It is no longer for political reasons. Proliferation arguments have been set aside for a long time. The Koreans would not be knocking their socks off to try and do this if there was a technology they thought was good enough lying there untouched.
We have to be realistic. There is no question that I am an enthusiast for nuclear power but I also live on planet Earth. This planet is governed by rules of economics which the noble Viscount probably knows more about than I do. These technologies are, to a large extent, not proven in a commercial context for the generation of electricity. There are arguments about whether or not you should be using plutonium and how it can be dealt with. These are understandable but they are yesterday’s arguments. Today’s concern is producing reactors which can do the job at a reasonable price, efficiently and safely. At the moment, these
criteria have not been met. If they had, the Japanese and Koreans would have the full-blown fast breeder on the table.
We know that there have been these things. There is a case for thorium but, as I understand it, the reactor in India produces 40 megawatts of power at the moment and it has quite a way to go. Some years ago I was fortunate to host a conference when a group of Indian technologists came over and described their work. It was fascinating but it was still small scale: I could compare it to carbon capture and storage. An enthusiast will tell me that somewhere in the world there is carbon capture and storage on a big scale but nobody has yet been able to find a way of developing it in an economically efficient manner.
Within 10 to 15 years we will probably have this kind of thing. Is Britain in a position to either contribute to this process or properly benefit from it? This is where the Science and Technology Committee report was highly critical of Government for not taking this seriously enough, over a number of years; this was not a coalition-specific charge. The previous Government, when they woke up to the requirement to embrace nuclear, understandably did a number of commendable things in terms of training and widening the opportunities for nuclear to be part of university engineering qualifications. Something like 13 university courses across the UK offer that, which is an achievement which is down to both Governments’ active encouragement. However, we still have a long way to go. We have a national laboratory at Sellafield which is not getting the funding it merits. This was the view of the Science and Technology Committee. Professor MacKay, the scientific adviser to DECC, who was before the committee last week but we have yet to get Michael Fallon, the Minister responsible, who will come before us after the recess.
Without getting too specific or hung up on particular technologies within the nuclear framework, it is essential that if we are going to take advantage of the new technologies as they come through we have got to have trained, capable people to do that. At the moment, I am not certain that the Government are giving it the highest priority and that is what this debate should be about. We could go through the specifics of Select Committee reports but that is not productive. If we are going to have this technology it is not a once-and-for-all thing. It is not like combined cycle gas plants which just need a little tweaking here and there. There are possibilities for bigger changes but, in order to invest in the right and most appropriate one, we must have a skilled labour force and institutions and research establishments capable of dealing with that. As someone hinted, we need to have an open-mindedness in the industry which, at times, it does not have—because they are very much companies wedded to particular technologies, as EDF is. It is just unfortunate in some respects that the company that is first to the starting line is the one that in the European context uses the least reliable technology in terms of construction, and probably the most expensive to run. If we get a strike price, as we will eventually, it will have to be set in such a way that it does not provide the more efficient and perhaps cheaper technologies with a chequebook to make fabulous amounts of money out of. I realise that
that is the predicament that the Government have, but we must not just keep saying, “We don’t have a UK capability—we’re dependent on foreign countries”. The technical changes that will come through in the medium term will be such that it would be a tragedy if we repeated the failure of the 1980s, the 1990s and the noughties in terms of getting the proper people and technical capabilities.
We do make reactors in the United Kingdom; we make them for our nuclear submarines, and they are made by Rolls Royce. If a proper programme was developed, one would imagine that Rolls Royce would be interested in getting into the new generation of nuclear technologies. There are companies within the United Kingdom that have the capability to take advantage of this, but they need encouragement from government more than anybody else.