Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Lord Wigley

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th March 2022 Grand Committee

[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.