My Lords, I realised when I saw my position in the batting order here that most of what I was going to say would have already been said, although I am somewhat astounded by what is coming out just now—what the noble Lords, Lord Whitty, Lord O’Neill and Lord Carlile, said—that we may not have had to get into this mess. I had thought that our membership of Euratom was, legally, tightly linked to our membership of the EU and that it was inevitable that we would have to leave Euratom. If that is not the case then somebody has made a very major blunder. I hope the Minister will be able to sort out for us whether we needed to leave Euratom, because I cannot imagine anybody supporting that.
I decided to speak today because I am convinced that nuclear power is going to be essential if we are to meet our carbon targets, and to sustain our nuclear power in the long term we are going to need a nuclear R&D programme. To explain my interest, I have spent a lot of time supporting nuclear R&D in this House as a past member and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee. I am therefore well aware of the importance of our membership of Euratom and of the need, after Brexit, to find the means to sustain what that membership provides. Related to that, I also retain the hope that the challenges of harnessing fusion power will in the end be met, and our membership of the international projects driving fusion forward also depend on our membership of Euratom. Both the future of nuclear R&D and fusion research are closely related to our membership of Euratom.
I realise that the Bill addresses only the issue of nuclear safeguards. I found this early in my reading, in a simple paragraph entitled, “What the Bill doesn’t cover”:
“The Nuclear Safeguards Bill only makes provisions for Euratom’s role on nuclear safeguards. Euratom however has a number of functions including regulating the civil nuclear industry, disposal of nuclear waste, ownership of nuclear fuel, and research and development”.
I would rate those things as outranking our safeguards by about 10 to one, but the Bill dodges them. It is being thrown into that overall confusion of what we are doing to negotiate our position in the EU.
Getting back to the Bill, I support the Government’s two-track approach to providing safeguards for our nuclear plants, but I naturally hope that we can follow the first track and find a way to remain a member of Euratom, rather than having to rely on the alternative of providing the capabilities ourselves. The Bill provides the means of establishing our own capabilities in the area of safeguards. This is going to be expensive—even this, as has been realised—and I believe that new inspectors are already being hired and trained. However, it is not going to be possible to train the inspectors to the level that they can maintain the current high standards in the long term without maintaining a competitive and up-to-date research and development programme. Nuclear technologies, along with all other high technologies, are going to continue to change rapidly. Advanced reactor designs are already being worked on, as are small modular reactors, and the knowledge of how to maintain safeguards for these new systems will require an up-to-date understanding of their operation. This can be obtained only through direct involvement with the engineers who actually design and build these systems. Either we have these engineers working on our projects, or we are members of the international community—presumably Euratom and perhaps the IAEA—and have access to the latest data from other countries.
As I have mentioned, there is also the vital issue of nuclear fusion. As we all know, we are leaders in this technology through our work on the Joint European Torus at Culham. For more than three decades we have maintained world leadership in this research. In addition, we have been major partners in ITER, the large international project in the south of France, where a fusion reactor capable of generating electricity is being built. At Culham we have also pursued research into new, smaller fusion reactors. These are known as spherical tokamaks, where the reactor chamber is not a torus, or doughnut, but spherical. This geometry has been shown to be three times more efficient and there are hopes that this may make smaller reactors than ITER feasible. There is also a commercial company in the UK developing this type of reactor. If we are forced to leave Euratom, we will lose the funds necessary to continue all this vital fusion energy research, which would be a major tragedy, perhaps not in the “dagger in the heart” category but almost there. We lead the world in precious few scientific or technological fields but this is one of them. It would be a complete tragedy if we jeopardised this project in any way.
In conclusion, I ask the Minister to reassure us that the Government will give the same priority to maintaining a competitive nuclear R&D programme as to establishing our own ability to provide the safeguards necessary to maintain our existing and already planned nuclear plants. This will be essential if we are to be able to assess our own power plants in the long term and to remain competitive in fusion research, which has the potential to solve many of the world’s energy problems.
6.01 pm