Energy Bill

I want to put forward a rather different case from that made by Government and Opposition Front Benchers. In the last analysis, the Government's case for nuclear was that it was needed to keep the lights on and to help Britain to meet its climate change commitments. The Government also said that that could be achieved without any public subsidies—that was repeated today—and that the waste problem would be perfectly manageable. Sadly, it is clear from the evidence that all four of those statements are very far from true. First, nuclear power cannot keep the lights on because reactors take too long to build. The Government's consultation conceded that even under their accelerated procedures, it would take at least eight years for construction to start. The consultation then assumed a five-year construction period. Optimistically, the earliest time at which a new nuclear power station could operate would be 2020, but that would be too late because, by then, there will be an energy gap in the order of 20 GW, which is the new electricity capacity that will be needed to replace obsolete nuclear and coal plants. No nuclear station has been built on time or on budget in recent times. The average reactor takes three times as long to build, and costs twice as much, as was planned. My hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) referred to the plant in Finland, which is the only plant to have been built in Europe in a decade. It is already two years late—there has only been two years' building—and it is something like £1 billion over budget, even with substantial subsidies from the Finnish and French Governments. It is not true that nuclear will keep the lights on when it is needed to address the energy gap between 2017 and 2020. Secondly, it is false to claim that the only way in which we can slash our carbon emissions while delivering energy security is by building nuclear power stations. Nuclear cannot do that because half our energy demand is for heat, which is mainly gas-based, and the next biggest demand is for transport, which is mainly oil-based. Electricity generation, which is where nuclear comes in, represents the smallest component of energy demand, and new nuclear would be a small portion of that. At present, nuclear supplies only 3.5 per cent. of our total energy and that figure is falling. Thirdly, the Government say that there will be no hidden subsidies. Well, I wish that were true, but it is clearly not the case. Paragraph 3.73 of the White Paper indicates that the Government intend to put a cap on the cost of decommissioning for nuclear operators and then to provide a mechanism for the taxpayer to meet the cost. Paragraph 3.52 is the real give-away when it says:"““If the protections we are putting in place through the Energy Bill prove insufficient, in extreme circumstances the Government may be called upon to meet the costs of ensuring the protection of the public and the environment.””" Those circumstances will not be extreme because the costs of decommissioning after 150 years—the time between the start of a new nuclear plant and point at which the waste is finally put in a geological repository—cannot be estimated. Those costs could increase exponentially. The bill for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is more than £70 billion and, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a further £20 billion will be required for the disposal of waste. I remind hon. Members that those figures together are the equivalent of 7 per cent. of our entire gross domestic product. Even those sums leave out two important liabilities for the public purse, one of which is what happens if a nuclear plant goes bust. That is not a figment of the imagination because let us not forget that when the nuclear holding company British Energy went bankrupt a few years ago, the taxpayer had to pay £5 billion to bail it out. The other liability arises because the Government and the taxpayer will always remain the last-resort insurer in the case of a large nuclear incident. Again, that is not a figment of the imagination, because paragraph 2.66 of the White Paper admits that"““we cannot dismiss the risk””." In the light of all that, it is frankly disingenuous to suggest that there are no hidden subsidies.