Viscount Hanworth
Main Page: Viscount Hanworth (Labour - Excepted Hereditary)
Viscount Hanworth
My Lords, as we have been reminded today and, indeed, in a previous session of the Committee, an installation providing an intermittent supply of electricity cannot be expected to stand on its own. It must be accompanied by an ancillary installation designed to supply power when the primary installation cannot provide enough. This can be either a storage system that can capture the power of the primary installation when it is in excess of the current demand, or it can be a means of importing power from a region where it happens to be in surplus or from another power plant that can be deployed rapidly to meet the deficit. The latter is currently the most common recourse and the ancillary plant is likely, nowadays, to be an open-cycle gas turbine installation.
In that case, given that the plant has a significant carbon footprint, it is liable to subvert the virtue of emissions-free renewable generation. For that reason, we ought seriously to consider other options. In fact, it has been asserted that the upper limit of the proportion of a nation’s electrical power that can reasonably be expected to be supplied by intermittent renewable sources is about 20%. This figure is well within the aspirations of the European Union energy directives. The EU aims to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Whereas renewables include wind, solar, hydroelectric and tidal power as well as geothermal energy and biomass, we imagine that the preponderance of the power will be from wind turbines.
Let us put aside the question of importing power from afar, which was discussed yesterday in Grand Committee, in order to concentrate on the matter of energy storage. There are two principal means of energy storage that appear to have the greatest potential for development. The first to be considered is a system of reservoirs and dams. At times of low power demand, water can be pumped up to the reservoirs. When demand peaks, it can be released and passed through turbine generators. Approximately 70% to 85% of the electrical energy used to pump the water into an elevated reservoir can be recovered, so this is an efficient affair in terms of energy conservation. The technique, so far at it has been pursued, has also proved to be a cost-effective means of storing large amounts of energy, but high capital costs are entailed in creating such facilities, and they depend on the existence of an appropriate geography.
The most visible leading example of pumped storage in the UK is the Ffestiniog reservoir and dam in north Wales. One of the largest facilities, which is also the least visible, is at Dinorwig, in north Wales, where a huge reservoir sits in a hidden cusp in the mountain. There is currently a peak capacity in pumped storage in the UK of around 2.8 gigawatts, which is about half the installed capacity for wind-powered generation. There is potential for an increase in capacity, albeit that the associated costs are uncertain. The Department of Energy and Climate Change conducted a hydropower resource assessment for England and Wales in 2010 but not, it seems, for Scotland, and there is much that needs clarifying.
It should be noted that, in the UK, the volatility of electricity demand is greater than in any other country. The reason for this lies in the electric kettles that satisfy the tea drinking urges of our citizens, which are closely linked to the evening schedules of our television programmes. Much of our pumped storage capacity is devoted to meeting the resulting spikes in electricity demand and the reaction of the system to the conditions of demand can be almost instantaneous.
Viscount Hanworth
“Nuclear Research and Development
( ) The Secretary of State must seek to foster Research and Development in nuclear technologies, including—
(a) advanced fission and alternative fuel cycles; and(b) profitable ways of employing Britain’s stock of plutonium in generating electricity.( ) The Secretary of State must report to Parliament annually on the progress made on these issues and any necessary changes to the legal remit of the NDA in furtherance of these aims.”
Viscount Hanworth
Throughout the Committee’s debates, one vital element has been barely mentioned—the future of Britain’s nuclear energy. Without the prospect of major investment in nuclear energy, the nation’s energy policy makes no sense and the Energy Bill is virtually meaningless. The lack of debate about Britain’s nuclear programme has been a reflection of its uncertainty. The Government are still in protracted negotiations with the French state-owned monopoly EDF—Électricité de France—which in reality represents, at present, the only means of achieving new investment in nuclear plant. For reasons of political ideology, allied to fiscal anxieties, the Government are loath to finance the investment. They are relying on EDF to raise the necessary funds from the financial markets, which are currently in a parlous state. The company, in turn, sees an opportunity to recoup some of its recent losses in projects elsewhere at the expense of the British taxpayer. It can look to the examples of foreign national rail companies, which are recouping their losses by adopting rail franchises in Britain. It hopes that it can follow suit.
With such a prospect in view, one might expect greater eagerness on the part of the company to strike a deal. In a previous debate on the subject of Britain’s nuclear programme, one of my colleagues voiced the opinion that our Government were in a strong negotiating position and that they should therefore stand their ground. That is a misjudgment. EDF has other prospects in view, in China in particular, and the scale of those Chinese projects will far exceed anything that is on offer in Britain. Moreover, the company’s expenditure in Britain to date in connection with the prospective Hinkley C nuclear power station is no guarantee of their commitment.
According to an economist’s nostrum, bygones should be bygones, while according to an alternative version of the dictum, one should not throw good money after bad. The Government are therefore advised to have a properly conceived and well publicised plan—a plan B, as it is usually described—to meet the eventuality of a breakdown in the negotiations. There is a strong suspicion that the Government have a plan B, albeit a covert one, given that an influential faction within the Government appears to believe that Britain’s impending energy deficit can be overcome by a dash for gas that would rely on supplies of gas that could be magicked out of the ground beneath our feet.
We have been feeling the effects of the Government’s schizophrenic attitude throughout the debate in Committee on the Energy Bill. The schizophrenia is not unique to Britain but has been severely affecting Germany’s energy policy, which accounts for the fact that the German energy companies that originally intended to bid for nuclear contracts here have withdrawn, The nuclear schizophrenia has also made some inroads into the policies of the French Government.
In this country, we are already seeing strong opposition to the prospect of fracturing the ground in order to extract gas. The short-tem expedient of relying on natural gas to power our generating stations would be in utter contradiction to the avowed intention of decarbonising our energy supplies.
A further reason for the Government’s reliance on foreign utilities to realise their nuclear ambitions is the attenuated state of our nuclear industry. A recent report by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords bore witness to this state of affairs. It recommended that drastic action should be taken to revive the industry and foster its research and development. The consequence of the report was flurry of activity that gave rise to a cluster of government reports centred on the so-called Beddington report that reviewed the civil nuclear research and development landscape in the UK.
Some of us have recently witnessed a resurgence in the optimism of the proponents of Britain’s nuclear industry. There is a strengthening feeling that the time is right for a nuclear renaissance. There are outstanding technical opportunities to be grasped for a generation of nuclear reactors that will succeed the reactors currently being built around the world.
Current reactors are conventional uranium reactors, mainly of the pressurised water variety, which follow the designs of the majority of the original civil reactors, albeit that nowadays they have greatly enhanced safety. There is, however, strengthening conviction that the succeeding reactors should take a new route that proceeds from a design that was realised in prototype form almost at the inception of the civil nuclear age. This is the thorium-based molten salt reactor. It has the signal advantage of using abundant fertile thorium fuel in place of fissile uranium fuel. In contrast to a uranium reactor, a thorium reactor will generate very little of the problematic wastes that afflict conventional reactors. It is also endowed with passive safety, which is to say that a malfunction leading to overheating the reactor would lead to its automatic shutdown. The reason why such a design was not adopted at the beginning of the nuclear age is that the reactor has one signal disadvantage which today is one of its major advantages —it fails to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Now is not the occasion to describe the technology in detail. However, some Members of this House are very well apprised of the details. They constitute the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, which is closely allied to the Weinberg Foundation. The foundation has a mission to expound the virtues of thorium technologies as well as to support nuclear technology and nuclear power in general. Those who are interested or curious should visit the websites of the APPG and of the Weinberg Foundation, which contain a wealth of information and are readily accessible.
There are other reactor designs we should also be considering, including fast breeder reactors. Notwithstanding some negative anti-nuclear propaganda that was aimed at them, fast breeders are eminently practical devices. The PRISM fast breeder reactor of the GE Hitachi company has been proposed to our Nuclear Decommissioning Authority as a way of profitably burning our stock of 120 tonnes of plutonium that resides at Sellafield. The authority has been given the task of recommending the best way to dispose of the stockpile, which was once regarded as a menace. Now it is being seen as a valuable nuclear resource which could power efficient and cost-effective ways of meeting our electricity demand.
Originally, it was proposed to bury the plutonium waste. Then it was thought that it could usefully be converted into a mixed oxide fuel for burning in conventional reactors. The emphasis appears to have shifted in favour of either the PRISM fast breeder as a means of burning the plutonium or the alternative Canadian CANDU reactor, which might be described as a slow breeder. It is because of this shift of emphasis, which implies a widening of the discretion of the NDA, that I believe that its original terms of reference, which were set out in the Energy Act 2004, need to be modified.
In 1954, the American physicist, Lewis Strauss, predicted that atomic energy would eventually make electricity “too cheap to meter”. That is the correct attribution of the quotation. He may have had in mind fast breeder reactors, which effectively create their own fuel, or he may have been thinking of power generation by hydrogen fusion. Either way, his vision, or something close to it, is still in prospect. We might therefore ask why, after the rapid progress at the start, the goal is still so distant. There are several answers to this question. One of them points to the nuclear phobia associated with nuclear weaponry, which has been exacerbated by nuclear accidents. However, the nuclear accident at Fukushima, which has created a major impediment, has little bearing on the question of the safety of a new generation of reactors.
There is also, in this country at least, the effects of a failure of the technological courage that once characterised the nation which we urgently need to recover. The effect of the demise of the scientific Civil Service has been experienced throughout the course of our deliberations in this Committee. The bright young people of DECC do not have the resources or the skills to deal competently with the complex matters that we have been considering. They have had to rely extensively on outside consultants. I hope that this will change in the near future. That is no criticism of them; it is a criticism of the circumstances in which they find themselves. I hope, too, that the injunction in my amendment that the Secretary of State should report to Parliament on an annual basis to give an account of his activities in relation to nuclear technology will provide some stimulus and will compel his to grapple with these issues.
I conclude by mentioning an article in the Engineer of 5 October 1956, the eve of the opening of the Calder Hall power station, Britain’s first nuclear power station. The article recounts that it took three and a half years from conception of the project to its realisation. This is the time that will have been spent in negotiations with EDF regarding the proposed Hinkley Point C reactor. The contrast with the snail’s pace at which we proceed nowadays is astonishing. The glory days of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and of the establishment at Sellafield—or Windscale, or whatever you care to call the place—are long since gone, but there is still an opportunity to recover some of the spirit of those times. I beg to move.
Baroness Worthington
My Lords, I will briefly speak to this amendment. I declare an interest as a patron—unremunerated—of the Weinberg Foundation. I also helped to establish the all-party parliamentary group to which my noble friend Lord Hanworth referred. I will not wax lyrical about the benefits of thorium and closed-cycle breeder reactors because I think we are all getting a little tired now as we are very near the end, but I understand the sentiment behind this amendment. I am particularly interested in the latter part of it, which requires the Government to report on,
“any necessary changes to the legal remit of the NDA”.
The reason why I am interested in that is that we have an opportunity here, in considering what we do with our plutonium stocks, to mark a new era in nuclear fission. That shift from seeing the plutonium as a liability that is just costing us money—which it is at the moment, to be honest—to seeing it as an asset that can be exploited to generate low-carbon electricity is, I think, just upon us. Soon it will be there, but we are not quite there yet.
My fear is that there is, quite understandably, a high degree of conservatism—with a small C—in the industry. There is a tendency to stick with what you know and not to do anything risky or to look beyond your immediate priority. The NDA does an amazing job of managing the process of decommissioning our existing nuclear sites, and I just hope that, when it considers what to do next with the plutonium stocks, it will consider in the round and will not be encumbered by a preponderance of doing only what it knows best and sticking to what it has seen previously. If it does that, I fear that once again we will be building a very expensive MOX fabrication plant, for which there will be probably no known customers by the time it is built. Certainly, the PWRs that are being built by AREVA and EDF will not wish to take it. It is much better for them to use newly fabricated fuel while it is available. That will be the “do nothing”, “stick to the plan”, “keep going as we are” strategy.
I am delighted that, in addition to those, new ways of approaching this problem have now been put forward by different industry representatives. My noble friend Lord Hanworth mentioned the PRISM reactor, GE Hitachi’s breeder reactor and the CANDU reactor from Canada. There has been quite a lot in the media about the PRISM reactor, but much less about the CANDU reactor, which is potentially an excellent solution. CANDU reactors are very flexible, are a tried and tested technology developed over many years by the Canadians, and have a very big investment arm behind them. It is a very viable project. There you get the advantage of building not just a fuel disposition solution but a reactor to provide clean energy. Given the precarious—or perhaps protracted—negotiations with EDF over Hinkley, it is very clear that we need to have a plan B. If we just switch our frame of reference to consider the plutonium stocks as an asset and then exploit them to maximise the production of electricity and minimise the production of waste, it will point us to a novel solution that would open up great benefits to the UK. I hope that the department, in the advice that it gives to the NDA, will consider this in the round and consider whether we need, perhaps, to rethink the remit of the NDA.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I welcome the amendment and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, is to be congratulated on giving us an opportunity to debate this matter. In many respects, if in the nuclear industry we had been able to get things started at Hinkley right away, we probably would have been committed to different reactors from the ones that are now coming along as opportunities. There is therefore some virtue in a degree of delay in the process. However, both PRISM and CANDU have to go through the generic design assessment process, which could take up to 30 months although, in fairness to the regulators, they have suggested that they will try to accelerate that by using foreign experience and so on.
We are talking here about a nuclear programme of construction that will continue for probably 30 years. As someone once said in the context of school dances, “You rarely went home with the person you danced with first”. In this context, we may well find emerging technologies that provide us with opportunities. At the moment we have to be realistic about the fast breeder element in the technologies that have been spoken of this afternoon—they are somewhat limited. When I was chairing the Nuclear Industries Association, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Paris that was meant to be a shop window for the French nuclear industry. I think that the French were a bit miffed when Japanese and South Korean companies came forward and spoke very confidently about their capacity to realise fast breeders in what will now probably be 15 years’ time. We did not go down the road of fusion today, which every schoolboy knows will be available in 35 years’ time; 35 years ago, they said it was going to be available in 35 years’ time. We therefore have to be a wee bit cautious about fast breeders, but we could be talking in terms of getting one in the United Kingdom perhaps 20 years from now, when we will probably still be building—
Viscount Hanworth
Perhaps I may interject. The truth of the matter is that we have already had a fast breeder in the UK that worked fairly well, in spite of rather diminished support. There were two fast breeders in France. There was Phénix and Superphénix. Phénix was very successful. There were some doubts about Superphénix, which had some engineering difficulties. However, its primary difficulty was, of course, political. I will reassert what I said previously, which is that fast breeders constitute an eminently practical technology. They are not 15 years away, but are as far away as it would take to ratify and certify them.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
This is a classic example: if it was that good, why are we not using it?
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
It is no longer for political reasons. Proliferation arguments have been set aside for a long time. The Koreans would not be knocking their socks off to try and do this if there was a technology they thought was good enough lying there untouched.
We have to be realistic. There is no question that I am an enthusiast for nuclear power but I also live on planet Earth. This planet is governed by rules of economics which the noble Viscount probably knows more about than I do. These technologies are, to a large extent, not proven in a commercial context for the generation of electricity. There are arguments about whether or not you should be using plutonium and how it can be dealt with. These are understandable but they are yesterday’s arguments. Today’s concern is producing reactors which can do the job at a reasonable price, efficiently and safely. At the moment, these criteria have not been met. If they had, the Japanese and Koreans would have the full-blown fast breeder on the table.
We know that there have been these things. There is a case for thorium but, as I understand it, the reactor in India produces 40 megawatts of power at the moment and it has quite a way to go. Some years ago I was fortunate to host a conference when a group of Indian technologists came over and described their work. It was fascinating but it was still small scale: I could compare it to carbon capture and storage. An enthusiast will tell me that somewhere in the world there is carbon capture and storage on a big scale but nobody has yet been able to find a way of developing it in an economically efficient manner.
Within 10 to 15 years we will probably have this kind of thing. Is Britain in a position to either contribute to this process or properly benefit from it? This is where the Science and Technology Committee report was highly critical of Government for not taking this seriously enough, over a number of years; this was not a coalition-specific charge. The previous Government, when they woke up to the requirement to embrace nuclear, understandably did a number of commendable things in terms of training and widening the opportunities for nuclear to be part of university engineering qualifications. Something like 13 university courses across the UK offer that, which is an achievement which is down to both Governments’ active encouragement. However, we still have a long way to go. We have a national laboratory at Sellafield which is not getting the funding it merits. This was the view of the Science and Technology Committee. Professor MacKay, the scientific adviser to DECC, who was before the committee last week but we have yet to get Michael Fallon, the Minister responsible, who will come before us after the recess.
Without getting too specific or hung up on particular technologies within the nuclear framework, it is essential that if we are going to take advantage of the new technologies as they come through we have got to have trained, capable people to do that. At the moment, I am not certain that the Government are giving it the highest priority and that is what this debate should be about. We could go through the specifics of Select Committee reports but that is not productive. If we are going to have this technology it is not a once-and-for-all thing. It is not like combined cycle gas plants which just need a little tweaking here and there. There are possibilities for bigger changes but, in order to invest in the right and most appropriate one, we must have a skilled labour force and institutions and research establishments capable of dealing with that. As someone hinted, we need to have an open-mindedness in the industry which, at times, it does not have—because they are very much companies wedded to particular technologies, as EDF is. It is just unfortunate in some respects that the company that is first to the starting line is the one that in the European context uses the least reliable technology in terms of construction, and probably the most expensive to run. If we get a strike price, as we will eventually, it will have to be set in such a way that it does not provide the more efficient and perhaps cheaper technologies with a chequebook to make fabulous amounts of money out of. I realise that that is the predicament that the Government have, but we must not just keep saying, “We don’t have a UK capability—we’re dependent on foreign countries”. The technical changes that will come through in the medium term will be such that it would be a tragedy if we repeated the failure of the 1980s, the 1990s and the noughties in terms of getting the proper people and technical capabilities.
We do make reactors in the United Kingdom; we make them for our nuclear submarines, and they are made by Rolls Royce. If a proper programme was developed, one would imagine that Rolls Royce would be interested in getting into the new generation of nuclear technologies. There are companies within the United Kingdom that have the capability to take advantage of this, but they need encouragement from government more than anybody else.
Viscount Hanworth
I am distressed by the inertia, the lack of vision and the dilatoriness of the Government and particularly of those agencies of government that have to deal with our technological future. I feel sure that we will come back to these questions time and again and will do so until we get some satisfaction. That may be a long time coming but in the mean time I will, of course, withdraw my amendment.