Nuclear Technology

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, for introducing this debate. I am very pleased to be sitting next to a Lib Dem espousing the nuclear case, on which we have had different debates in the past.

Nuclear power makes a vital contribution to the electrical power around the world. At Dunkirk it also provides heat, which I believe helps the fish farming company of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox. As has been said, the heat from nuclear power stations is also important in the Arctic.

The IAEA estimates that nuclear fission provides 50% of all non-fossil power in the world, excluding hydro-electric. In France, 80% of the electrical power is nuclear, although for political and environmental reasons they want to reduce that to 50%. However, it is still a very high percentage.

Over the past 10 years, there has not been strong public pressure in the UK to maintain the UK as a country with advanced fission technology. That is a great pity. Now, the question for the Government is whether they want to choose nuclear fission for the future. In a sense, they have done so with the announcements made this week. However—this has always caused difficulty for many people who are concerned about nuclear power—they have not been very clear on the question of what to do with the radioactive waste. The current position is that, as in Sweden, radioactive waste will be stored in such a way that it can be retrieved and transformed into a state with a short lifetime. That would be the ideal solution. We should also recall that, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, there have been remarkably few casualties from nuclear accidents around the world, and the number is absolutely minuscule compared with the endless effects of coal, sulphur and particles.

Meanwhile, other technologies with lower levels of waste are being developed. Fusion is the favoured option supported by the UK and Europe. The ITER project is going to cost a lot of money, at $10 billion or $15 billion, but it will be an enormous device. Last week a presentation was organised by the French embassy at the Royal Institution, where we saw a film of this extraordinary great structure already being made. The inner core measures something like 30 metres by 30 metres by 30 metres, and it will produce many thousands of megawatts of power. However, as Professor Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, said at this public occasion, this is an experiment. Of course, it has to be an experiment when it is supported by our German colleagues, who do not want nuclear power. Professor Cowley went on to say, as did his French colleague, that this experiment would turn into practical generation in around 2040 or 2050, which of course are the dates being cited by colleagues in Europe.

An alternative is to produce modular fusion. The early idea from Culham is to have a spherical reactor with a radius of the order of 1.5 metres. To answer the question about power, new physics shows that, as a device, this should be able to produce positive power before 2020 and practical power generation perhaps by 2025. We should remember that there are now a number of small companies in the United States and Canada which are aiming in the same direction, so it is not as though this is a strange British brainchild.

In the UK we have Tokamak Energy Ltd, and I declare an interest as an advisor. This is funded by largely private investors, including, recently, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. This is not a PowerPoint; it is a real project which can be found at the Didcot industrial park, where there are two devices. It is an experiment which is running continuously, thanks to the use of high-temperature superconductors. The point about the ITER project is that it involves low-temperature superconductors, and the amount of energy required to keep the device at an incredibly low temperature is much higher. If a high temperature can be used, the dynamics are very different.

I have a major point to make to the Minister. It is extraordinary that here we have a world-beating British company but DECC does not allow this to be displayed at the IAEA annual conferences. There will be a big one next year on fusion and we are asking him for support, particularly as it is supported by the Government. Of course, there are sensitivities attached to this in that it is a small device compared with the larger ones, but I hope that the Minister can get round it.

The other point that everybody is concerned about is the fact that the UK has a very large amount of fissile material or radioactivity. I believe that in the future we should be motivated by the possibility of having hybrid fusion-fission.