Nuclear Research and Technology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, Britain needs to continue to generate a substantial proportion of its electricity from nuclear power. The supply of electricity will need to increase considerably to accommodate the electrification of transport and the continuing decarbonisation of our energy resources.

The growing volume of wind-generated and solar-generated electricity, which is affected by a wide variability, will need to be underpinned by baseload generation, which has to come from nuclear power. At present, nuclear power provides some 18% of our electricity. At the peak in 1997, 26% of the nation’s electricity was generated from nuclear power. Since then, numerous reactors have closed, including all the original Magnox fleet. The older AGRs, or advanced gas-cooled reactors, built more recently, have been life-extended, and further life extensions across the AGR fleet are likely.

In 2010, when the coalition Government came to power, we seemed set to build a new generation of nuclear power stations. The then Government were prepared to construct up to eight new nuclear power plants and keen to consider the proposals of any willing provider. Those who expressed an interest included the French company, EDF, and the German companies, E.ON and RWE. However, in consequence of the Fukushima disaster of March 2011, the German Government decided to abandon their own nuclear power projects. This led to the withdrawal of the two German contenders, leaving EDF alone to build the power station at Hinkley Point.

In March 2012, E.ON and RWE put their Horizon joint venture up for sale, and it was eventually purchased by Hitachi in November 2012. From 2010 until 2015, the policy of the Government was that the construction of any new nuclear power stations in the UK would be led and financed by the private sector. By 2015, faced with the collapse of the programme to build new nuclear power stations, the Government proposed to provide large subsidies to the Hinkley Point C plant, paying twice the market rate for electricity. It appears nevertheless that the Government still adhere to the belief that the nuclear programme should be largely self-financing. They seem to have lost the will to face up to the realities of what is needed to secure the future of our electrical power industry.

There is a strengthening opinion that we can do without additions to nuclear power beyond the eventual contributions of the Hinkley C power station. This delusion has been encouraged by the growth of renewable power generation and by its declining cost. There is also a belief in some quarters that we can overcome the intermittency of the renewable power resources by relying on an interconnected energy market which will enable us to draw our power from the wider European community. It hardly needs to be said that Brexit threatens that ambition. It also needs to be understood that electrical connections to the continent of Europe cannot be expected to compensate greatly for the variability in our own power supply. The uniformity of the meteorological conditions over a wide European area implies that, at times, there will be a universal dearth of the supply of renewable electricity. At such times, it would be very expensive to acquire our power via a wider European market.

The report of the Science and Technology Select Committee does not hesitate to express dismay at the Government’s delay and indecision in confronting the needs of our future electricity industry and of its nuclear component. There are two immediate priorities. The first of these, which has not commanded much attention in the report, is for the Government to provide sufficient support and encouragement to the Horizon consortium to enable it to proceed with its plans to build new reactors at Wylfa and Oldbury, which were the sites of the last two Magnox reactors to be built. The final investment decision is yet to be made by the consortium, and it will depend on the financial support of other parties, which will join the enterprise only if they can be convinced that favourable terms will be forthcoming from the Government.

The second priority, to which the report pays considerable attention, is the lack of progress in the competition to determine the design for a small modular reactor—SMR—which could be deployed extensively in the UK and which could also be aimed at overseas markets. As we have heard, the Government announced the competition for a small modular reactor in March 2016, and it was expected that phase 1 of the competition would be completed by autumn 2016, with the publication of a road map. We are still waiting for that. Meanwhile, some UK companies have invested heavily in developing their solutions. I am told that, without a clear government road map, those companies will have to decide by the end of year whether to continue to invest in SMRs or to walk away. Should they walk away, Britain will lose much of our nuclear competence—in which case, we would have to rely entirely on foreign suppliers for our nuclear equipment. That would be an extraordinary outcome for the nation that was the first to create a civil nuclear power station.

These are the demands of the immediate future. However, there are demands and opportunities that lie further in the future to which we should also be paying attention. Perhaps the foremost of these requirements is for a means of disposing of our nuclear waste. The indecision of which the report talks has severely afflicted the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority—the NDA—which has responsibility for decommissioning the sites of the original Magnox power stations and for the disposal of their waste.

There have been three options for waste disposal with which the Government have been confronted since they acceded to office in 2010 and on which they have failed to make a decision. The first option, which was rejected in the past by a previous Conservative Government, is to bury the waste in a secure depository. The second option is to partially burn the waste in a version of the Canadian CANDU reactor, which can be described loosely as a slow breeder reactor. This reactor has a far more powerful digestive system than the conventional civil nuclear reactors. The third option, which proposes a more fundamental solution to the problem of waste, is to burn it in a fast reactor, of which the Hitachi PRISM is one of the most capable of being realised within an acceptable timescale. The PRISM reactor would be able to profit from an abundant supply of nuclear fuel—the stock of plutonium residing in the UK. In this way, what has long been regarded as a nuclear hazard would become a major asset.

The problem of radioactive waste is not an inevitable accompaniment of nuclear power generation. It affects the fast reactors to a much lesser extent than the conventional second- and third-generation reactors, which are preponderantly pressurised water reactors which consume only a limited proportion of the available uranium fuel. The predominance of such reactors is because, at its inception, nuclear power was dominated by military rather than civil demands. The pressurized water reactor was required for military marine propulsion. It displaced another early design, which would have been much more appropriate to civil purposes. This alternative design, which had been tried and tested by the 1960s, was a molten salt reactor for which the fuel is an abundant thorium isotope. It has the virtue of passive safety; it would never have been implicated in accidents such as the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl incidents, or the Fukushima meltdown. Its waste products are far less hazardous and long lasting than those of conventional reactors.

I believe that, if the UK were to become involved in the development of a molten salt thorium reactor, its future as a leading nuclear nation would be assured. For that purpose, we would need to regain some of the technological courage that characterised our nuclear industry in the early post-war years. We should also need to depend upon public investment in the project and to seek a partner in the enterprise, which might be another European nation.