Lord Haworth
Main Page: Lord Haworth (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Haworth
My Lords, I thank the Government for staging this debate today; it is certainly timely. Last week I had the privilege of attending a very interesting seminar in London, organised by the Westminster Energy, Environment and Transport Forum, with the title “Nuclear Energy: Moving Closer to New Build”. We may be moving closer but the rate of progress seems glacially slow. Indeed, one might say the glaciers are melting rather faster than we are making progress. The keynote speaker at the conference was Keith Parker, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association. He rightly identified the speech made by Tony Blair to the CBI in 2006 as the turning point in the chequered history of nuclear power in this country and as,
“the moment which historians will recognize as the crucial signal of a change of policy after two decades of gradual decline, after Chernobyl and after the denationalization of the energy utilities”.
Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Reay, who was rather curmudgeonly on this point, I think that announcement remains one of the bravest, boldest and best decisions taken by that Labour Government.
Two years later, in January 2008, after the lengthy process of the energy review, the White Paper on nuclear power was published. It set the seal on Tony Blair’s far-sighted vision and gave new impetus to the nuclear industry. We are now, however, almost five years on and the best we can say—with last week’s announcement from the Secretary of State for Climate Change—is that eight sites have been formally identified as suitable for the next generation of nuclear stations. It is progress but it is painfully slow. Meanwhile, we are heading rather faster towards something of a cliff edge, with the closing down of substantial generating capacity—starting within the next five years—of old coal-fired power stations and old life-expired nuclear capacity.
I welcome the publication of the whole suite of revised draft national policy statements on energy, which accompanied the Minister’s Statement last week, as I welcome this debate. I am glad that we are getting on with it and I have no wish to pour cold water over welcome progress towards the new nuclear build. However, the conference I attended also raised a major question about the long-term sustainability of nuclear power on the basis of present policy.
The forum heard a presentation from Professor Colin Boxall of Lancaster University. He occupies the chair in nuclear engineering and decommissioning in the engineering department. His talk centred on the availability of uranium worldwide, and how long this finite resource will realistically last. It is not just us who have taken a key decision to develop a new generation of nuclear reactors. Last year, worldwide, there were 436 reactors in 31 countries, providing some 370 gigawatts of capacity. Rather more importantly, there are 50 reactors under construction in countries such as Japan, Korea, Finland, India and China. In addition to that, 137 more are on order or planned and a further 295 proposed—a total of 482 new reactors, which will more than double present capacity. It somewhat dwarfs our proposals for our eight sites. This is a major projected uplift in nuclear capacity worldwide and has big implications for uranium supply. The known resource of uranium in the ground is 5.5 million tonnes. It may well be that there is approximately twice that undiscovered—another 10.5 million tonnes—based on the geological characteristics of known deposits. More than 1 million tonnes of this had already been used up by the turn of the century, way before the great leap forward for nuclear.
I am sure that the House does not want to hear a long string of alarming figures from me based on possible projections of the rate of consumption of uranium. I could do so as I have a lot of figures here in my notes, but let me summarise them very crudely, though I hope without any unfairness or exaggeration. The 4.5 million tonnes remaining equate to about 70 years at the current rate of consumption and burn-up. At the historical growth rate of 1 per cent per annum, even the speculative resource will be exhausted in just over 100 years. At a modest future growth rate of 1.4 per cent per annum, the known reserves will be exhausted within 40 years and, at a wholly plausible growth rate of a little greater than that but still less than 2 per cent per annum, exhaustion of the known reserves will come as soon as 2045 and exhaustion of the speculative reserves before the end of the present century. I am happy to provide the Minister with these figures, but I am sure that they are available to his department and are unlikely to be seriously disputed. Indeed, a number of senior civil servants from both the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department of Energy and Climate Change heard the same presentation as me last week.
For the future of nuclear worldwide, not just in the UK, this is a serious issue of sustainability. Our nuclear programme, going forward, is based on the presumption that,
“any new nuclear power stations that might be built in the UK should proceed on the basis that spent fuel will not be reprocessed and that plans for, and financing of, waste management should proceed on that basis”.
That quotation is taken from the 2008 White Paper, Meeting the Energy Challenge. The consultation document published around the same time by BERR states that the,
“base case for decommissioning and waste management costs associated with new reactor construction assumes that there will be no reprocessing of the uranium fuel, and spent fuel will be disposed of after it has been used”.
In other words, “once through” is the preferred option. This was underlined again in the revised Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN6) at section 2.11 dealing with radioactive waste management. This was published the other day.
On the basis of current policy we are going to run out of uranium rather quickly, probably before we run out of oil. Climate change and future energy policy are long-term issues. The effects will be felt long after we who are discussing these matters and taking decisions now are all dead, but we surely owe it to future generations to use our finite resources as sustainably as possible.
I am not in any way suggesting that the next generation of nuclear stations—the ones just around the corner—should be delayed while other ways of dealing with the uranium issue are investigated. That would be a sure way to see the lights go out in my lifetime. However, I hope that further consideration of issues relating to reprocessing and/or fast breeder technology will come under active consideration for the next generation after that, for stations which might be planned to come on stream after 2030. Fast breeders are likely to be something like 40 times more fuel efficient and would extend the lifetime of uranium fuel perhaps by—again, this is an estimate—3,000 years. Even at higher growth rates for nuclear than previously discussed, this avoids exhaustion. Such technology does something else as well: it significantly reduces the heavy metal residues and the radiotoxic burden which would need to be sent for final disposal in the proposed geological disposal facility. It would be a win-win situation. I do not begin to suggest that fast breeders would not be without associated problems. There is the question of cost, impact on the environment, the issues relating to nuclear proliferation—because of the separated plutonium—and other safety concerns, including transport. However, such technology would extend energy availability from uranium from maybe 80 years to more than 3,000 years. There would be a huge reduction of the waste heat load and radiotoxicity in the proposed repository from a quarter of a million years to 120 years and a reduced dependence on foreign oil, LNG and coal.
In the context of climate change and the long-term use of sustainable non-carbon energy sources, these are surely considerations on which the Government should have an open mind and an active and inquiring mind. I look forward to the Minister’s response.