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8.27 pm
Mr. David Chaytor (Bury, North): I welcome you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to your new appointment.
I found the Select Committee report extremely interesting. It reflects great credit on my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil (Mr. O'Neill) and his colleagues on the Committee. I pay tribute to him, to the way in which he introduced the debate, and to the measured way in which he balanced the various arguments that must be considered.
My first point is little to do with the BNFL PPP itself; it is to do with the process by which Parliament has considered the issue of BNFL and the whole nuclear industry over many years. I find it remarkable that, given the size of the industry, the number of people employed in it and the economic impact in many parts of the United Kingdom, particularly the north-west, where my constituency is located, there has been so little debate about and scrutiny of BNFL and the rest of the nuclear industry in the past 30 years.
I think that the rot set in--it must be said--in 1979. In the 1970s, under Governments of both parties--the 1970-74 Government and the two Labour Governments who followed--there was considerable debate about the industry, but once we got into the 1980s it was almost as if Government and Parliament abdicated their
responsibility completely. That is important. It says something about the way in which we as a nation and as a Parliament deal with questions of science. I would draw analogies with the way in which we have dealt with BSE, and the way in which we are struggling to deal with GM technology, and perhaps even with stem cell research.There are serious lessons for the Government--who are, I know, taking the matter seriously--for Parliament and for all of us as Members of the House about how we deal with scientific issues. We have tended to find them difficult and to run away from them. We have tended to assume that science was best dealt with by the scientists. That has been the root cause of many of the problems of public policy in recent years--certainly in the case of BSE--and of many of the difficulties that BNFL and the nuclear industry have experienced.
There is a wider issue relating to public policy. In Britain, our tendency is to exclude debate once a line has been agreed. If we look back at the history of BNFL, particularly the history of THORP and reprocessing, there is no question but that a consensus was established, arguably driven by the needs of the Ministry of Defence to generate stocks of plutonium in the earlier years of the cold war. The consensus was established by the figures that mattered--the scientific establishment, the MOD and the sponsored department of the Department of Trade and Industry--that THORP and reprocessing were the way forward.
Because that was an investment of such enormous size and scale, even though other voices were arguing against it, the juggernaut of the political, military and industrial establishment could not be stopped. If we look back now over the past 20 or 30 years, we will see that that was one of the most gigantic mistakes of public policy that any Parliament has made. If we were going back to the 1970s, would we go ahead with THORP and start again with reprocessing? I suspect not. There are serious lessons to be learned about the way that we, as a democracy, handle complicated issues of science.
Representing a constituency in the north-west, I know that this is an important and sensitive issue for many of my hon. Friends, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham). I have the luxury of not having a nuclear establishment in my constituency, although I have companies that supply the nuclear industry. That luxury perhaps allows me to be a little more detached and dispassionate about some of the issues relating to BNFL than might otherwise be the case.
There is an enormous paradox about BNFL. As many of my hon. Friends have said, the company undoubtedly contains one of the largest concentrations of scientific expertise anywhere in the world. As a hugely enthusiastic supporter of British science and of the need continually to extend the boundaries of scientific research, I want that body of expertise to thrive. The proposal that we are considering, for a PPP with 51 per cent. of the shares remaining with the Government, is an effective way of achieving that, subject to certain conditions.
However, the industry has been incredibly dishonest, hugely damaging in environmental terms, and hugely profligate with public funds. We must recognise that billions and billions of pounds of taxpayers' money have gone into subsidising the nuclear industry over the years, and will continue to subsidise it throughout the next century. That is an extremely important point. It explains why BNFL has liabilities of £27 billion in its accounts.
There is, therefore, the paradox of that aspect of the industry, and the enormous technical expertise attached to it, which is vital to the future of this country, to the many employees in the north-west, and, to many countries throughout the world, because nuclear clean-up and decommissioning is a burning issue not only in the United Kingdom and parts of western Europe, but particularly in the United States and, most worryingly of all, in the former Soviet Union. British Nuclear Fuels has the potential to be a leading player in the programme of nuclear clean-up and decommissioning that is getting under way.
I do not believe--in this, I agree completely with the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell)--that the future of the company lies in reprocessing or in the international plutonium trade. The Select Committee report identified some of the assumptions on which the nuclear reprocessing industry was initially established: the need for plutonium because of the cold war--that may not have been specifically mentioned in the report--the expectation that the price of uranium would rise, and a scenario in which nuclear power would continue to expand, possibly because of concern about oil prices after 1973-74.
One by one, all those assumptions have been proved obsolete. In 2000, it is difficult to see the rationale for nuclear reprocessing. Why do we take spent nuclear fuel from power stations at the other end of the planet, ship it across the world, separate it out and store the plutonium in the north-west of England? I understand that that gives us some advantage in terms of foreign currency, and that it creates employment for many people in the north-west, especially in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland, but we must ask ourselves what we are doing it for, particularly now that the consensus is that plutonium is not an asset, but waste.
The end of the cold war changed the value of plutonium at a stroke. That is why the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords last year recommended that much of the British plutonium stock should be declared waste, with only a small strategic reserve being kept.
We have spoken of mountains of plutonium and molehills of plutonium. Let us get the facts right. We currently have a stock of 60 tonnes of plutonium. By 2015, that stock will increase to almost 120 tonnes. It is all in the north-west of England, on the edge of the Lake district, and it is the biggest concentration anywhere on this planet of the most dangerous substance known to human beings.
Dr. Ladyman: I must tackle my hon. Friend on that point, which he has mentioned twice. There is absolutely no objective criterion according to which plutonium can be described in that way. I can give him the name of naturally occurring, growing substances called lectins that are even more toxic than plutonium. He exaggerates. If he wants constructive scientific debate, as he said earlier--and I fully agree with him about that--we must conduct it on the basis of the facts, not on the basis of exaggeration.
Mr. Chaytor: If plutonium is not dangerous, why have all the leading nations signed the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty precisely to reduce stocks of plutonium and to eliminate the risk of the theft of plutonium and the obtaining of plutonium stockpiles by terrorist groups? Other substances may well be equally dangerous, but plutonium remains one of the most dangerous substances on the planet, which all the leading nations of the world, including the United Kingdom, are determined to ensure is stored safely to avoid proliferation. It is difficult to appeal to other countries to control their stocks of nuclear weapons while we generate more and more stockpiles of plutonium.Reprocessing does not have a future. The Select Committee's report is right to recommend that the Government make their policy on reprocessing clear. It would have been better had the previous Government done so, in which case we might not have been in quite the mess that we are. On the other hand, it would make sense for the Government not to do that, and simply to allow market forces to take their course. If anything will bring the reprocessing industry to an end, it is the partial privatisation of BNFL.
Dr. Jack Cunningham: My hon. Friend talks as though successive British Governments had somehow been reckless. With regard to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, all the safeguards in respect of that and Euratom are in place at Sellafield and have been for a long time. My hon. Friend also talks as though only Britain did reprocessing, and that if we stopped doing it at Sellafield, reprocessing would somehow go away. He should bear in mind the fact that the Japanese have just awarded 650 tonnes worth of reprocessing business to the French at Cap de la Hague.
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