Electricity Supply

Lord Oates Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My noble friend will be reassured to know that the fusion projects are proceeding at a fast pace, and a competition has just been launched to host the first STEP project in the UK. As he will know, the White Paper promised £385 million to invest in new nuclear technologies. On his last point, all investment involving critical infrastructure is subject to thorough scrutiny and needs to satisfy robust legal, regulatory and national security requirements. These will only be enhanced by the National Security and Investment Bill, which arrives in this House tomorrow.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

What justification can the Minister provide for licensing new nuclear plants when, 60 years after the UK’s civil nuclear programme began, the Government still have no solution for the safe, permanent storage of existing high-level nuclear waste, which remains deadly for longer than any civilisation has ever survived?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

It is a priority of the Government to look after the waste securely. We have been looking for a permanent solution for the geological disposal facility. All developers are responsible for the cost of storage and transportation of nuclear waste, which has been safely disposed of since we pioneered nuclear power stations in the 1960s.