Nuclear Research and Technology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, for his ever deft chairmanship of your Lordship’s Science and Technology Committee and to its ever helpful staff. I confess that, having left the committee, most Tuesday mornings I now rather pine for our sessions. They were often fun and always fascinating. I declare my fellowship of the British Academy. I have no idea why, but it occasionally looks at the history of civil nuclear power, so I think I ought to.

The question lurking behind tonight’s debate is whether we as a nation have lost our nerve as a serious civil nuclear power. There was a time—when I was a teenager in the early 1960s—when we seemed to be brimming with nuclear nerve, even verve. In 1956, we had become the first nation to provide civil nuclear-generated power into a national grid, when the Queen threw the switch at Calder Hall in Cumberland. As other noble Lords have mentioned, by the early to mid-1960s a fleet of first-generation Magnox stations was coming on stream and they did sterling service to baseload provision over several decades. We also had a plan for the future all mapped out. There was a road map: my noble friend Lord Broers is calling for another one. The second-generation advanced gas-cooled reactors were to fill the gap between the Magnoxes and the fast breeder reactor, whose dome on the prototype site at Dounreay in Caithness stood gaunt but full of promise, looking over the swirling waters of the Pentland Firth, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic. Beyond the fast breeder beckoned the lustrous prospect of nuclear fusion—abundant and clean—which we thought in the 1960s would be transforming world energy about now. Dounreay is being dismantled and cleaned up as we meet and fusion is almost certainly still decades away as a feeder of grids, though I am sure we will get there one day.

Where does the Government’s response to the Science and Technology Committee’s report fit into the wide sweep of UK civil nuclear history? Does it offer the country a fighting chance of leading the small modular reactor generation deploying to maximum and sustained effect our scientific prowess, engineering skills and technological flair? Can we hear a call to arms to restore ourselves as a serious civil nuclear pioneer and pacemaker, no longer reduced, as at Hinkley Point, to buying another country’s technology off a very expensive shelf? Up to a point. Things are moving, but is there enough of what David Lloyd George liked to call “push and go” in Whitehall? I hope there is, that the Minister—for whom I have great respect—can convince your Lordships this evening that there is, and that the cycle of indecision has been well and truly broken.

However, the language of the Government’s reply to the Select Committee report does not exactly glow with a critical mass in the making. There is no ruling out in its prose, but there are tepid signs of ruling in. Let us eavesdrop for a moment on the BEIS draftsmen and women as they crafted paragraph 27:

“As we move to de-carbonise our economy, there will continue to be a demand for the secure, low carbon energy that nuclear provides. This could include energy from SMRs. For example, third generation modular reactors have the potential to play an important role within the near-term electricity generation market, but only if they can reduce costs to a competitive level. While more novel modular reactor technologies offer the potential to deliver major breakthroughs in cost, safety or functionality but are less technologically mature and require further basic research and development support”.


More than a touch of the tentative there, as there is in paragraph 29 with its recognition that:

“Government could have a role in reducing barriers, including on siting and regulatory approvals, which could help de-risk projects and ensuring they are acceptable to the public”.


I counted five coulds in the response to our report.

However, to be fair to Her Majesty’s Government, there is a dash of push and go in paragraph 32. Dealing with the SMR, it declares that:

“We must invest time now to make a strategic decision for the UK—a decision that could have implications stretching many decades into the future”.


Exactly, but can the Minister be more precise than the Government’s response of 13 September, which said that the decision would be taken in the coming months? Paragraph 35 is certainly very welcome, outlining as it does government funding for advanced manufacturing and for the nuclear R&D programme.

I gladly acknowledge that the Government’s reply to the Select Committee report has its touches of pep, but much of it strikes me as a long, weary sigh induced by the feeling that it is all too difficult. I hope that the Minister will sweep this impression away with a burst of brio and enthusiasm and a flurry of reasons to be cheerful. I live in hope.