European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Broers Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

Follow that, my Lords. If the theme of my noble friend’s previous debate was frustration, the word on my mind is bewilderment. On the first group of amendments, which we spent many happy hours discussing, there was considerable debate about whether the public, in voting to leave the EU, were aware that the Government would interpret that as a decision also to leave the single market and customs union.

Whatever noble Lords’ view on that is, I doubt very much that anyone who voted in that referendum understood that one of the most perverse outcomes of the Government’s approach to negotiation would be summarily to announce that the UK was leaving Euratom. This body has enjoyed an excellent track record over many decades. It was established by the European Coal and Steel Community as far back as 1957, around the time of the first civilian nuclear reactors. It has provided secure access to nuclear materials and technology for peaceful purposes. It has provided research, including co-ordinating funding for world-leading nuclear fusion research, much of which takes place in the UK at Culham. It safeguards nuclear material to ensure that it is being used for civil purposes, in line with our non-proliferation responsibilities. It facilitates free and frictionless trade in nuclear goods, services and people, including regulating the supply of isotopes used in nuclear medicine.

Why is the UK leaving Euratom? This was formally outlined in the Explanatory Notes to the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017, but the reasons for leaving have not been specified. The most likely speculation is because it sits under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, although the ECJ has never, as far as I know, been called on to make any pronouncements in relation to Euratom.

What are the consequences of leaving? I would identify four, and refer noble Lords to the work of the Institute for Government. First, we will have more difficulty ensuring a long-term supply of nuclear fuel to the UK. Secondly, we risk an immediate shortage of medical isotopes. Thirdly, we may no longer enjoy access to research facilities and funding. Finally, the UK will have to establish its own regulator with regard to nuclear proliferation, which will be both costly and challenging.

Let me pick up just two points there: first, interruptions to the supply of medical isotopes. Leaving Euratom risks breaking a series of time-sensitive supply chains which supply isotopes used in nuclear medicine. This is causing a lot of concern to people in the health service. Currently, Euratom facilitates free trade of nuclear material across the EU. This gives a secure and consistent supply. It is used extensively in diagnosing particular diseases and in the relief of pain, particularly in palliative care, and biopic analysis in clinical pathology.

The UK does not have any reactors capable of producing these isotopes, and they decay rapidly, often within a matter of hours or days, so we rely on a continuous supply from reactors in France, Germany and the Netherlands. History suggests that crises in supply can occur. It happened last in 2008-10. That meant that hospitals across Europe had to delay or cancel hundreds of thousands of medical tests. In response, Euratom’s supply agency was given a more prominent role in overseeing the supply chains and ensuring that the crisis did not occur again. Without the support of Euratom, the UK may find it harder to guarantee a supply of these materials to hospitals.

Pressed on this in the Second Reading of the Nuclear Safeguards Bill, which is a parallel piece of legislation that your Lordships are debating at the moment, and which will have its first day in Committee—oh, joy—tomorrow morning, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, who it is good to see in his place, said that,

“changes to our customs arrangements after our withdrawal from the European Union could ... affect the timely supply of medical radioisotopes”,

that the Government were working to minimise that risk and that he was confident that,

“a future customs arrangement with the European Union that ensures cross-border trade in this area is as frictionless as possible”.—[Official Report, 7/2/2018; cols. 2026-27.]

I think anyone who has heard this afternoon’s debate would question the noble Lord’s optimism. He is an eternal optimist, I know, but the reality is that, given the current state of negotiations, and the failure of the Government even to reach an agreement among themselves on what negotiation outcomes should be, this is a very risky prospect indeed.

The final point I want to make is that the Nuclear Safeguards Bill essentially enables the Office for Nuclear Regulation, one of our very own regulators, to take over Euratom’s vital non-proliferation nuclear safeguarding responsibilities. However, because Euratom is doing such a good job, the Government want us to leave Euratom but to remain in total alignment with the standards set by Euratom, even though we are no longer a member. You could not make it up if you tried. But more than that, having said that they want to stick to Euratom standards, they cannot do it because of the precipitate date of March 2019, by which time the ONR has no chance whatever of recruiting enough inspectors to meet those Euratom standards. So what they have decided is that we will not be able to accord to Euratom standards; we are going to accord to the standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency. According to evidence given by the ONR to the Public Bill Committee on the Nuclear Safeguards Bill a few weeks ago, that means that there is a lower standard and less frequency of inspections.

Everyone agrees that Euratom is a good agency and that its standards are high—higher than overall international standards. The Government themselves say that they want to stick to Euratom standards, although we cannot have any influence over them in future, but we cannot do that in 2019 so we will have to live with lower standards until we can actually recruit the number of inspectors that we need. That is plain daft. It is quite clear that we should stay in Euratom. If we cannot do it, we should make sure statutorily that we are as aligned as we possibly can be.

All of us noted Mrs May’s comments on the European arrest warrant recently, where she accepted that there was a role for the ECJ. What I say to the Government is that Euratom works really well and that, for the sake of a theoretical involvement of ECJ, surely even at this late moment, it is time to accept that the wrong decision has been made and that it would be much better if we stayed within Euratom. I beg to move.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I did not speak at Second Reading because I thought that the decision to leave Euratom was tied irrevocably by law to our withdrawal from the European Union. I discovered, while participating at Second Reading of the Nuclear Safeguards Bill—as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has mentioned—that it was in fact a political decision. I still do not know who made the decision but I regard it as a very serious and damaging mistake, and that is why I wish to support this group of amendments. We should do everything we can to avoid the disastrous consequences of leaving Euratom.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Broers Excerpts

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

Moved by

[Lord Broers]

227BK: After Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—
“Implementation of agreements reached with the EU on nuclear research and development
(1) Before exit day, the Secretary of State must publish a report which includes the details of any agreements reached with the EU on the United Kingdom's continued participation after exit day in—(a) extensions of the JET project;(b) the ITER project;(c) research into advanced nuclear fission reactors;(d) any other research undertaken by Euratom.(2) In addition to the report described in subsection (1), at the same time, the Secretary of State must make regulations providing for the implementation of any agreements described in the report.(3) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (2) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, when the Minister replies eloquently as she always does, could she try to explain to the Committee why in all our mini-debates on this issue and on the nuclear safety Bill, the Government have still not come forward with a coherent written explanation for their decision to leave Euratom? Why have we not been written to about this, despite repeated requests in this House, and when will the Government face up to the fact that they are doing this purely for ideological reasons without any clear explanation whatever?

[Lord Broers]

I want to point out two things in response to the noble Viscount. First, I have introduced this amendment because research and development was ruled by the Public Bill Office to be outside the remit of the safeguards Bill, so it had to be brought here. Secondly, the fusion projects are large and collaborative; they are not projects where we can decide what we want to do and where we want to do it. We would be hopelessly underresourced if we did not join these European projects. That is why we have to join them. At the moment, we are major players in them and have always been so, but we have relatively small resources. ITER costs €13 billion—it has to cost that amount. It is certainly worth that amount. It is a tiny fraction of what we spend on energy, but, unless we collaborate with the other nations in this project, we will be nowhere.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, I recall many years ago in private practice acting on the instruction of the late Lord Weinstock to fix the price of Hunterston A. At that time, we were in the very lead of nuclear energy development. I regret to say that I have the feeling that we are slightly less in the lead now than we were then. I do not have anything like the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Broers, but I want to emphasise the need to ensure the important place of nuclear energy in our future plans.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Broers]

My Lords, I am encouraged that the Government are going to be conscientious and provide all these updates. I wonder whether one of these updates might satisfy my amendment. In light of what the Minister has said, while I am still minded to hang on to this issue—I have been pursuing it for a long time with a lack of any success, but that does not mean I will not hang on to it—for the moment, with the permission of the House, I beg to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 227BK withdrawn.