 I rise to make some brief remarks tonight and I'll commence with the news which is on the wires this afternoon that BHP Billiton has shelved its proposed expansion of what would have been the world's largest uranium mine and the largest excavation on the surface of the earth and obviously there's a lot of chatter and analysis around at the moment about why they have done that. It seems to relate mostly to falling commodity prices and the fact that this gargantuan project was always going to be very difficult for the company to get across the line. One of the aspects of it of course though that I think perhaps has escaped analysis thus far is the collapse of the world uranium price since the disaster on the 11th of March in Japan last year at the Fukushima Daiichi plant along Japan specific coast and I can't help but imagine that that must have played some part in the decision by BHP to shelve this project. But I've wanted to know for a very long period of time whether it's the Roxby expansion or the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory what happens to our uranium when it leaves. Where does it go? It's a question that I wish more Australians would ask. It's a question that I wish more politicians would ask because of course what we see are the dollar signs and we very rarely take heed of the danger signs. In the interest of finding out where our uranium ends up I travelled during the winter break and spent a few days in Tokyo and three days in Fukushima Prefecture between Fukushima City which lies about 60 kilometres from the reactor complex and coastal towns to the north of the plant and I found where our uranium goes. Some of it in the form of cesium which is a fission product so it's effectively a broken uranium atom. It's an atom that has been cracked into an uneven and radioactive fragment by neutron bombardment inside a nuclear power plant. Quite a lot of the uranium from Australia appeared to be in the soil in a field that I visited on the edge of a dead village formally known as Itate and when I was there the work crews of a couple of dozen or so in plastic masks and clean suits were working earth moving equipment slowly through this field stripping the top 50 centimetres of soil bagging it in black plastic and then containing it under blue tarpaulins. I have no idea where that material is headed for or even why they were doing it. Some of the uranium from Australia we found even in the form of cesium in Sasaki Kerkos lounge room in Fukushima City where the ambient radiation levels are two or three times what they would be in this chamber or in an ordinary environment anywhere in Australia and this cesium is now part of the subliminal background radiation which these people who were not evacuated will have to live with for as long as they stay in their homes. Some of that uranium from Australia is now buried under a small hill in a park in Minami Soma where I had the good fortune this is a city on the coast that wasn't as badly hit by the fallout from the Fukushima plant as some places that were evacuated. It was terribly damaged by the tsunami that washed through on the 11th of March instantly killing 19,000 people. That uranium now in the form of cesium and other fission products buried under the hill is the result of 16 or 17 months of work in which the city authorities and the local people conducting their own radiation monitoring have stripped the top soil from that park. They've sandblasted the bark from the trees and they've buried the contaminated waste under a small hill in their park because they were worried that their kids had now had 16 months without being able to play outside. They're balancing the risks of long-term chronic radiation exposure with the risks of vitamin D deficiency, depression and the lack of outdoor exercise. Some of that uranium from Australia is in the fish. Some of it is in the food and fresh produce which can now no longer be put onto the market. Some of it is in the horticultural produce. These industries have been destroyed right across the prefecture and what is what has done that I discovered after a lot of time spent with the local people obviously is the result of the disaster that overtook Tohoku on the 11th of March. The wave height at the point where it crossed the coast at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was 14 meters more than twice the size of the seawall that the Japanese utility TEPCO had built to protect the plant and although two of the operators were killed instantly in the impact the rest of them then had to contend with a plant that had had all its power knocked out so although the reactors had closed down as designed an hour before the disaster the the remaining residual decay heat even of the closed down reactors was enough to melt the fuel and set off hydrogen explosions in all four plants that then blew the containment buildings apart and left those crews contending with quite literally a worst case scenario in which they would have had to have pulled back and let the disaster run its course had they done that the Prime Minister now to Khan revealed some months later the Japanese would have had to evacuate the northern half of Honshu Island including Greater Tokyo population of around 30 million people that's how close they came the Prime Minister stormed into TEPCO headquarters on the 15th of March just four days after the disaster with three of the plants in full meltdown and demanded that TEPCO keep their staff on site and do everything that they could to keep through the melted reactor piles covered in seawater less that worst case scenario take place so millions of Japanese not just those in the impact area but right across the country and now aware that but for a different fall of the dice they would have lost their country the Prime Minister that last September told journalists it was a crucial moment when I wasn't sure whether Japan could continue to function as a state that stuff came from here it came from Australia I won't be shedding any tears tonight about BHP's dilemma in terms of their proposed expansion for the world's largest uranium mine I was also very fortunate to attend the launch of the Japanese greens and that is something that I think quite closely mirrors the history of the party here in Australia we are a global party we have members in regional national assemblies around the world and our footprint in South and East Asia is growing all the time and in Japan we're being seen as the answer to a political system that is simply paralyzed the nuclear industry is now openly referred to as the nuclear mafia it's being treated as a self-interested and extremely dangerous organized crime syndicate with very deep roots right to the face of Japanese society I attended the largest demonstration of my entire life on the streets of Tokyo in which the people effectively took back the street and are hoping to take back their country the Japanese are a patient people and the patients has run out things have changed I was really proud to be a part of that launch of the Japanese greens it will cost them something in the order of 60,000 Australian 60 or 70,000 Australian dollars simply to lodge the nomination forms to take part in national elections for every single candidate that they put in the field but I believe they can do it and they know what's at stake and how difficult it's going to be to break into the entrenched power structures that have prevailed in Japan in the post-war era and now brought their country to the brink of ruin but for another tectonic act of random and cruel misfortune they still could lose their country because of course in unit four which was the plant that wasn't operating at the time of the tsunami impact more than 1500 spent fuel rods are still perched quite precariously in a building that has been severely compromised so I hope that the Roxby uranium expansion joins Jabaluka, Akerula, Kungara, Angela Pamela and Toro's doomed Waluuna project as one of the Iranian minds that never was and must never be I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the people who showed me around who took me through the contaminated zones down to the coast and those of the Japanese grains who now have such a task ahead of them but nonetheless I know that they're up to it my deep thanks from from here to you in Japan to Koryama Messiah to Akira Kawasaki to Mary Joyce one of our own from Melbourne to Sasaki Keiko in whose lounge room I learned firsthand exactly what it means to live in an area that wasn't subject to evacuation to Matumoto Namiho to Rikia Adachi and to Mr and Mrs Murakami who told us what it was like on the morning of the or on the afternoon of the tsunami that flattened their entire neighborhood killed everyone in the district completely out of the blue and they told us their story of what it's like to live in a temporary accommodation center not too far from Minami Soma where they have effectively built a traditional Japanese village rebuilt a community of reciprocity and care while they wait for their resettlement I wish BHP well and what I wish the BHP would do is take a look at the writing on the wall and tune its investments more towards the gigantic abundance of free energy that is falling from the sky every single day colleagues there are better ways of shunting electrons down wires than nuclear fission reactors I thank the Chamber