Weightman Report (Fukushima)

Caroline Flint Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

All I can say is that I am delighted; I could not expect anything less from the hon. Gentleman, who is a member of the Gorsedd of Bards: what he lacks in facts, he is able to make up for in poetry and rhetoric. Let me a deal with a couple of his key points.

I believe that the e-mail exchange reported in The Guardian, to which the hon. Gentleman drew attention and quoted, came from an official in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills rather than from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. No, I do not approve at all of the tenor of those remarks; nor are they the tenor of the policy making we conduct in DECC. We are very clear that safety is absolutely the No. 1 concern. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we made a clear provision in the coalition agreement that nuclear power could go ahead, providing that there is no public subsidy and providing investors are prepared to do that. That is exactly what is going on.

I think the hon. Gentleman misinterprets what Dr Weightman said about the issue of costs. The situation is exactly as I said. Dr Weightman could have looked at costs had he wanted to; the reality is that he, quite rightly as the chief nuclear inspector charged with safety, takes the view that safety comes first—regardless of the cost issues. That is why he has come up with a report that does not look into whether the measures he puts forward will or will not have excessive costs. That is for the potential operators to judge, not for Dr Weightman, and the operators will do so.

Let me end my response to the hon. Gentleman by pointing out that a published study, commissioned from Arup, available on the DECC website, puts the costs of nuclear at £71 per megawatt-hour in comparison with the lowest marginal cost at the moment, which would be a gas plant operating at £77 per megawatt-hour. Although he is absolutely right that stringent safety measures might add to costs, the other factor that needs to be taken into account is that precisely because some other countries have not gone through the same process as we have—of assessing the facts and attempting to base our policy on the evidence—they have pulled out of new nuclear construction. The result of that is that demand for new nuclear power stations has fallen. Normally, according to my basic economics, when demand falls and supply stays the same, the price goes down, not up.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

I join the Secretary of State in thanking Dr Weightman for preparing the report, and thank the Secretary of State for allowing early sight of it.

The terrible events in Japan earlier this year reminded us that the Government must ensure that our regulatory regime in the nuclear industry is robust, and that there can be no compromises on safety. In that light, the Government were entirely right to ask the Office for Nuclear Regulation to examine the events in Japan and their implications for the United Kingdom.

I welcome the recommendations in today’s report, which will of course need to be closely examined, but given that the situation in Japan is clearly still ongoing, will the Secretary of State tell us what further monitoring he has planned? Will he also clarify two points? Can he confirm first that Dr Weightman was satisfied with the amount of time that he was given in which to prepare the report, and secondly that he had enough access to UK sites to inform his recommendations?

In our view, nothing in the report calls into question the importance of a continued role for nuclear power as part of a more sustainable future energy mix. Given the concern expressed in recent days about the Government’s commitment to tackling climate change, along with the worrying news of Scottish and Southern Energy’s decision to pull out of a nuclear project in Cumbria and speculation about the future of RWE’s nuclear programme in the UK, may I ask the Secretary of State what he is doing to ensure that the Government give investors the support and confidence that they need to deliver the construction of new capacity in the nuclear industry on time and on budget?

[Chris Huhne]

I congratulate the right hon. Lady on her first outing in her new role. She was right to say that the events in Japan are ongoing, but we feel—and Mike Weightman certainly feels—that the circumstances are clear enough to render it unlikely that any substantial new information will necessitate a change in the recommendations. However, one thing that emerges from the review is the fact that the culture of nuclear regulation in the UK is, appropriately, one of continuous improvement. If new facts come to light, we shall be able to take them on board and improve the regulatory environment.

Dr Weightman certainly feels that he was given enough time in which to complete the report, but had he wanted more time it would have been available to him. I was particularly pleased that his expertise—of which the right hon. Lady will know, as he was appointed by the last Government to inquire into the Potters Bar rail disaster—his independence and his impartiality were recognised by the international community when he was appointed by the International Atomic Energy Authority to conduct its review of the lessons of Fukushima. He has been running that operation in parallel with this.

I think we can be confident that we have an extremely solid piece of work here, and that the lessons are genuinely being learned. Dr Weightman—who is, after all, the chief nuclear inspector—had all the access that he needed not just to the reactors, but to all the UK sites. In this final report, he deals with some of the lessons that may emerge from the silo and pond issues at Sellafield. The ministerial team is seized of the need to deal with those important issues, and to make certain that no resource constraint prevents us from acting as quickly as possible to ensure the proper security of the sites.

The right hon. Lady asked about the speed of nuclear projects. Some delay will inevitably have been introduced into the process because of the lessons of Fukushima, but we are confident that all the key elements of the process that we, as a Government, need to undertake to get things going have been undertaken. We have produced national nuclear policy statements, discussions continue between the operators and the regulator on the generic design assessment, and we have put through the regulatory justification. I understand that, either today or yesterday, planning permission was requested for the first new reactor at Hinkley Point, which is due to be completed at the end of the decade. I believe that investors in nuclear power are content that we are moving as rapidly as we could expect to move.