Infrastructure Planning (Radioactive Waste Geological Disposal Facilities) Order 2015

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am not Cumbrian and I have absolutely no connection with Cumbria—I live in Southwark—but I support the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in his request that this order be withdrawn. It is clear that he was speaking from a democratic point of view, which is an incredibly valid thing to be concerned about. The fact that it is Labour legislation does not mean that it has to be used; there is a lot of quite bad legislation still on the books that really ought to be repealed.

There are a few environmental concerns expressed in a report called Rock Solid?, which was produced for Greenpeace specifically for this sort of action. There are concerns that have to be answered and the relative risks and dangers, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, have perhaps not been assessed as stringently as they might have been. For example, copper and steel canisters and overpack containing spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste could corrode more quickly than expected; we do not know. The effects of intense heat generated by radioactive decay and the chemical and physical disturbance due to corrosion, gas generation and biomineralisation could impair the ability of backfill material to trap some radionuclides.

The build-up of gas pressure in the repository, as a result of the corrosion of metals and/or the degradation of organic material, could damage the barriers and force fast routes out through crystalline rock fractures or clay rock pores. There are also poorly understood chemical effects, such as the formation of colloids, which could speed up some of the more radiotoxic elements such as plutonium. Unidentified fractures and faults, or a poor understanding of how water and gas might flow through the ground, could lead to the release of toxic materials into groundwater. These are concerns that cannot be ignored, and the order needs a little more research about whether this is an activity that can be supported with a view to complete public safety. I would argue that it is not, but I look forward to the Minister reassuring us.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I am also not from Cumbria, although I shall have the pleasure of visiting Sellafield in two weeks’ time. I know that it consumes a vast proportion of the Minister’s budget in DECC, and I look forward to that visit.

My question is more one of logic. The Explanatory Memorandum states clearly, as does the legislation itself:

“This Order will bring certain development relating to geological disposal facilities for radioactive waste, and the deep borehole investigations necessary to determine the suitability of potential sites, within the nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP)”.

I suppose that my question is this: whether one likes it or not—whether one is pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear—there is a certain logic to the idea that a radioactive waste disposal site would come within the decision-making of a major project. This was set up by the previous Government, as my noble friend Lady Miller has pointed out, and taken on by this one. It sort of fits within that. The exploratory deep borehole investigations seem to be a measure on a completely different scale, so I do not understand the logic of having both of those in. The exploration side seems logically to fit far more within the standard local authority planning system. I would be interested to hear a comment from my noble friend about why both these scales of project have been put into this order, rather than just one or the other.

While I am on my feet and we are on nuclear waste, at the beginning of this Parliament we looked at the national policy statement for nuclear power generation, and it has always slightly amused me that a footnote states:

“Geological disposal of higher activity waste from new nuclear power stations is currently programmed to be available from around 2130”,

some 115 years from now. I wondered whether the Government intended to keep their foot on the accelerator on that policy.

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, we seem to have overlooked that regular high-level nuclear waste is being generated at Sellafield already and plans have to be made for its safe storage and ultimate disposal. If plans go ahead to use the 140 tonnes of plutonium that have been stored up from previous nuclear programmes at Sellafield to generate electricity, as in the two proposals that have been put forward by CANDU and GE Hitachi respectively, there will be nuclear reactors on the Sellafield site using that plutonium and generating further waste. I suppose part of the Government’s thinking in having their eye on Cumbria is that this large quantity of nuclear waste has to be moved from the Sellafield site to the ultimate place of disposal. That concentrates their attention on Cumbria. However, when the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said that he would like to see a survey of all the sites that might be suitable for this purpose, I was under the impression that a lot of work had already been done on the subject and that nobody had any thoughts of alternative sites that would be superior to Cumbria. I may be wrong and would be very interested to hear from the Minister whether that work has already been in train and, if so, what the results were.