Revised Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation, volumes I and II (EN-6)

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to take part in this debate and I congratulate the Minister on bringing forward these documents and those that we discussed on Tuesday. We debated this whole process long and hard when the legislation was going through. It is good that we are able to scrutinise and consider these documents without the possibility of amending them at this stage. I declare an interest as being chairman of the Rail Freight Group and a harbour commissioner in the port of Fowey in Cornwall.

The proposed nuclear power stations will probably be absolutely necessary to achieve the Government’s carbon reduction commitments. I hope that Ministers, having decided to go nuclear, will be able to look at the carbon footprint of the construction and manufacture of nuclear power stations to make sure they play their part in contributing to carbon reduction. Whether one starts with uranium mining, I am not sure, but they should certainly look at construction and materials. A lot of people do not realise that in producing a tonne of cement, you produce a tonne of carbon. That is an easy calculation to remember, but it is still an awful lot of carbon. Steel probably takes even more. Then there is the question of deliveries to site; I shall come on to that. I have not seen anything in the documents that covers that, so I want to talk about it briefly this afternoon.

Before I get on to that, there are a couple of things, starting in paragraph 2.10, to do with flood risks and droughts. I have been talking to people in Oldbury and Hinkley Point about whether it would be useful to bring things in by sea. I am conscious that, certainly at the Oldbury site, people are extremely concerned about the level of the tide that will be coming up the River Severn in the future and about how high they have to build. The document is silent on the design time for which they should calculate the level above the flood. It says that the design should be for the life of the power station, but it is possible to give these things extra life by upgrading them in 30 years’ time or so. Even if they are decommissioned, there is a question of whether it will matter if they flood. I do not know, but I do not see the timescale for which flood risk is calculated addressed here. Do you work to a 100-year flood or a 200-year flood? In the past few weeks, we have seen some pretty frightening floods in Brazil, and in Australia following 10 years’ drought, and the calculation will be different. I would feel more comfortable if something in the document was a bit more specific as to how the bidders should approach the matter and how they will be judged.

Conversely, paragraph 2.10.2 talks about the risk of drought. The Minister mentioned the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Cope, about Oldbury and the high cooling towers; he has certainly talked to me about that too. It is pretty extraordinary that you need cooling towers when you are next to the sea, because the sea is not a bad source of cooling. I am told that it is because when the Severn goes out and there is no water in it at low tide, there might be a problem, but I should have thought that it would have been possible to build a tidal lake to fill up at every high tide, and to make sure that there was enough volume to provide the cooling needed until the next high tide. High tides are pretty predictable; they do not not come. They have slightly different levels sometimes, but they usually come. I hope that that will be looked at as an alternative to having any of these cooling towers at all at Oldbury, frankly.

Paragraph 3.13.3 is welcome. It talks quite a lot about the impact of the construction, but construction is not seen as particularly important. The paragraph talks about the long term; the rest of it says, “There will be a few problems during construction”. I have worked on a few big projects in my time. Transport Ministers are trying to persuade people in the Chilterns that a high-speed line is a good idea, but people get upset when new things are built near them. It would be useful to have in the document—I am not sure where—some reference to the importance of mitigating the effects of construction in terms of transport noise and everything else. From the point of view of carbon reduction, I would certainly like some reference to environmentally friendly transport such as sea or rail. You cannot use rail everywhere, but you probably can use sea in most places because these things are built by the sea.

I have been doing quite a lot of work with regard to the Olympics, trying to make the construction more environmentally friendly. We have had some success in getting materials brought in by rail and river, but the process of procurement was not designed or managed nearly as well as Heathrow Airport’s terminal 5. At one stage, I calculated that if the procurement and logistics had been organised, about 800,000 lorry movements into Stratford, east London, could have been saved. The same examples would apply to any major project anywhere, such as a nuclear power station. In a document such as this, some reference to minimising the carbon footprint, together with all the other mitigating effects, would be very useful. Certainly you can build quays at Oldbury and Hinkley Point to bring in materials, as we have been discussing. You could extend railway lines to those sites or you could have short railway lines, but I think that a bit more work could be done to mitigate the effects. Finally, if a railway line is to be built, it could be used to get the nuclear waste out, as such waste does not often go by road for very long distances.

In conclusion, I think that this is a good document. It says all the right things, although it just needs to say a little more. However, it is an improvement on the previous document and I commend it.

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[Lord Marland]

There are two erroneous statements there, if I may say so. First, we are not predicting that the demand for electricity will be as the right reverend Prelate is suggesting; we are predicting that it will be between two and three times what it is now in 2050. So we know the task ahead. We are also not sitting here and saying that there are eight sites and that is all there are going to be—and I want noble Lords to go away and understand that. We must obviously endeavour to have more sites. The Government will not sit back and say that all we have are eight sites. At the moment, I am answering his question about capacity. I was saying what capacity would be if we had eight sites and one reactor on each site; that is what we hope to achieve from those eight sites. Clearly, if we have 10, it will be more.

The noble Lord, Lord Broers, gave one of the finest speeches that I have heard—he was remarkably to the point, and talked about fusion. As he knows, that is a subject for BIS, which is fully supportive of the development of this particular form of future generation.

I do not want to disappoint the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, by not answering a number of her questions. She rightly asked how we quantified the cost of waste and its disposal when the Government say that the private sector is responsible for paying for it. Of course, over 100 years we cannot predict that, which is why there is a system for reviews of the mathematics, which will happen frequently, and I can give her more detail of that because it is published somewhere in our documents. She asked whether the Secretary of State would take advice on the decision. Of course he will—but the point is that this country and its electors will want the Secretary of State to be responsible for a decision on something as complicated as this, and he will make it. She asked whether the IPC would have a role in deciding adequacy of interim storage on site. Yes—and that is clarified in the draft of the NPS in paragraph 2.11.6.

[Lord Berkeley]

Before the Minister winds up, can he answer the question about process put by my noble friend Lady Smith? After the consultation period on this draft statement, can the process be changed? If so, will it have to be consulted upon again and will there be a delay? What will happen?

[Lord Marland]

I am no expert on these matters as I have only been here for five minutes. I would expect noble Lords to be able to answer that. I have been passed a note, which is very helpful. I wish that noble Lords would not ask questions to which they know the answer. The answer is: if there are no substantive or material changes, there is no reason to reconsult or repeat scrutiny. However, my overriding point—