Baroness Worthington
Main Page: Baroness Worthington (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Worthington
My Lords, if you thought it was challenging speaking on nuclear power for three minutes, try summing up this really fantastic debate in three minutes and also questioning the Minister. It has been fantastic and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hanworth on securing the debate. It shows what great industry there is in the House for energy matters. I am sure that these debates will continue when the Energy Bill reaches us. On balance, most speakers seem to agree that nuclear power has an important role to play in both decarbonising our power systems and in providing more security of supply. But important caveats were put down by speakers today. My noble friend Lord Whitty said that we may want to pay for nuclear power, but not at any price. It must not be at the expense of consumers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, made very important points about waste. Waste is an issue. We cannot move to 60 or 70 gigawatts of nuclear power with a once-through fuel cycle. It generates far too much high-level waste. We need innovation if we are to be able to solve that waste problem. My noble friend Lord Judd quite rightly said that we cannot in all conscience go forward planning lots of new reactors until we have solved the problem that we already have today and, importantly, worked out what it costs.
There seems to be a common theme that the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, started off: what is the contingency plan? If our current proposals to move ahead with these large-scale pressurised water reactors do not happen, and a number of speakers raised the fact that they are very difficult for the private sector to deliver with the timescales and capital costs involved, the contingency plans and the insurance, it is a very difficult issue. A number of noble Lords mentioned that in the past there has always been a fairly high level, if not a complete level, of state involvement. It is not clear that this is going to work out as we might hope, therefore there needs to be a contingency plan. Many noble Lords mentioned the cost overruns of the Flamanville and Finish reactors. We need to learn lessons from them if we are to pursue this course.
I shall make a few suggestions, picking up on something that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford mentioned. There is a way for the state to get involved in nuclear R&D at a much higher level than it is at the moment through rethinking our approach to decommissioning. At the moment, a huge proportion of DECC’s budget goes on the NDA and its role in decommissioning our existing reactors. The legislation that created the NDA in 2004 was written at a time when we did not conceive that nuclear would need to have a renaissance or that it would come back to help us tackle climate change, and therefore the NDA was given a very narrow and limited remit just to dispose of the waste. When is waste not waste? It is when it is fuel. Some of those fuels that are currently stored as waste could kick-start a new generation of nuclear reactors, whether fast-breeders or any kind of closed-cycle nuclear system. If we use thorium, which a number of noble Lords mentioned, we can move to much more sustainable nuclear power, so if the Government do not have a contingency plan, I ask that they develop one and base it around the concept that we could bring about quite a high degree of innovation in the nuclear industry and get back to what the UK was very good at.
We have a very good history of innovation in nuclear power. It was only in the 1980s that we started to see a precipitous decline in R&D and the closure of eight of our 12 nuclear research labs. With the Beddington report, I hope that we are starting to turn that cycle. Let us get involved in nuclear fission research again; let us increase the budgets and make sure that we try to help bring the world a much more sustainable nuclear future in which nuclear can compete with carbon capture and storage, renewables and all the other solutions that will be necessary to deliver us from climate change. I do not think it is an either/or, or that it is nuclear or renewables or CCS. They all have to play a role, but we probably need a new type of nuclear, and I would love us to play a part in bringing that to reality.