My Lords, I will make some brief remarks in answer to the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. The research we are talking about here is not necessarily just in fusion—it includes fusion, but that is a great big project—but in areas that are ancillary to a certain extent but terribly important. Research is going on everywhere into radioactive waste disposal, but we happen to lead that. I do not think that this defeats the noble Viscount’s ambition—which is my ambition—that our own industry does a lot and gains a lot from that. It also gains a lot from being accepted by the community, so that when our advances come up, others will use what we did. The same is true of radiological protection, which is always a problem with workers around nuclear plants. So it is not just the new reactors, although the one gap in our knowledge is what is happening to the new generation fission reactors beyond the EPRs that people are working on. We really need international collaboration.
With respect to our own ambitions, I entirely support the noble Viscount in terms of SMRs. We are dying to get going—to be specific Rolls-Royce is dying to get going—on SMRs. In fact, Rolls-Royce tells us they are spending £1 million a month keeping that programme alive and waiting for the Government to make a decision on the competition which I hope will come.
Also, in fusion, there is Tokamak Energy. This is a very ambitious small company which feels it can contain fusion in a spherical tokamak, which is a fascinating thing. I should love to spend a lot of time talking about it. It is a very clever and effective way to up the
efficiency of the use of the magnetic field to confine the plasma. So there is more to this research than just a few of the most obvious things. I think that is greatly in support of Amendment 7. I also support Amendment 6. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Hunt, who mentioned this. I think the independent review is designed to help the Government and not be a hindrance.