Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 16th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Drew Hendry]

It is very important that the unanswered questions are dealt with in this insufficient Bill—[Interruption.] Well, a lot of people will be concerned about the implications of what is not covered in this discussion, some of which I intend to cover.

With regard to nuclear safety, it is critical that we continue membership—or, at the very least, associate membership—of Euratom. Falling back on WTO rules could risk the UK breaking international law. It will come as no surprise that we in the SNP believe that the safest nuclear power policy is no nuclear power. We are determined to deliver just that.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

I am going to make some headway.

In Scotland, we are already showing what can be achieved by renewable energy. New storage solutions for renewables are developing further access to the vast potential from offshore wind and tidal, meaning that an abundance of low-cost, clean energy will be generated. In contrast, this Government continue to chase the folly of new nuclear such as the white elephant that is Hinkley C, leading to exorbitant costs for consumers and leaving yet another burden for future generations to clean up—and that is if there is no more immediate crisis caused by failure or deliberate act leading to nuclear incident. I also wonder what care and attention has been given to people in Wales, as only days ago it came to light that about 300,000 tonnes of “radioactive mud”—a by-product of this Government’s nuclear obsession—is to be dredged and moved to Wales. I will leave that to hon. Members from Wales to debate further.

My constituency is in the highlands, which is not only the natural home of much of our renewable generation and its potential, but home to Dounreay. It is a place where the impact and long-term costs, both financial and environmental, of nuclear are well known. Those costs should not be repeated. The Minister pointed out that the responsibility for domestic nuclear safety resides in the UK, but that does not mean that the UK has a good record, especially prior to EU membership. Indeed, most of us living in the area can recall the various worrying nuclear material scares, and we are well versed on the dangerous radioactive levels recorded on Caithness beaches.

Each scare should remind us of why our membership of Euratom is so important—because while they can never be perfect, agreed EU directives over safety have been essential in ending some of the hair-raising practices in the UK nuclear industry. Who could forget that in 2006 the remains of actual plutonium rods were found on the beach at Sandside, in Caithness? Hon. Members earlier mentioned watertight provisions, but one retired Dounreay worker who was interviewed at the time spoke of a catalogue of errors, accidents and bad procedure, including claims that workers commonly disposed of radioactive material in the sea at night to avoid it having to appear on official documents. He told a reporter that he once saw a man

“using a Wellington boot tied to a piece of string”

to take test samples

“because the proper equipment had rusted”

beyond use. Mr Lyall, the retired worker who spoke out, had been a plant supervisor for many years.

Although the UK Atomic Energy Authority—as it would—denied that Mr Lyall’s claims were true, it did admit:

“There were practices from the 1950s to the 1960s that we would not repeat today.”

Those practices occurred before we were members of Euratom. In the same statement, the UKAEA told reporters:

“Standards have risen in health and safety and environmental protection, and government legislation has also been tightened considerably.”

Our membership of the EU, and especially of Euratom, has had a positive impact on the improvement of the standards that the UKAEA spoke of. In Scotland, although we are working towards a nuclear-free future, we have to maintain safety at existing facilities during that process, and we must plan for a future of decommissioning.

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[Drew Hendry]

It is telling that Conservative Members are willing to ignore all advice from experts in the nuclear industry in order to uphold their position that we must have the hardest possible Brexit.

[Kit Malthouse]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

No, I am going to make some progress.

As I have said, the UK does not currently have any reactors capable of producing such isotopes.

[Drew Hendry]

I do not think that the Minister is reflecting the view of the experts in the industry who are affected, and I will come on to underline that with some quotes.

Euratom supports the secure and safe supply and use of medical radioisotopes. If and when the UK withdraws, it will no longer—this is the critical point—have access to Euratom’s support, ending the certainty of a seamless and continuing supply. The Royal College of Radiologists points out that the supply of radioisotopes would be disrupted by leaving the single market, because transport delays will reduce the amount of useful radioisotopes that can be successfully transported to their destination.

[Kit Malthouse]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

No, I am going to make some progress. As I pointed out, radioisotopes decay within hours or days of production. The most common isotope has a half-life of just 66 hours. The consequences of a disrupted radioisotope supply was made clear not only during the incident that the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) mentioned, but during the channel tunnel fire in 2008. That led to a reduction of the availability of radioisotopes, and to cancelled procedures. So, for patients, there can be no no-deal scenario. Such a scenario is a ludicrous proposition with regard to leaving the EU; as practitioners point out, however, in relation to medical isotopes it is a matter of people’s very lives.

Leaving Euratom will increase the difficulty of maintaining nuclear fuel in the longer term and threaten research funding into medical isotopes.

[Kit Malthouse]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

No, because I am going to conclude.

Most concerning of all is that leaving Euratom has the potential to reduce standards of protection for workers and the public. Since the UK Government have committed to a nuclear future, it would be pushing their irresponsible actions to critical levels if they were to forsake membership or, at the very least, associate membership of Euratom. Until there is no nuclear in Scotland—on our land, or in our waters—we should have the right to remain a member of it.

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[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I do not think that anybody debated or considered leaving Euratom, or voted to leave it on 23 June 2016—

[Kit Malthouse]

I did.

[Rachel Reeves]

Except the hon. Gentleman. However, we are where we are, and the Government have made their decision. I urge them not to abandon what I and many hon. Members regard as a sensible approach: to pursue a transition period during which we stay under Euratom’s auspices, and then seek some sort of associate membership so that we do not have to recreate everything that the Minister and others have said that we value from our membership.

I understand the need for the Bill. There is a risk that we could crash out of the EU and Euratom, and we need a back-up, given that the Office for Nuclear Regulation will take on the responsibilities that Euratom has today. Unlike trade, there is no fall-back option for nuclear. With trade, we have the World Trade Organisation, but with nuclear, if we do not have an arrangement with the IAEA, we will not be able to trade or move nuclear materials around the EU. The Bill is an important belt-and-braces measure in case we crash out, which I hope does not happen, but is a risk.

The Bill does part of one thing—pass the remit for safeguarding inspections from Euratom to our regulator, the ONR. As hon. Members know, the ONR is not new, but there are serious pressures on its capacity. It is currently recruiting a new chief nuclear inspector, and only last week the Government had to put aside more money for it as part of the clean growth strategy. We therefore know that the ONR is under pressure even before taking on the new responsibilities that the Government may pass on to it. As a senior ONR official was forced to admit to a Select Committee in the other place, the timescale for adding safeguarding responsibilities is “very challenging”.

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[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I am grateful and very pleased to be here as the first brick is placed into the strong foundation that we will be building for a post-Brexit Britain. This is the first real piece of legislation enabling us to see what it will look like. I congratulate the Minister on the Bill’s brevity and concision. Hopefully that pattern will be repeated.

I welcome the Bill and indeed our leaving Euratom, as I said earlier, although I recognise that many will not. Warm has been the embrace of Euratom for the past 40-odd years. Much has been achieved, in both research and safeguarding standards, but in truth the mourning bell has been tolling for Euratom for some time, because it is clear that the EU is turning its face against civil nuclear power. Germany is phasing it out by 2020, in a decision taken a couple of years ago, while Belgium, in a decision taken by our friend Mr Verhofstadt when he was Prime Minister, has decided to phase it out by 2025. Italy and Denmark have already made nuclear power generation illegal. Greece and Spain are phasing it out. Austria—ironically, as the home of the IAEA—has made it illegal even to transport nuclear material across its territory, such is its antipathy to it.

Given that the aggressively anti-nuclear Green party peppers Parliaments across the continent and has 51 seats in the European Parliament, serious questions need to be asked about the future of Euratom and its funding. When we recognise that much of the Horizon 2020 funding, which will go towards nuclear research, is generated by Germany, which will not be using the technology invented under that programme, we have to ask how long Germany will tolerate the notion that it should be pouring hundreds of millions of euros into nuclear research.

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

My hon. Friend clearly knows a lot about this subject, so on a point of information to illuminate the House, what does he think about the French attitude to nuclear power?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I was about to say, in truth, Euratom is the French. It is anchored around France, with its 58 reactors, and they are the only serious nuclear player among the EU 27. The UK is second and Ukraine, although not a member—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) pointed out, it is now a special associate of Euratom, as it were—is third. Nevertheless, we now have the opportunity to look strategically at where our civil nuclear is going, what global alliances we should have, the direction of Euratom and EU nuclear research, and whether there is a better way.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the future of nuclear is still very uncertain? If the Romans had invented nuclear power, we would still be guarding our nuclear waste sites.

[Kit Malthouse]

I absolutely think that nuclear waste is important, particularly to us in this country. That is why we should have total control of it ourselves and not be reliant on a series of countries that will perhaps not even be willing to put money into researching how to dispose of, or reprocess or otherwise use nuclear waste.

We have been members of the IAEA since 1957. We have the capability to make the change; indeed, there is a strategic argument that the Office for Nuclear Regulation would be much better served if it had responsibility for all three of the civil nuclear strands—safety, security, and regulation and safeguarding. We lead the world in safety regulation; we can lead the world in the other two.

[Mr Vaizey]

I am immensely enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech, not least as I have discovered that the one person in the country who went to the polls on 23 June specifically to get us out of Euratom also happens to be a Member of this House. It is a remarkable coincidence. If I may probe his argument, does it not have a weakness, in that if he is saying that so many members of the EU want to undermine civil nuclear power, is this not precisely the wrong time for the Brits to leave the French to themselves? Does he also agree that, regardless of his attitude to Euratom, we will still have to go through an incredible number of hoops to recreate what we have benefited from?

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[Kit Malthouse]

No, I completely disagree with my right hon. Friend. This is not the wrong time; it is exactly the right time for us to recognise that there is a world beyond the EU in terms of nuclear research. There has been much angst in the House already about nuclear scientists being able to travel freely, but I would point out that they do actually exist outside the European Union. There are lots of them in Japan, Korea, China and elsewhere. Indeed, the leading edge of nuclear research and the development of civil nuclear power is elsewhere. As I have said, we are dealing with a community of countries that are turning their back on this technology. Even if we get to the holy grail of fission, and we manage to get fusion going from the great reactor in my right hon. Friend’s constituency, the Germans will not use it. They have said already that it is of no use to them. The idea that they will continue to fund it into the future is fallacious.

[Mr Vaizey]

I am always further intrigued by the arguments of people such as my hon. Friend, who imply that we could do nothing outside Europe when we were members of Euratom. However, we got the Chinese to invest in Hinkley while remaining members. How did our membership prevent us from co-operating with other nuclear states?

[Kit Malthouse]

It has not prevented us, but we now have the opportunity to recognise that the nuclear community is global. While Euratom has served its purpose thus far, the point I am trying to make is that the trend of European opinion is very much against nuclear, so those countries are unlikely to continue pumping the money into Euratom that it has hitherto enjoyed. That is why we need to look elsewhere. It is perfectly possible for us to have a bilateral relationship with France. We have one on nuclear defence at the moment, which was signed in 2010; we can do the same on power. There is absolutely no threat to our participation in some of the global research programmes, such as the one at Culham and the ITER in the south of France, which currently includes Korea, China, Japan and Russia. There are lots of ways in which we can be involved.

My message today, I guess, is that people have to learn that Euratom cannot be part of project fear. It must not be part of project fear; it is far too strategically important to us not to reach out to the rest of the world. I am quite happy for us to have an associate membership, if that is what is required, but there is a world beyond the EU, and we have seen that in medical isotopes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) said, no one is pretending that we will not be sent medical isotopes when we come out, but that points to a strategic problem because of our membership of Euratom: we should be manufacturing those isotopes here. Why have we not got a reactor that will create them? We have the largest agglomeration of life sciences research on the planet, yet we do not have this feather in our cap—this piece of the jigsaw. Notwithstanding the SNP’s antipathy to nuclear, perhaps we should build that kind of reactor in Scotland, given that thousands and thousands of Scots benefit from medical isotopes every year.

The argument about Euratom has exposed the strategic nature of nuclear to us, in defence, civil nuclear and medical, and allows us now to think more coherently about which way we go. Civil nuclear is an international effort. Regulation should be at international level, as should partnership, so that we can finally find the holy grail of fusion power, which will solve our power generation problems well into the next century.