Euratom Membership

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I commend the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) for securing this very important debate.

I have an interest in this subject because of my constituency. In Abingdon, many of the workers at the Joint European Torus facility are very worried about what is going on and feel they have been forgotten in the last few months. I am delighted that today, they get a chance to be heard.

My former profession was physics teaching, so if I may be indulged, I would like to explain why nuclear fusion is so important. While fission is the splitting up of large isotopes to create smaller ones, releasing energy, fusion is the joining up of smaller ones to create large ones, also creating energy—and what is amazing is that the base material is water. When we are done with it, the end products have barely any decay half-lives. It is an extraordinary technology, and—make no mistake—if we get it right, it is as scientifically significant as sending a man to the moon. It could solve climate change completely, because water is essentially an inexhaustible material. I would like to make the case for that, because I think it has been forgotten. Humanity needs that technology—I do not think I am overstating it—and it is vital we get it going.

It is covered under the treaty, not only because of the work programme, to which the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) referred, but also because afterwards we have ITER. If we are going to access that supply chain and not lose the expertise of those scientists, the best thing we can do is give them certainty. I have visited the site several times and been told that there is already movement among the scientists to leave. They need to know now what is going on, because it will soon be the summer holidays, and they are deciding what to do for their families. If their jobs are not secure, they will leave. Compounded with the issues around which EU citizens get to stay here, that means literally hundreds of jobs are on the line.

I would like to ask the Minister, on behalf of my constituents, what he is doing to ensure we do not have any of these cliff edges. Will he assure us that if he cannot negotiate the replacement treaties in time, he will extend our membership of Euratom until such time that we do? Is the plan right now to have associate membership? Surely he can tell us what the Government are looking at. Will he also confirm that the reason we are in this mess is the Prime Minister’s obsession with the European Court of Justice? I applaud the constructive nature of this debate, and the fact is that if we just decided to get over that, we would avoid this mess entirely.

If I may, I would like to explain why the radioisotopes issue is such a big one. The Minister and the Government keep saying that it is not covered by the treaty, but I refer them to page 66 of the Euratom treaty. Line 2 clearly states that the very same radioisotopes, technetium-99m and molybdenum-99, are covered by the treaty. We cannot make those in the UK, so if we are to import them—that is the only way we can get them—they are covered by the treaty. Will the Minister agree with the industry that that is at risk and also reassure cancer patients that diagnostics and treatments will not cease?

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan]

No, I am going to make some progress.

Any future negotiations on whatever membership of Euratom we might have—I hope that it is full membership, but there could be associate membership—must include the Scottish Government, as they are dealing with the regulation of nuclear facilities in Scotland. Some people have talked about putting our own regulatory framework in place. Of course, we could get our own regulations in place, but the problem is that the clock is ticking, we do not have a lot of time and producing these frameworks takes many years, not 20 months. That is a real issue.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned medical isotopes. The Euratom Supply Agency ensures the security of supply of medical isotopes for all members of Euratom. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) gave us some statistics. She said that 500,000 diagnostic scans and 10,000 cancer treatments are carried out annually as a result of those isotopes. However, we cannot produce our own medical isotopes and must therefore import them. Medical isotopes have very short half-lives, which means they need to be transported quickly, and there are only a few facilities in the world that produce them. A number of the reactors that produce medical isotopes are coming to the end of their useful lifespan, which means that in future there could be real problems with their supply worldwide anyway. This is not the time to take ourselves out of the agency that ensures that we have a supply.

[Layla Moran]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the real issue with these radioisotopes is that their half-lives are so short that any delay in getting them to the UK—even hours—means that they will have expired?

[Carol Monaghan]

As a fellow physics teacher, the hon. Lady will know that something such as technetium-99, which is used in medical diagnostics, has a half-life of six hours, which means that after 24 hours it is pretty much useless, or its activity has dropped to a level that makes it inert. These isotopes must be transported and used very quickly after they are produced.

The hon. Lady has already given us a physics lesson on fusion, so I will not do that, but fusion is a field in which we are world leaders in the UK. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) talked about JET in his constituency. It is one of the world’s most important facilities and one of Euratom’s main facilities, so we need to ensure that funding continues. JET currently receives about £48 million annually. The contract runs to the end of 2018, so we must ensure that pulling out of Euratom does not affect future funding.

We must ensure that transitional arrangements for nuclear safeguarding, trade and funding are in place until the EU-UK negotiations are complete, and that should be done with the full consultation of the nuclear industry and community. We need to retain our membership of the European observatory on the supply of medical radioisotopes and continue to work with Euratom and global partners to mitigate any shortages of medical isotopes. We need to ensure that Euratom funding for our nuclear research projects continues. Finally, the UK Government must involve the Scottish Government at every stage of the negotiation process, to ensure that the deal reached works for Scotland’s nuclear industry as well.