European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Viscount Trenchard and Lord Broers

Committee: 8th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 19th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, the amendment would ensure that we maintain the resources needed to remain competitive in nuclear research and development beyond 2020. If we do not, we will almost certainly lose the ability to replace and increase the nuclear baseload needed to underpin our intermittent renewable sources. Our large wind and solar resources will leave us in the dark on windless nights—at least until full-scale storage or fusion power become realities—unless we replace nuclear power with fossil fuel plants and thereby miss our legally binding target of reducing emissions by at least 80% by 2050.

Indeed, we would find ourselves in the situation that exists in Germany, as described by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, in today’s Times, where, because the Germans decided to abandon nuclear power, they are now being forced to build coal-fired power stations to back up their renewable sources, thereby counteracting the purpose of building the wind and solar facilities in the first place. At least we have not got that far. We are pressing ahead with our nuclear baseload and all looked well until we made the incomprehensible decision to withdraw from Euratom, despite the fact that our withdrawal was not legally required by our withdrawal from the EU. Until now, we had sensibly been relying on our membership of Euratom to improve our capabilities to manage and dispose of nuclear waste, improve radiological protection, keep up to date with the progress being made on advanced fission reactors—including small modular reactors, or SMRs—and remain major contributors to the development of fusion power, particularly extensions to the Joint European Torus, or JET, at Culham and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER.

Let me say a few words about fusion. Controlled release fusion was first achieved in JET at Culham in 1991. In my opinion, this could well turn out to be one of the most important advances in experimental physics ever made. This was the earliest successful experiment; however, it produced only two short pulses when fusion power of one megawatt was verified for a fraction of a second. By 1997, things had moved on and JET produced a peak of 16 megawatts of fusion power, with fusion power over 10 megawatts sustained for over half a second. This gave everyone the confidence to proceed with JET’s successor, ITER, which had been talked about since the mid-1980s but was escalated into a multinational project that had been estimated to cost about €13 billion—interestingly, about the same cost as has been estimated for the finding of the Higgs boson. ITER is currently under construction in southern France and is designed to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power and 10 times more fusion power than the power put into the plasma.

I mention this background to show that progress has been made but this is a very long-term project. Construction of ITER will not be completed until 2020; the initial plasma will not be created until 2025; and the first fusion experiments will not be carried out until 2035. Few noble Lords will see that happen. Many challenges face the project but there are potential answers to all of them. At present, there are no experimental or theoretical showstoppers identified. By the middle of the century, it could well demonstrate that fusion power is practical and capable of delivering unlimited quantities of clean, carbon-free energy.

Through what I see as government neglect or lack of support, we have lost our expertise in a disturbing number of vital technologies, of which microelectronics is one. We are leaders in designing microelectronic chips—that capability is now owned by Japan—but we cannot make chips. More recently there was the decoding of DNA, where we do retain expertise but have lost the business of DNA decoding to the USA.

Let us not lose our expertise in nuclear power. These matters are too important to leave to chance and words of promise. Let us this time ensure that we remain internationally competitive in nuclear technologies and lead rather than follow in seeking truly clean energy for our planet. The amendment would ensure that our nuclear technology continues to receive support at its present level. I beg to move.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I share with the noble Lord, Lord Broers, many of his concerns about the future of our nuclear energy programme. Like him, I regret very much that we have lost so much expertise. Part of the result of our withdrawal from Euratom is that the ONR will have to recruit a large number of scientists qualified in nuclear matters. Perhaps we will also have another opportunity to debate these matters tomorrow in the Nuclear Safeguards Bill, so I will not detain the Committee long, except to say that although I basically agree with the noble Lord, Lord Broers, about the importance of nuclear power, and the fact that it is not subject to intermittency makes it much more reliable than renewable energy, I do not go as far as him in saying that it is necessarily deplorable that we withdraw from Euratom.

Many scientists and senior executives who have worked in the nuclear industry consider that Euratom is a rather bureaucratic organisation that is too cumbersome in its approach to verifications and too much concerned with understanding the detail of what all its members are doing, rather than helping to ensure a proper, adequate nuclear safeguards regime. I believe the noble Lord’s amendment does not recognise the upside of our withdrawal from Euratom—we will ourselves be able to decide where to commit funds in nuclear research and development. For example, we might want to spend money on small modular reactors instead of on ITER. Anyway, if we want to be in ITER, besides the EU/Euratom countries, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States all participate. It will be good to be able to decide which projects we commit funds to in nuclear research and which we do not, whereas at present we have no independent right to decide.

Besides that, it is clear that we will need a transition or implementation period for the Euratom treaty as well as the EU treaties, so we do not have to decide any of this by exit day anyway. We will take some time to decide the detail as to which projects to go on with after we have recovered our right to decide where we will commit our funds in nuclear research.