Lord Bishop of Hereford
Main Page: Lord Bishop of Hereford (Bishops - Bishops)
The Lord Bishop of Hereford
My Lords, I welcome the debate and congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, on securing it. In the three minutes allotted to me, I shall make four overrushed points. First, I am hugely supportive of us walking the nuclear path. I would love the 85% target for 2050 to be achieved, and I stress that thorium molten salt reactors should be on the medium and long-term radar. There is four times as much thorium in the world as uranium. One tonne of thorium is equivalent to about 200 or more tonnes of uranium, which is equivalent to 3.2 million tonnes of coal, which would produce 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 900,000 cubic feet of waste fly ash. That is a no brainer when we are starting to be green and looking to be green. There is no argument about that, apart from one of cost, but it could be turned on its head and we could say, “Can we not afford this? Is there a way to achieve those reductions without it?”. I do not think that there is.
Secondly, research and development are vital. I appreciate very much the steer towards putting a bit more money in. What a shame that since 1995 we have had almost no money in R&D for fission. I understand that at the moment in our universities there are only five PhD students doing R&D in fission and, if noble Lords would like to guess the number of post-docs, it is 0.2 of a researcher. That is desperate, and we are heading for a massive skill shortage unless we do something about this now and step up hugely the amount of money spent on research. It is greatly needed.
Thirdly, the national decommissioning authority must surely be given a remit that is new, fit for purpose and joined up with the rest of the documentation we have here. Instead of the national decommissioning authority working on its own brief to its own agenda and therefore not being able to use its money to help with the research, we need to make sure that we change the mindset so that some of what is regarded as waste can be regarded as fuel. If we have thorium molten salt reactors, that would be possible. We need to recognise that the new generations of reactors have far less wastage and therefore there is ultimately far less to decommission, which is another good reason for walking this path, and we need to cut down the £2.3 billion a year that is being spent, which I understand is 80% of DECC’s annual budget. That seems an outrageously large sum, and we need to close the gap.
My fourth point is that this cannot and will not happen without government putting in the initiative, as the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, has made clear. Anything that has a 15 or 20-year, let alone a 60 or 70-year, lead time is hardly going to be commercially attractive. It needs government to do it. We are having such trouble finding anybody to build our reactors at the moment because we have trusted to private enterprise, and things of this scale have to be joined up and have government support. I would like us also to have something that is far more clear, coherent and comprehensive with a commitment from the Government to go for that, and then others would come aboard with university and other research money to follow.