Energy Agency, up to a million. That was put together by Russian scientists, and it only came out about two years ago. But meanwhile we continue to have this argument about radiation and we have heterodox views. A colleague of mine at the Australian National University, a professor of nuclear physics, Aden Bern, a very polite New Zealander, knows a lot about nuclear physics, but is not a physician, but he claims that "radiation really doesn't do you much damage at all". I must quote, I don't know if he's in the audience, but Professor Barry Brook? No answer? Okay, not here. But what he said after the Fukushima accident was "the risk of meltdown is extremely small. The death toll from any such accident, even if it occurred will be zero. There will be no breach of containment, and no release of radioactivity, beyond at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure. Those spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces. I'm happy to be quoted forever on the above if I am wrong, but I won't be. The only reactor that has a small probability of being finished is unit number one, and I doubt that, but it may be offline for a year or two." Not only did he say this straight after, but he repeated the same kind of message for some time afterwards. I'll come back to the Australian attitude, because it's very interesting. You people in South Australia, you've got Honeymoon and Olympic Dam and Beverley. Three mines and the word there's that South Australia has the biggest and richest uranium deposits in the world. It think that's a bit of a stretch, but never mind. But a lot of miners were very angry, very angry indeed when Fukushima occurred and I've been to a number of seminars at the Lowy Institute in Sydney which is very pro-nuclear, that were fulminating about the myths that were created about nuclear power and how bad it is. And you know, you have to think well, what is this all about? Well it's about money. It's about shares. It's about power. And if you continue until, and I think it's happening in Japan, people realise that this is one hell of a way to boil water, and it's very dangerous, and there are much better ways for generating electricity. Let me just continue to say that, and I'll not take too much longer, but why do I think things are changing in Japan? Well the Japanese, they're very good at bearing misfortune. They're very stoic people. They're very disciplined people. Now I generalise of course, but of course if you can generalise about anyone, you can generalise about the Japanese. I've got many friends there. I speak the language, I lived there, my wife speaks much better than I do, mine's very stilted Japanese but nevertheless. It's a wonderful country and they're wonderful people. Very inventive. But there's a Nuclear Village and the Nuclear Village consists of bureaucrats in government, nuclear bureaucrats in the ministry of economy, trade and industry, they're very pro-nuclear. The big companies like Toshiba and Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Ishikawajima-Harima, and other who make the things, they make the containment vessels, they make the nuclear rods, they process things, they enrich things, they do the whole process. It's a huge industry. A multi-billion dollar industry, and a lot of government officials who think that this is the way to self reliance. "Japan is going to be great again". The analogy is with the second World War. The Kwantung Army decided in the thirties that they had to go south, invade China and invade South-east Asia and take all the rubber plantations from those wicked white colonialists, and the oil and the food products and the palm oil and everything so that "we will become a self-sustaining empire" the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. And then the only thing that stopped them in fact was when the Emperor said in a massive understatement the the war was "not necessarily going to our advantage" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed, so they changed course. And then they changed course radically to a policy of economic expansion and growth, as you know. They became very successful in the 'fifties and the 'sixties and the nuclear industry was part of that. The vision developed in the minds of the Nuclear Village "we can develop this power and it will sustain us, and we will be world leaders". And there are 54 reactors in Japan to prove that case. They've had a few accidents in the past, but nothing compared with Fukushima. And now this has occurred, there are people who are beginning to say "it's not on". There are Nobel prize laureates like Kenzaburo Oe, and other writers, philosophers, creative people, and politicians who are saying "we don't want nuclear power anymore". You know that in 2009 the Democratic Party of Japan, the first time since the end of the war, apart from a very brief period, became the first liberal with a small 'l', semi-socialist government in Japan. They took over from the conservative liberal democratic party, the Jimento and they said Hatoyama, the first Prime minister under the new regime said "we're gonna stop the power of the bureaucrats, we're gonna take over, we the elected people are going to run this country and we're not going to let the conservatives run things" but then he fell on his sword and Naoto Kan took over. Kan was the Prime Minister when Fukushima blew, and he was not all that experienced. He was a bright man, but he was anti-nuclear. He was particularly panicked by a report that he got from his Prime Ministerial office technicians, who said "look, if this cooling pond in reactor number four actually falls over, or if the reactor vessels themselves breach, you're gonna have to evacuate Tokyo" 250 kilometres to the south. He knew he couldn't do that. You can't evacuate 15-20 million people from a city like that, couldn't be done. I think probably wisely in retrospect he held that to himself, he didn't let that out, but it deeply worried him. If he'd let it out, it would have panicked everyone. Didn't happen, and you know, proved to be not the case. Tokyo is still surviving, and it's okay so far. What he did do though was close the Hamaoka plant which is south-west of Tokyo, which is much closer to Tokyo and just as susceptible to earthquakes and tsunamis as Fukushima. He also insisted on taking away the nuclear regulatory body from METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. There's a system in Japan called "amakudari" which means descent from heaven, or descent from the Gods. The Gods are the bureaucrats, and they had a cosy arrangement with the private companies, Mitsubishi et al, that once they retired they would take over senior positions in these companies, you see. So that each was scratching the other's back. They weren't regulating at all independently. They were part of the industry. So what Naoto Kan did was say "I'm not going to have this anymore". He also started a push for renewables, but the pressure became too great and he also fell on his sword, only about 6 months ago, and passed over the command to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. Now Noda is a different kettle of fish, he's the present Prime Minister. He's fairly quiet, he doesn't say much. He's an economist. Naoto Kan was an engineer. And Noda doesn't have the same fire in his belly about changing the political situation in Japan to get rid of nuclear power. Meanwhile the Nuclear Village is regathering their forces, they've got big, powerful men in METI who are now pushing nuclear power again, saying "you don't have to worry about this, that was an aberration, it won't happen again" but you've got a whole lot of local governments, provincial governments, the government of Fukushima was the first one to do it, to say "hey, we don't want reactors any more" and the law in Japan says that you must have local government approval before you can restart any of those reactors, and right now, only three out of 54 reactors in Japan are operating. Last summer, eleven were. The Japanese got through that hot summer without blackouts and without having to cut off their air-conditioners except for sometimes. By remarkable self-discipline among the people who were only too prepared to accommodate the Government's wish to conserve power, and they did lots of things to do that, so you're building up a head of steam here, and I say in my book if any of you care to read it when it comes out, and yes, I would like you to give me some suggestions on a title for it, I'm saying in that that the Japanese have turned a corner, and I think that there's going to be a change. Now, Alison and I went up to the region, we took the shinkansen fast train to Fukushima and we saw and we talked to farmers and we talked to local officials and many of them were very frank with us. And we also went to a hospital, a medical hospital, the Fukushima medical centre and met a very charming, young professor of radiation medicine in his clinic. His clinic was very modern and it had every bit of equipment. It had a stainless steel bath to wash radiation off victims. It had a gurney at the front with a dummy on it, showing you how you'd bandage it up so it'd be alright. You had charts on the wall, but what struck a note in me was the charts were all about 'naturally occurring radiation'. That is, radiation you get from the ground or from the sun. He said at the end, I said 'look you don't seem to be worried, you're staying here with your young children.' He said 'Yes, I'm here to disprove the lie, I'm here to say that radiation is alright, and is going to be okay. As my wife and I left, we thought 'I wonder if TEPCO financed this clinic? I wonder if they pay this man's salary? I wonder if they financed the whole hospital?' I'll be careful in my book not to make that assumption, the fact is I don't know. But I suspect that's the case. There are some captains of industry coming on board about this new thing of renewables. They haven't done much yet, and some conservatives we talked to in Tokyo said 'we can't do it, we don't have enough wind, we don't have enough solar, we don't have enough geothermal. But they do. There's a tremendous amount of geothermal in Japan. It's the worst possible archipelago on which to build nuclear reactors because it's so prone to earthquakes, but also they've got an enormous geothermal capacity. Masayoshi Son is the Chief Executive Officer and chairman of the Japanese computer giant Softbank. He's one of the richest men in Japan. He said 'for us to head towards a clean and more inexpensive option over the long term, all the Government needs to do is to take solar power purchasing policy it is already discussing one step further, and simply add the resolution to purchase all power at 40 yen for the next 20 years. It is sheer nonsense to cling to nuclear power, when it will recede in the future, instead of taking the path that will definitely lead to cost reduction. Solar, solar-thermal, wind, geothermal, biomass, oceanic energy and other blessings of nature can be used for thousands of years without contaminating the earth. These are forms of energy that co-exist with nature without destroying it. Ports of the past can gain new life as ports of solar and wind energy. Such recovery projects would create huge job opportunities for the regions' people, and Japanese manufacturers already have the number one solar technology in the world. Instead of exporting it, we should use it domestically to create the world's largest solar belt. There are a lot of other visionaries who are saying let's build photo-voltaics and other kinds of renewable energy along the Tohoku coast, and my bet, ladies and gentlemen, and I say this in my book, sticking my neck out, of course, is that the nuclear industry in Japan has a short life from now. I give it ten years before there's a diminution. A lot of reactors are not going to go back online, none are going to be built, no new ones are going to be built. The ones that will be allowed to come back online will be begrudgingly and simply as part of a mix in the interim as they go to renewables. Let me finish by saying what impression I think this will have on the rest of the world. Japan as you know is a world leader in all sorts of technologies. The Koreans are catching up fast. Korea is very gung-ho about nuclear and will continue. They're having a nuclear safety conference in March, in Seoul this year. The whole task is to prove that nuclear is safe. No-one 's going to ask the question 'should we have it at all,' but they're going to reinforce the message that it is safe, and they've got lots and lots of people there. It follows on from the Obama conference of 2009 in Washington where they were talking about nuclear safety. The emphasis there was on terrorism, this is on safety. Russia will continue to develop RosAtom and its nuclear external capacities. The British, they're still pro-nuclear and I always worry because their technology is not very good. The Americans are equivocal. You'll notice that Obama has just signed off on two new reactors being built somewhere in the United States, but there are 104 in their fleet and many of them are aging and will have to close down. They still, and this is one of the biggest problems with nuclear, no-one has yet developed a spent fuel repository that can take that stuff and isolate it from the biosphere for the required geological time. Yaku Mountain is a joke, it's a political football. It's not working. The Swedish have tried. The French think they've got somewhere. And the French too, the French as you know are very positive, the second or third biggest nuclear power. 58 reactors. Sarcozy is in favour of nuclear the but Ségolène Royal and the Socialist party that's standing for the next presidential election is against nuclear power. It will be very interesting to see what happens there. The Germans have stopped! Now two countries, Germany with its powerful economy and Japan with its powerful economy, if they can prove anything at all it will be that we can do without nuclear. So it doesn't leave the miners, BHP Billiton, the American owners of Beverley and the people who own honeymoon very far to go. And it'm very sorry for South Australia. You've got a premier who wants this and sees dollar signs flashing in his eyes, but the fact is that uranium exports from Australia are just under one billion dollars a year. Queensland alone export 400 billion dollars of coal a year. It's a drop in a bucket. I think it's less than the value of industrial salt that we export from this country, and yet we blow it up into a big thing. Final point to make is, if I can end on this note. Julie Bishop was fond of saying when she was shadow minister for the environment that 'we need nuclear because it's going to save us from global warming. Here's the fact. Electricity generation around the world counts for 18 percent of carbon emissions. 18 percent. So even if tomorrow through some miracle you could change all the coal and oil and gas generators into nuclear, you're still not making much of a dent on the other two major villains which are transport hydrocarbons and deforestation. They're the things that are doing the damage, not nuclear. So thank you very much for your indulgence, and I'd like to answer questions and have a discussion if you'd like. [applause]