Nuclear Energy

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot compete with many of the speakers in this debate in their degree of expertise and knowledge on this subject. It has been more like an adult education seminar than a political debate, except perhaps for the last contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which was typically robust and in her own style.

I come to this as a natural supporter of nuclear power, in the first instance, and as a Cumbrian, which I think puts me in a unique position on this issue. I was a natural supporter of nuclear power from what my mother told me when I sat on her knee. She was brought up in a pit village in west Cumberland and her view was that nuclear was wonderful because it meant that people like my father would not have to go down the pit working a 2.5-foot seam in very dangerous conditions and that this would supply us with the power that we need without that dreadful human cost. I took that on board, and I think there are still a lot of people who think like that.

As several noble Lords have pointed out, west Cumberland is the birthplace, as it were, of the British nuclear industry. It is where Windscale and Calder Hall were located. I even remember that when I was at school, there was an accident and we were all told we could not drink school milk for many weeks—which as a child I was very puzzled by—because of the proximity to the activities there. West Cumberland is still the centre of British nuclear skills. All the skills involved in the clean-up at Sellafield are very important. My regret is that we have never managed to internationalise, for instance, the robotics which have been developed to deal with the nuclear waste in the ponds into a global competitive industry, which we should have been able to do. The National Nuclear Laboratory has lots of interesting ideas about the future of nuclear and they should be taken forward, but the tragedy for me as a Cumbrian is that at the moment we do not seem to appear much in the plans for the future of the industry, other than as dealing with waste and the possibility of a long-term waste repository.

The noble Lord, Lord Howell, in his very analytical approach at the start of the debate said that we are at a fork in the road; we could go one way towards big reactors on the Sizewell model or the other way towards smaller nuclear reactors. I rather agree with my noble friend Lord West of Spithead that we should do a bit of both. That seems the most risk-free option. The trouble with Britain is that, when we come to these forks in the road, we dither and argue. We have been stop-start on our nuclear policy for the past 30 years. When the noble Lord, Lord Howell, was Energy Minister, we were pushing ahead with a great programme; it was with Mrs Thatcher’s full support but, at the end of the 1980s, that all collapsed. Labour dithered around for quite some time when we came in in 1997 and then decided that we would go ahead with a big nuclear programme. Then we had the coalition, and the Lib Dems said that they would not allow any public funding of nuclear.

There has to be an element of public funding or public guarantee. No private sector company will undertake totally on its own the risks of construction costs running beyond what was anticipated; nor will they bear the very uncertain risks of clean-up at the end of the life of the station. There must be a public-private partnership of some kind in this area if we are going to get anywhere, but we seem to have dithered about it for years and years.

We have got to the point in Cumberland where the only industrial project that has been touted is a new coal mine, which is absolutely ridiculous. What could be more backward-looking than the idea of a new coal mine in west Cumbria when we have a whole lot of expertise that should be able to contribute to a nuclear revival that must play an important part in the fight against climate change?

We need a plan from the Government. I applaud the idea of setting up Great British energy, or whatever it is called, as it might give some coherence to these issues, but we need a plan. At the moment, there is no plan for energy that relates to the grid, which is a huge, unresolved question. What is our plan for the grid? That needs to be put in place. Much of the plan for the grid depends on where you have the generation. I am not making a party-political point, but a general point that we seem to have dithered a lot on all this. I hope the Minister will tell us that we will now get some action.