Throughout the Committee’s debates, one vital element has been barely mentioned—the future of Britain’s nuclear energy. Without the prospect of major investment in nuclear energy, the nation’s energy policy makes no sense and the Energy Bill is virtually meaningless. The lack of debate about Britain’s nuclear programme has been a reflection of its uncertainty. The Government are still in protracted negotiations with the French state-owned monopoly EDF—Électricité de France—which in reality represents, at present, the only means of achieving new investment in nuclear plant. For reasons of political ideology, allied to fiscal anxieties, the Government are loath to finance the investment. They are relying on EDF to raise the necessary funds from the financial markets, which are currently in a parlous state. The company, in turn, sees an opportunity to recoup some of its recent losses in projects elsewhere at the expense of the British taxpayer. It can look to the examples of foreign national rail companies, which are recouping their losses by adopting rail franchises in Britain. It hopes that it can follow suit.
With such a prospect in view, one might expect greater eagerness on the part of the company to strike a deal. In a previous debate on the subject of Britain’s nuclear programme, one of my colleagues voiced the opinion that our Government were in a strong negotiating position and that they should therefore stand their ground. That is a misjudgment. EDF has other prospects in view, in China in particular, and the scale of those Chinese projects will far exceed anything that is on offer in Britain. Moreover, the Government’s expenditure in Britain to date in connection with the prospective Hinkley C nuclear power station is no guarantee of their commitment.
According to an economist’s nostrum, bygones should be bygones, while according to an alternative version of the dictum, one should not throw good money after bad. The Government are therefore advised to have a
properly conceived and well publicised plan—a plan B, as it is usually described—to meet the eventuality of a breakdown in the negotiations. There is a strong suspicion that the Government have a plan B, albeit a covert one, given that an influential faction within the Government appears to believe that Britain’s impending energy deficit can be overcome by a dash for gas that would rely on supplies of gas that could be magicked out of the ground beneath our feet.
We have been feeling the effects of the Government’s schizophrenic attitude throughout the debate in Committee on the Energy Bill. The schizophrenia is not unique to Britain but has been severely affecting Germany’s energy policy, which accounts for the fact that the German energy companies that originally intended to bid for nuclear contracts here have withdrawn, The nuclear schizophrenia has also made some inroads into the policies of the French Government.
In this country, we are already seeing strong opposition to the prospect of fracturing the ground in order to extract gas. The short-tem expedient of relying on natural gas to power our generating stations would be in utter contradiction to the avowed intention of decarbonising our energy supplies.
A further reason for the Government’s reliance on foreign utilities to realise their nuclear ambitions is the attenuated state of our nuclear industry. A recent report by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords bore witness to this state of affairs. It recommended that drastic action should be taken to revive the industry and foster its research and development. The consequence of the report was flurry of activity that gave rise to a cluster of government reports centred on the so-called Beddington report that reviewed the civil nuclear research and development landscape in the UK.
Some of us have recently witnessed a resurgence in the optimism of the proponents of Britain’s nuclear industry. There is a strengthening feeling that the time is right for a nuclear renaissance. There are outstanding technical opportunities to be grasped for a generation of nuclear reactors that will succeed the reactors currently being built around the world.
Current reactors are conventional uranium reactors, mainly of the pressurised water variety, which follow the designs of the majority of the original civil reactors, albeit that nowadays they have greatly enhanced safety. There is, however, strengthening conviction that the succeeding reactors should take a new route that proceeds from a design that was realised in prototype form almost at the inception of the civil nuclear age. This is the thorium-based molten salt reactor. It has the signal advantage of using abundant fertile thorium fuel in place of fissile uranium fuel. In contrast to a uranium reactor, a thorium reactor will generate very little of the problematic wastes that afflict conventional reactors. It is also endowed with passive safety, which is to say that a malfunction leading to overheating the reactor would lead to its automatic shutdown. The reason why such a design was not adopted at the beginning of the nuclear age is that the reactor has one signal disadvantage which today is one of its major advantages —it fails to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Now is not the occasion to describe the technology in detail. However, some Members of this House are very well apprised of the details. They constitute the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, which is closely allied to the Weinberg Foundation. The foundation has a mission to expound the virtues of thorium technologies as well as to support nuclear technology and nuclear power in general. Those who are interested or curious should visit the websites of the APPG and of the Weinberg Foundation, which contain a wealth of information and are readily accessible.
There are other reactor designs we should also be considering, including fast breeder reactors. Notwithstanding some negative anti-nuclear propaganda that was aimed at them, fast breeders are eminently practical devices. The PRISM fast breeder reactor of the GE Hitachi company has been proposed to our Nuclear Decommissioning Authority as a way of profitably burning our stock of 120 tonnes of plutonium that resides at Sellafield. The authority has been given the task of recommending the best way to dispose of the stockpile, which was once regarded as a menace. Now it is being seen as a valuable nuclear resource which could power efficient and cost-effective ways of meeting our electricity demand.
Originally, it was proposed to bury the plutonium waste. Then it was thought that it could usefully be converted into a mixed oxide fuel for burning in conventional reactors. The emphasis appears to have shifted in favour of either the PRISM fast breeder as a means of burning the plutonium or the alternative Canadian CANDU reactor, which might be described as a slow breeder. It is because of this shift of emphasis, which implies a widening of the discretion of the NDA, that I believe that its original terms of reference, which were set out in the Energy Act 2004, need to be modified.
In 1954, the American physicist, Lewis Strauss, predicted that atomic energy would eventually make electricity “too cheap to meter”. That is the correct attribution of the quotation. He may have had in mind fast breeder reactors, which effectively create their own fuel, or he may have been thinking of power generation by hydrogen fusion. Either way, his vision, or something close to it, is still in prospect. We might therefore ask why, after the rapid progress at the start, the goal is still so distant. There are several answers to this question. One of them points to the nuclear phobia associated with nuclear weaponry, which has been exacerbated by nuclear accidents. However, the nuclear accident at Fukushima, which has created a major impediment, has little bearing on the question of the safety of a new generation of reactors.
There is also, in this country at least, the effects of a failure of the technological courage that once characterised the nation which we urgently need to recover. The effect of the demise of the scientific Civil Service has been experienced throughout the course of our deliberations in this Committee. The bright young people of DECC do not have the resources or the skills to deal competently with the complex matters that we have been considering. They have had to rely
extensively on outside consultants. I hope that this will change in the near future. That is no criticism of them; it is a criticism of the circumstances in which they find themselves. I hope, too, that the injunction in my amendment that the Secretary of State should report to Parliament on an annual basis to give an account of his activities in relation to nuclear technology will provide some stimulus and will compel his to grapple with these issues.
I conclude by mentioning an article in the Engineer of 5 October 1956, the eve of the opening of the Calder Hall power station, Britain’s first nuclear power station. The article recounts that it took three and a half years from conception of the project to its realisation. This is the time that will have been spent in negotiations with EDF regarding the proposed Hinkley Point C reactor. The contrast with the snail’s pace at which we proceed nowadays is astonishing. The glory days of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and of the establishment at Sellafield—or Windscale, or whatever you care to call the place—are long since gone, but there is still an opportunity to recover some of the spirit of those times. I beg to move.