Nuclear Technology

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Viscount Ridley]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the relative merits of different forms of nuclear technology.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to introduce this debate on the merits of nuclear technologies, and I thank other noble Lords in advance for taking part in it.

I start from a position of great perplexity. I read and hear a lot about different nuclear technologies—fission or fusion, uranium or thorium, light water or heavy water, salt or metal, water or gas, pressurised or boiling. Although I can follow some of the details, I have not really the foggiest idea which one to recommend or champion. I do not expect the Minister to banish my perplexity, but I hope that this afternoon we may suggest a way to let the answer emerge through a sort of bake-off, if you like.

This topic is important because there is both a strong case and an urgent opportunity for the UK to regain its technology leadership in nuclear power. The only way we will bring down the cost of nuclear technology is with new designs and new ways of regulating them. New technologies change the world not when they are invented but when they get cheap. Computing and air travel have been around for a very long time, but it is only when they became dramatically cheaper that they noticeably increased living standards.

In this respect, nuclear power stands out as a glaring exception. It was invented 70 years ago but has failed to get cheaper. That is why it is currently declining—yes, declining—as a percentage of world primary energy. Imagine if we could make nuclear power genuinely cheap. We would make fossil fuels obsolete, we could stop spending billions of pounds a year on futile and regressive renewables subsidies and we would eradicate fuel poverty and all emissions.

Building stations such as Hinkley Point will not make nuclear power cheaper because we are locked into a very high price for a very long time for the electricity, a price that looked reasonable if you assumed very high oil prices, but in fact oil prices came down. Because Hinkley is one of a kind, there is virtually no chance to get the price down by learning by doing. However, this is not a debate about Hinkley, so I shall stop there.

How do prices come down in other areas of technology? In a phrase, innovation through trial and error. That is what brought down the price of shale gas, semiconductors and air fares. Therein lies the problem. We cannot allow errors in nuclear power, so we cannot allow trials. We build excessive safety in from the start and we overengineer and underinnovate as a result. However, that is not a problem unique to nuclear power. Aeroplane manufacturers have faced essentially the same issue and, thanks to complex system analysis, they have cracked it. They innovate without accidents. So something is wrong with the way we are regulating nuclear.

As Professor Eric McFarland of the University of Queensland wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year,

“what holds back nuclear power is its high cost, which is almost entirely due to government regulations and restrictions that have kept the industry confined to minor yet expensive improvements to existing reactor designs. Out-of-the-box thinking on new reactor concepts that could be far cheaper and safer is systemically discouraged … Today’s light-water nuclear reactors are constrained by government regulations and agencies appropriate for the 1950s to look much like those built for the production of isotopes for weapons—not because these are the lowest-cost power-reactor designs or the best and safest fuel cycles, rather because these are what we have built a gargantuan regulatory framework to accommodate”.

That does not mean that we should lower our safety standards, but it means that the Government should recognise that misregulation is preventing the invention of inherently safer, as well as dramatically cheaper, designs. Whichever country unleashes that nuclear innovation will reap rich rewards. The world is awash with potential designs for better nuclear power plants—molten salts, accelerator driven, thorium, small modular, fast, and so on—but hardly any of them gets beyond the design stage. They remain PowerPoint reactors, in the joke terminology. That is because of the immense cost of getting to the stage of building a reactor, in particular the generic design assessment cost of about £100 million in this country.

I shall focus now on small modular reactors, which hold real promise of getting costs down because of the ability to roll them off the production line and not make each one a unique project. In theory they can slot into egg crates at sites, so as to build up a large capacity in small steps. They can be up and running within a few years, allowing a return on capital and bringing the finance costs within reach of normal capital markets. They can also be located inland rather than on coastal sites.

We are going to hear more, I think, about small modular reactors from a number of noble Lords this afternoon, including the noble Lords, Lord O’Neill and Lord Rees. In short, small modular reactors could do for nuclear what Samuel Colt did for firearms. Interchangeable parts have done amazing things for the affordability of other technologies and they could do the same for nuclear. They could also possibly allow us to experiment with other technologies, because in some ways small modular is not itself a technology but a vehicle for technologies.

However, here is the obstacle. A 300-megawatt small modular reactor faces almost the same general design assessment as a four-gigawatt leviathan, and the same ludicrously long time to qualify—four years or so. That is the hump that the Government have to help them to get over, and that is what is keeping small modular reactors in PowerPoint form. In their response to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee last year, the Government promised to look at the generic design assessment process for SMRs. What fruit has that investigation born?

The National Nuclear Laboratory, in a report last year, concluded that there is a significant global market for small modular reactors valued at £250 billion to £400 billion. It reckoned that there are four technologies for PWR SMRs that could be viable within 10 years. They require £500 million to £1 billion to reach production-level maturity over a period of five to seven years. The report identifies,

“an opportunity for the UK to regain technology leadership in the ownership and development of low-carbon generation and secure energy supplies through investment in SMRs”.

As Candida Whitmill of Penultimate Power wrote in a paper for Civitas last year, we should look at what the US is doing. In January 2012, the Department of Energy in the US announced a competition to incentivise the first commercial SMR, offering $452 million over five years on a 50% match-funding basis for successful projects. It also provided the site at Clinch River free of charge.

Instead of spending £100 billion by 2030, forcing poor people to disproportionately subsidise the incomes of wealthy investors in fringe technologies like wind and solar—I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, was expecting me to say that—let us spend a chunk of money on bringing forward SMRs and on proper, well-funded research into the alternatives, including molten salt reactors, thorium and accelerator-driven designs. We could potentially win a commercial jackpot for the British nuclear industry.

I add one final note on fusion. I know that fusion has been 40 years away for 40 years, but there is good reason to think that may be changing. There is exciting new science, which we heard about at the Science and Technology Select Committee, suggesting that a far lower field strength is necessary because of spherical tokamaks and high-temperature superconductors. Here again, the vital thing is surely to let a thousand small flowers bloom. There is a rash of exciting new start-ups, which threaten to do to public sector fusion what Craig Venter did to genomics 17 years ago—that is, dramatically cut the costs and accelerate the progress. I suspect that we will hear more about this from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, so I will not go on. We are as well-placed as almost any nation to benefit if we take the plunge into new technology in nuclear, but we must consider taking that plunge.