Energy Bill

No; I want to make just a little progress. The context of this issue is the enormous cost of decommissioning and clean-up with which the first generation of nuclear power stations left us. In Committee, we explored the various current costs that the taxpayer is having to pick up from the nuclear installations inspectorate, CoRWM, the potential nuclear financing assurance board, and the big daddy of them all, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The Minister gave assurances that many of those were intended to be covered under the new regime. That is quite a threat to investors, given the cost of the NDA. The net grant-in-aid contribution of the taxpayer to the NDA in 2007-08 is £1.4 billion. That is rising by 8 per cent.—a very good settlement, as many public sector organisations would agree—in 2008-09, and by almost a further 5 per cent. in 2009-10. Therefore, the taxpayer will soon be facing an annual bill of £1.6 billion from the last generation of nuclear power stations. It is brave of the Government to be leading us down the same path a second time. When we listed all the potential costs to the taxpayer, the Minister gave a lot of assurances about which of them were intended to be entirely covered by the regime, but there was one exception: long-term storage and the financial regime covering that, which the new clause addresses. It has rightly been said that there is, in effect, a ceiling to the risk to the private sector and an ongoing liability and risk to the taxpayer. We discussed at length in Committee the various time-scale problems. The hon. Member for Wealden has again raised a lot of the questions, many of them unanswered, such as about how the costs can be predicted or divided. For instance, although the new generation of nuclear power stations may, should it ever come to pass, produce radioactive waste in smaller volumes, it may well be much more radioactive and therefore pose new technical challenges that are different from those facing the repository for the current generation of nuclear power stations. There is also the question of whether we are expecting to take in foreign radioactive waste, as we have done in the past. Are we, in effect, to become the nuclear dustbin of the whole of Europe, or countries further afield, by being one of the few countries brave enough to progress with the idea of repositories? It is tempting to try to apportion proportions of the blank cheque that we think is at risk of being written, but as the Minister has honestly accepted, the problem is that we cannot know the real context in which all this will be decided in 40 or 50 years' time. We are seriously expected to sign up to licence fees for a repository for radioactive waste that does not exist, in a location that has not been found, for amounts that we cannot calculate, and all for power stations that might never be built and that no sane investor would touch with a barge pole. This is nuclear fairyland, and the Minister has an impossible task in persuading us that he can provide clarity and reassurance on this matter.