Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I very much respect the expert opinion of the noble Lords who have tabled this amendment. I share their concern about whether the ONR is going to be sufficiently staffed in time, with enough appropriately qualified experts who can quickly take up all the safeguarding duties. It is also essential that the ONR should have the necessary budgets and organisation and enough duly authorised persons in order to carry out its duties. I should like to hear from the Minister that he is satisfied that this will be the case.

I should also like to ask the Minister exactly what our status is going to be during the interim or implementation period, assuming that we have managed, before March 2019, to put in place an IAEA-approved safeguards regime. This is unlikely because I think we will need most of the implementation period till the end of 2020 to establish and enter into the new NCAs, at least with our principal nuclear trading partners. Many of them have to go through their own legislatures and we have no means of guaranteeing how smoothly this will be done. I think we can be confident that it is equally in their interests to make sure that they continue the appropriate arrangements with the United Kingdom as a major player in the nuclear sector.

I feel that the noble Lord, Lord Broers, and the other noble Lords who have tabled this amendment, fail to recognise that there is an upside from our leaving Euratom. It has been suggested that it is a mistake, and that we could have remained within Euratom but left the EU. Even if this were so—and I do not know whether I believe it or not—I think there are good reasons why we would do better to have our own safeguards regime approved by the IAEA and to escape from the rather cumbersome and onerous Euratom process.

Other noble Lords were present at the briefing given by Mr Colin Parker of EDF. I have also been told by Dr Pat Upson, former director of BNFL and Urenco and former chief executive of ETC—the joint venture between Urenco and EDF—that there could certainly be advantages to the UK in having an independent safeguards regime and not seeking to replicate Euratom safeguards which concentrate too much on complicated verification processes and are less robust than IAEA requirements on process, procedures and controls.

There are those who believe that our security in this very sensitive sector will also be enhanced if we are not obliged to share all the details of our research and development programme with the 27 members of Euratom. There is, therefore, a considerable upside. Euratom is also too expensive. To replicate Euratom’s safeguards regime does not provide extra safety or security over what is required by the IAEA. I therefore have some reservations about proposed new subsection (3)(c) of the noble Lord’s amendment regarding the necessity to continue to share research and development entirely with the Euratom community.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am inclined to clap a hand on my head and express my utter amazement at the absurdity of this aspect of the Brexit agenda.

We are at present attempting to mitigate the deleterious consequences of a wholly unnecessary programme of the Government for leaving the Euratom consortium. The present amendment, which is supported by all other parties, foreshadows an inevitable outcome. The programme to leave Euratom will not be fulfilled by March 2019, when we shall formally leave the European Union, and the Government will have to bid for extra time. A similar amendment ought to have been brought forward by the Government. Their need to demonstrate their faith in Brexit may have prevented their doing so. Indeed, they have fostered some dangerous delusions. At the outset, the Government evinced an unreasonable optimism in the ability of the ONR to have the necessary security arrangements in place by March 2019. They have since become convinced that they will be able to negotiate a meaningful transition period thereafter from which our nuclear industry could profit. I believe that, notwithstanding recent events, it is far from certain that a workable agreement on a transition period will be reached. Certainly, a secure agreement has not yet been reached.

The Government also have an unjustified optimism regarding the likelihood that the necessary nuclear co-operation agreements, or NCAs, will be in place in time to avert a crisis in the supply of nuclear fuels and engineering materials. Without these NCAs in place, the generation of our electricity by nuclear power and the construction of the new nuclear power stations are likely to grind to a halt. Let me elaborate on these three points in the order that I have raised them, albeit that, in doing so I am conscious that I will repeat some familiar arguments. It is necessary to do so in the face of the obtuseness of the Government.

First is the question regarding the readiness of the ONR to assume the burden of nuclear safeguarding by March next year. Doubtless the Minister will attest that the ONR has declared that it is willing and able to undertake the task, and that it is working hard to meet the deadline. One is bound to retort, “It would say that, wouldn’t it?” But it has also said much else besides, which makes it abundantly clear that the best that it could achieve by that date is a threadbare organisation that would be severely understaffed. These honest admissions on the part of the ONR of its incapacity do not seem to have registered fully with the Government. However, they may have registered with other agencies that participate in the international nuclear regime. I am thinking of the foreign organisations that will require that we should have a proficient nuclear safeguarding regime in place if they are to continue to be our suppliers.

Next, there is the Government’s optimism regarding the likelihood of our being granted a lengthy transition period to ease the demands of Brexit. We have heard a statement recently from Michel Barnier to the effect that he sees a prospect for a rapid advancement of the negotiations, but he has insisted that all this depends on the precondition of an arrangement regarding the Irish border. I wonder how this sounds in the ears of the responsible government Ministers. Have they been listening more to the upbeat tone of the delivery of the message than to the preconditions that it asserts? To many listeners the message serves only to increase the anxiety that there will be no viable transitional arrangements.

The final point to make concerns the nuclear co-operation agreements or NCAs. The importance of enacting these in good time has been stressed repeatedly by EDF, which is the owner of Britain’s existing fleet of nuclear power stations and the constructor of the first of what is planned to be a new fleet. These are surely the people to whom we should be listening. The NCAs can be established only when there is a viable UK nuclear safeguarding regime in place. There is likely to be a considerable hiatus between the time when a new UK nuclear safeguarding regime is up and running and the enactment of the necessary NCAs. The Government have said nothing about how they would accommodate the inevitable delays. As many have mentioned, one is mindful of the fact that a new NCA with the United States will require to be ratified by the Senate. This could be a hazardous and lengthy process. The US has a nuclear industry of its own. Someone in the US legislature might be minded to promote the commercial interests of the American industry at the expense of ours and at the expense of the French, who own our nuclear power stations. I believe that this amendment foreshadows an inevitable outcome. The Government will be bound to take the steps proposed in the amendment.

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[Viscount Trenchard]

My Lords, I welcome Amendment 6, proposed by the Minister. It makes a lot of sense but I do not think the House would be wise to support Amendments 7 or 9. Amendment 7 is about collaboration with Euratom in future in research and development and the import and export of qualifying nuclear material. I think we will benefit from greater flexibility by making our own decisions about research and development and committing our own funds. Of course Euratom will be an important and continuing partner for us in nuclear but we will be freed of the obligation and in the position where we will own our own research material, which of course in the JET and ITER programmes we do not. We should caution against overoptimism on what ITER is likely to bring; I understand that there is considerable scepticism in the industry about whether it is really worth the massive amount of money that it costs, and that there is some chance of a demonstration operation by 2045 if all goes well. If we were to commit funds to SMR research, by contrast, in which we in this country have several notable qualified players, we would own the outcome and could get ourselves back into the lead in nuclear by selling our new technology to others. We would have greater flexibility and the freedom not to be committed—

[Lord Fox (LD)]

I remind the noble Viscount that the two are not mutually exclusive.

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[Viscount Trenchard]

I accept what the noble Lord says but if you are bound to commit, through the Euratom programmes, to a greater amount of funding for the sector as a whole, that could effectively mean that you were constrained in what you do on your own. I am not saying we would not wish to contribute or to continue to participate, but it would be our decision on whether we participated or not. We would recover the right to make decisions and to apply our research and development funds, which we would then own in so far as they were invested in programmes that we were running independently.

On Amendment 9, I do not see the need for the taxpayer to have to fund a further independent reviewer. The IAEA will ensure that we follow the approved safeguarding regimes, check and verify our safeguards regime and ensure that we work only with verified customers.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support Amendments 7 and 9, and I compliment the Government on Amendment 6. I remind the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, that scientific research, in this area or anywhere else, is now overwhelmingly collaborative. If you do not get in the game collaboratively, you find that some of your best researchers and ideas are rapidly transferred abroad to someone else who is much more interested in collaborative research. We have moved on from being a Great Britain that does all this stuff ourselves to being a collaborative, global, international participant in research, including in this area. That is one of the reasons why I support Amendment 7; I think it takes us in the right direction. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Broers, whose amendment last night I sadly missed, will want to say a bit about that.

I am really pleased that we have come back to talking about medical isotopes and having a report that keeps Parliament up to date in that area. There is huge concern outside this House about whether the supply chains around medical isotopes will be sufficient to cope with the needs and demands of NHS research and NHS patients.

On Amendment 9, after the last debate that we had before the vote, you would have to be one of life’s perennial optimists—I am not a Liberal Democrat so I do not join that particular club—to believe that everything is going to be okay by March 2019. I suggest to the Minister that he might find it useful to have an independent reviewer who can make independent reports to Parliament to convince sceptical parliamentarians such as me and, I suspect, a few others in this House that good progress is being made on some of the critical issues. That is why I support Amendments 7 and 9.