Draft National Policy Statement for Geological Disposal Infrastructure

Lord Fox Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and an honour to follow three such distinguished and wise speakers. I find myself in the rare position of not considering myself to be a Luddite, although I will perhaps speak in a way that sounds like it. To give your Lordships a little context, I shall burden the Committee with a bit of biographical detail, for which I apologise. For nearly 15 years, I worked for Schlumberger, which, as many of you will know, is the world’s largest reservoir evaluation company and has provided much of the technology that has evaluated those wells that have been drilled to date, in terms of working out what is going on below ground. Subsequently and for a much shorter period, I worked for the privatised part of UKAEA. This is not a declaration of interest nor is it a claim of expertise; it is to explain where I am coming from and what my disposition is.

Schlumberger taught me that reservoir evaluation and downhole logging is an inexact science. Even when you are as good as Schlumberger, you are always wrong, so you never really know what is going on down there. Working in the nuclear industry was a more salutary experience. For example, the facility at Dounreay went from being in the white heat of technology to being virtually a white elephant inside a generation. It demonstrates how neglected things become once they stop being new. By the time I was in the industry, plutonium pellets were washing up on Dounreay beach and people could not account to me how many there were and where they were coming from.

The issue of geologic disposal has been around for about 40 years—almost as long, I think, as the Minister has been in the House of Lords. As we have heard, many Governments have sought to solve this problem and stepped back from doing so. So why now and with this Government? New nuclear has been mentioned on a number of occasions. It offers the prospect—if “offers” is the right word—of a great deal more material to be disposed of and, clearly, the decision to go ahead with new nuclear was predicated on the assumption that there would be downhole geologic storage. However, we should also remember that this new nuclear stuff will be hanging around on the surface for a very long time and the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, about addressing some of the surface storage issues as well is something that I would ask the Minister to consider.

I want to make a point on semantics that may cast me in a Luddite mode. We use the term “disposal”—I have used it several times—but of course what we are actually doing is not disposing of it; we are either burying or hiding it. We are concentrating the hazard and putting it in a place where it will remain more or less for ever and to all intents and purposes it will be toxic to organic life for ever. So it is not disposal, it is hiding it by putting it in a downhole cupboard, closing the door and hoping that it stays shut.

The evolution of this quest has been referred to by other speakers, but in the beginning the primary mover was geology. We have heard a little bit about geology but I am going to come back to it again in a moment because after flirting with salt and indeed clay, which would be the London solution, the focus came down on to granite because it was seen to offer the best opportunity to make a seal. Permeability, as the Minister knows, is the extent to which fluid can flow through a rock. Granite is more or less impermeable, but as two of the previous speakers have mentioned, it is susceptible to fractures and faulting. Fractures facilitate the movement of water, and I think that generally everyone agrees that that is a very bad thing. A campaign involving boreholes which looked in that direction was started, having been based on the geological rather than the sociological opportunity. Even then, volunteers were called for to some extent, and as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Judd, the focus was quickly on west Cumbria, or an area that we could call greater Sellafield. I am sure that it is to the Government’s regret that the geology of the areas proved to be less hopeful in prospective terms than they had hoped. The point made just now about fractures and water flow is completely apposite. It was apposite then because it started to put people off and it remains very central to the suitability of this location.

At the time, the Government met with a lot of planning objections when they tried to drill prospective boreholes in England and Scotland. The reclassification as a national infrastructure project changed that, which I suspect was the objective of making the change. It is possible that it made it easier for the proponents to get the opportunity to drill prospective wells. Part of that process has necessitated the Appraisal of Sustainability Report, produced by Amec Foster Wheeler. I know that the Government have welcomed the report in their draft policy, but there are two obvious and significant diversions. First, the report sets out some key considerations that any repository needs to follow. There is a list and then there is a description. The Government just about pick out that list, although inexplicably they have changed the order so that water comes lower down it than other issues. However, there is a significant difference when it comes to the geology. The report states:

“The geologic formations around the engineered facility will isolate and contain the radioactivity for a very long period, thus preventing any harmful amounts of radioactivity being released into the environment in future”.


That is clear. The Government’s equivalent sentence in the same place at the bottom of the list is:

“The stable geological setting (rock) in which the facility is sited”.


I put it that stability and sealing are fundamentally different, and there was knowledge of that when those words were changed because it opens up different available geology.

Secondly, on a point already clearly alluded to, the appraisal of sustainability report explicitly recommends that national parks be omitted from the process. The Government do not accept this, as we know. As we heard, the Select Committee pointed out that,

“despite the Appraisal of Sustainability report concluding that an exclusionary criterion would have the most positive effect, the Government decided against excluding National Parks and AONBs on the grounds that it did not ‘wish to foreclose future possible locations that could be more advantageous in addressing safety over the lifetime of the facility’”.

In his response the Minister, Richard Harrington, told the Select Committee that,

“the Government were not in favour of exclusionary criteria as they would preclude proposals from communities who may be interested in hosting GDI and that would have been designated to minimise the environmental impact”.

It is very clear where the Government are pointing their eyes on this occasion—on national parks. This is not an accident.

I mentioned that when the west Cumbrian studies were done there were two possible exceptions where there might been slightly more advantageous geology. Both of those exceptions, Eskdale and Silloth, are in the Lakes and in a national park. It is not hard to see what is going on in the clockwork brain of the Government for where they think the answer to this problem is. That is why the speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Liddle, were so important.

So, to date, the principle of community consent has led us to only one place. As we know, it did not get very far, but as the Minister set out, we now have seven-figure bribes to back it up. I have two problems with this. First, it is immoral, and secondly, it fails to recognise what the community of these particular areas is. First, why is it immoral? It is because it is the reverse effect of demutualisation, which crystallised the values of centuries for one generation looking back. This crystallises value for essentially one generation looking forward. What about subsequent generations? Do not forget that this will be here for thousands of years, probably right until the end of the existence of our species. Despite saying that there will be money every year, the Minister cannot speak for Governments going forward. Quite frankly, using the Dounreay example, interest will fade.

Secondly, who is the community in this? The noble Lord, Lord Judd, alluded to this. Groundwater does not respect county council barriers—as far as I know that is the problem. Also, who is the community in the case of a national park? I declare an interest: I spent a lot of my youth running up—or crawling up and down—the mountains of the Lakes. If it is a national park then I am part of its community, but I will not be consulted. Indeed, a very small number of people will be, relative to the population of this country.

Time is passing, but I have a couple of other points. One technical point is that I sense that the technology for this is depicted as a one-way street: we put it in and we cannot get it out. It seems inexcusable that we create something that we cannot reverse. There has to be the technology to reverse this if we find that there is a problem. We should not go down this one-way street without the ability to come back.

Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, raised investing in future research. Time has moved on. There has been further research. Frankly, if we threw as much resource that needs to be put into building this repository—or indeed a fraction of that resource—into future research into ways to use this material, I feel sure that we could elicit results. I would like an undertaking by the Government that they will invest in the current surface technology—the holding tank, if you like—to make it safe and not use it as a reason for hastening downhole disposal, and that they will invest in real future technologies.

The Minister talked about technical feasibility and dismissed all other technologies as not being technically feasible. I am not clear that this is technically feasible. I know that it is the preferred option, and it is kind of more understandable because it is about building something, so therefore we think it is technically feasible. As my noble friend pointed out, we know that digging a tunnel under London is pretty difficult. It is technically feasible, but it is very difficult and very expensive. Technical feasibility is an interesting phrase to use because most things are technically feasible if you throw enough money at them. Once again, how much money makes this technically feasible and does that in the end make it economically unfeasible?

Going back to my point about Dounreay—I am sorry to mention it—how is this facility going to be operated? Who is going to be in charge? How is it going to be managed? This matters. The draft national policy states:

“Implementing geological disposal, including identification and characterisation of potential sites, is the responsibility of the developer, working in partnership with a community”.


Bearing in mind that the Government expect this site to be active for 150 years and then to be sealed for many thousands of years, who do the Government envisage being the developer and the operator of this site? Again, this matters. We need to know what is happening a generation ahead because we can see what happens when we do not have a plan. What are the financing and the funding for this going forward? It is not just how much money we spend on building it, it is the operational expenditure because once we start clipping back on the operational expenditure, that is when we start to have problems. Let us face it: is this a private sector operation or a public sector operation? Carillion could not run a hospital for six years, so who is going to run this for 150 years and then several thousand years? How on earth do the Government plan to put in place the institutional support to deliver a functioning facility for generation after generation? Perhaps the Minister can describe to me in a few words—there is no need to go into every detail—how this will be done.

The Select Committee in the other place produced a very useful report, but I had one quibble with it in that it stated that safety trumps all. I understand why the Select Committee said that, and safety is vital, but environment is also very important and there should be a double key, not a single key, on this issue. It is about safety and environment.

Finally, the Government have yet to convince that this is a route we should be taking. They have to restore the geological imperative to isolate and contain because without that they are being extremely disingenuous, and they need to rule out national parks, as per the sustainability report which they themselves commissioned. They should make safety and environment the double lock for further progress. They should undertake to make the repository reversible rather than a one-way street and demonstrate good faith by continuing to invest in research into alternative options for reprocessing and decontaminating this waste. They should explain how this site is going to be operated and managed. Until these points are addressed, it is impossible to support the process going forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

I am not going to speculate on what exactly will be found to be suitable—I will give way in a minute if the noble Lord, Lord Fox, will let me answer the question. As the noble Lord made clear, it is not the most exact science. We have to find a suitable area and it might be that it can be adapted in some ways. I cannot speculate on that; it must be a matter for future processes. It is not only the community involvement that we are looking for; it is also getting the geology right. Then we can move ahead.

[Lord Fox]

I was actually rising to help the Minister. The answer is in the appraisal of sustainability report, which specifically states that the geology should,

“isolate and contain the radioactivity for a very long period”.

That wording is dropped in the national policy statement and is replaced merely by “stable”. Will the Minister confirm that the imperative to contain and isolate remains the Government’s definition of the correct geology?

[Lord Henley]

I am fairly sure that that will be the case. I congratulate the noble Lord on spotting a marginal difference in the two—the noble Lord speaks as a greater expert than I am. I would be grateful for the opportunity to write to the noble Lord in greater detail. It is important that we get these things right. That is why I have made it quite clear that no decisions have been made. This is not an attempt to impose something on Cumbria that it does not want; it is not something to impose on the Thames Valley—I am thinking of community involvement in Staines or Heathrow or wherever. It is not something that we are proposing. We want to find somewhere with the right geology and the right community involvement.