I welcome the amendment and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, is to be congratulated on giving us an opportunity to debate this matter. In many respects, if in the nuclear industry we had been able to get things started at Hinkley right away, we probably would have been committed to different reactors from the ones that are now coming along as opportunities. There is therefore some virtue in a degree of delay in the process. However, both PRISM and CANDU have to go through the generic design assessment process, which could take
up to 30 months although, in fairness to the regulators, they have suggested that they will try to accelerate that by using foreign experience and so on.
We are talking here about a nuclear programme of construction that will continue for probably 30 years. As someone once said in the context of school dances, “You rarely went home with the person you danced with first”. In this context, we may well find emerging technologies that provide us with opportunities. At the moment we have to be realistic about the fast breeder element in the technologies that have been spoken of this afternoon—they are somewhat limited. When I was chairing the Nuclear Industries Association, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Paris that was meant to be a shop window for the French nuclear industry. I think that the French were a bit miffed when Japanese and South Korean companies came forward and spoke very confidently about their capacity to realise fast breeders in what will now probably be 15 years’ time. We did not go down the road of fusion today, which every schoolboy knows will be available in 35 years’ time; 35 years ago, they said it was going to be available in 35 years’ time. We therefore have to be a wee bit cautious about fast breeders, but we could be talking in terms of getting one in the United Kingdom perhaps 20 years from now, when we will probably still be building—