Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, this group of amendments centres on the important aspects of nuclear waste and the decommissioning process. As we have heard, they give rise to polarised opinions. I will be brief, given the number of amendments that we are aiming to get through this afternoon.

A number of speakers raised issues around nuclear waste at Second Reading. The Minister acknowledged that work on a geological disposal facility to dispose of high-level waste permanently is still ongoing. It is doubtful that the Minister will be able to provide any meaningful updates on that project this afternoon, but I may be proved wrong.

There are genuine questions to be answered. However, whether they need to be answered in full through this Bill is less clear. The answer to that question may lie in the likely process once the Government are finally ready to proceed with their chosen long-term solution. Will separate legislation be required to get that project under way?

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

Oh, no.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Yes, I know—it’s boring hearing the facts, isn’t it? I apologise for not catching the noble Baroness’s eye earlier but I want to contribute briefly to this debate with just a couple of historical facts that might help.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for his words about the Liberal Democrats in the coalition. As one of the four people from the Liberal Democrat side who contributed to the agreement with the Conservatives, my recollection on that is that, as I am sure he will remember, nuclear power was to be at no cost to the public purse. That was very much the coalition’s starting and finishing point; I hope that it will continue to be so.

I have done most of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, invited us to do to apprise ourselves of the facts. Indeed, back in 2001, with the active co-operation of BNFL—British Nuclear Fuels Ltd—I produced a short report, Cleaning Up the Mess, which looked specifically at what would be the best way to deal with nuclear waste; at that time, it was much more prominent in the headlines than it is now and just as intractable. We looked at some of the conditions needed. One is stable geology but the other, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned, is stable politics. If you look at Europe, only two countries —England and Sweden—have had even 350 years of political stability. Of course, the events in eastern Europe at the moment are a reminder of that.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

It seems to have been relatively stable in Scotland.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I am sure that the noble Lord’s colleagues from the Scottish National Party will remind him of the Act of Union, which was subsequent to that date. Yes, England was a deliberate choice, but I will accept other places; it is hard, however, to find another place other than Sweden that has had even 300 years, let alone however many thousands of years we are talking about, of stability.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

What about Portugal?

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Let us try Portugal. The Duke of Wellington was required to liberate Portugal from Spanish and Napoleonic domination. It is easy to forget Napoleon and Hitler and all sorts of things but—not that it is particularly relevant to this debate—political stability is important and rare. This country is one of the places that has been able to exhibit that despite our sometimes fractious debates on nuclear storage.

The conclusion of my report was that you need deep geological storage. It would be sensible for it to be in England. This is not, and never has been, Liberal Democrat policy, but my report pointed out that there was a big business opportunity because nobody else in the world—neither then nor, for that matter, now—had a good place to put their nuclear waste. I am certainly not opposed to having a deep geological disposal point.

The purpose of this is to establish the risk and the cost to the public purse. I go back to where I was in 2010—that there should be no cost to the public purse. We have gone backwards since 1999. Then we at least had a site and a plan—or BNFL did, which was strongly advocating it—but at the moment we have neither. We had a timescale; it would have been operational in 2024, which would have been very convenient for the passage of this Bill. Now it will probably not be for another 25 years, even if it gets a fair wind.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

When the noble Lord says that there should be no cost to the public purse, is that in regard only to future projects or also to existing nuclear power stations? I mentioned in my intervention the situation in Trawsfynydd, the cost of decommissioning which could never have been anticipated when it was built. Is there not a case in those circumstances that the public purse is the only way to bail out that sort of situation?

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

The noble Lord is almost certainly right. That ship has sailed, to say the very least. In phases one, two and three of the nuclear programme, no adequate provision was made for decommissioning or any way of storing the waste. Unfortunately, that will clearly fall back on to the public sector in some form or another.

We are talking about a new generation. It is surely right and proper to learn from the mistakes of the last 60 years and make sure that that is properly costed in the formulation given for the construction and operation of these plants. I do not think that it is particularly controversial that we should learn from previous experience, although it is often very hard to do so.

Is the Minister satisfied that the public purse will be properly protected over a period of time from finally picking up the costs of geological disposal of nuclear waste from the plants that this Bill is intended to finance? The Government ought to answer that honestly and frankly so that there is no illusion on anyone’s part either about what is happening in terms of public subsidy or that the true costs of delivering a nuclear programme incorporate the costs of decommissioning, rather than shuffling them off at the start and delivering them as a bill of unknown but undoubtedly large size to the public purse.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

Before the Minister responds, I would be interested in whether we should have a review of the societal demands of how we treat the decommissioning and waste of nuclear, because it seems to me that we are operating against a set of principles that have become detached from the reality of how you can manage this more cost-effectively. A large body of evidence says that geological disposal is not needed, because you can just do subterranean management. If it were not for the widespread lack of understanding about the nature of the problem and the way it can be dealt with, we would not have to incur these costs. If there is a review, we should go back to basics.

The same is true of decommissioning. The simplest and cheapest way to decommission is to leave it alone and then decommission it. The desire to bring it back to greenfield status is utterly unnecessary. These are highly concentrated industrial sites that serve clean energy to millions of people. We should not be seeking to return them to greenfield on an accelerated timescale, unnecessarily incurring huge costs to the taxpayer. We should have a review, go back to basics and consider all of the above in terms of what we should do with our waste and decommissioning.