Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-459)
PROFESSOR GORDON
MACKERRON
19 JUNE 2006
Q440 Mr Weir: One final question
on this. You also say in your report that there should be the
minimum transportation of waste. Do you envisage one national
repository to take all waste or do you envisage more than one
to avoid large-scale transportation?
Professor MacKerron: Clearly minimising
transport where possible is an objective. We are not going to
prescribe that there will be only one site, we are going to say
simply that one should minimise the number of sites and, as you
rightly say, avoiding unnecessary transport is one of the issues
in that respect. There are certainly arguments in relation to
security that suggest minimising sites may be a good thing to
do as well. We are not going to pronounce on the exact number
of sites, we are just going to say we minimise the number. The
presumption is the fewer the better.
Q441 Chairman: You referred just
then to "oversight bodies that might succeed us", I
think that was your phrase. Your final recommendations are in
July, presumably there is then a process of discussion with the
Government about those recommendations, but what happens to CoRWM
then after they have either accepted or rejected your recommendations?
Professor MacKerron: It would
be very nice to know. We have got an assurance from Government
and the devolved administrations that we will be kept in existence
at least until November, and possibly December, to answer questions
on our recommendations, to make sure that our audit trail is as
firm as it can be and possibly to initiate some further discussions.
I think it is going to be important for Government to make a decision
whether or not it wishes to pursue our package of recommendations.
There has been an inter-departmental group meeting now for the
best part of a year to think about how the baton can be handed
on, to use an athletic rather than cricketing analogy, from ourselves
to the process that follows. I imagine they will be anxious to
try and make sure there is not discontinuity. We are certainly
very keen that momentum is maintained. We are also very keen to
say to Government that some kind of oversight body with some independent
membership, although of course accountable to Government, should
be set up to help maintain the higher degree of public trust that
I think through CoRWM we have won. We have reasonably well succeeded
in establishing some level of public confidence and stakeholder
confidence greater than when we started and we think it is important
that that be maintained in some way, but Government will clearly
have to make its own decision.
Q442 Chairman: Your draft recommendations
have been in the public domain for some two months now. You must
have a reasonable gut feeling whether the Government actually
likes them or not.
Professor MacKerron: Indications
are that Government is reasonably happy with them, yes. I think
we would have heard by now because we talk regularly to our sponsors.
We are independent, but we are accountable, they are people whom
we have to please in the last resort. We have had discussions
and nothing in those discussions suggests that Government is deeply
unhappy but, of course, our discussions are principally at the
level of the Civil Service and we know there are big political
decisions ahead, so it would be wrong of me to anticipate what
Government might actually decide, but indications are reasonably
good, yes.
Q443 Chairman: This time the recommendations
might actually be acted upon.
Professor MacKerron: We very much
hope so.
Q444 Chairman: This time round. One
last question from me before I bring in Mick Clapham. Do you have
any idea at all of what the sort of order of magnitude of cost
this long-term storage is going to be? The NDA is going all over
the place with decommissioning costs at present which seem to
be going up quite sharply. After all, if the industry is to make
private sector investment in new nuclear build it must be charged
with the costs of waste disposal, so they must be able to give
them some kind of indication of the kind of levy that is going
to be imposed upon them to pay for the costs of that long-term
disposal.
Professor MacKerron: The mechanism
that might be used is one that clearly we have not been charged
with looking at and we are not making any clear recommendations
on. In terms of the total cost, we know that Nirex costed reasonably
carefully on an engineering basis and from the bottom up what
the kind of repository it was trying to build near Sellafield
would cost in about 1997, and the answer was of the order of—let
us give it a round number—£10 billion for the entire
repository, including the development work and its other operating
costs before it closes. If a repository was built that was designed
to accept all categories of waste that cost would rise, we have
been advised, by of the order of maybe two or three billion, but
within a very wide uncertainty range, and the uncertainties are
very much more weighted towards the upper end, increases in cost,
than towards the lower end. Until any particular design and site
has full regulatory approval it will be difficult to know whether
that is realistic. As I say, we have not looked at the funding
regime. If it were the case that Government did decide on new
build, and if it decided that the waste from that new build would
be housed in such a repository, then clearly some formula would
have to be found. In volume terms it would not add a very great
deal, at least until you have got a very large number of reactors,
to the material already being housed. We have not been into that
issue in any detail. No doubt the Treasury and others will be
doing the arithmetic and the companies involved might be doing
the arithmetic, but we have not done any detailed work on that.
Q445 Mr Clapham: Given that your
committee has made it clear that it does not want to be seen to
be taking a view on new nuclear build, but in relation to what
you said about your indication on your recommendations, do you
feel the Government could take the recommendations as an indication
that you are giving the go-ahead for nuclear build because we
can manage the storing of waste?
Professor MacKerron: It is very
difficult for us to speculate on what Government will do with
our recommendations. I know that when the DTI published its consultation
document for the Energy Review it quoted us as having already
said that there would be no major technical obstacle to accommodating
new build waste in the kind of facilities we are looking at. At
that time we had already said that we thought the politics and
ethics were different. As it happens, the DTI chose not to publish
that part of our recommendations at that time. Clearly people
will select from our recommendations according to taste. There
is nothing we can do to prevent that, but we are very keen to
say that we have no remit in terms of the new build debate, no
view, but, even more important, we do not see our recommendations
as either a red or a green light for new build and we do think
that the waste issue that would emerge from new build would need
to have its own assessment process because, as we say, politics
and ethics are different when you decide to create new waste from
the inevitable need to manage legacies.
Q446 Mr Clapham: On that new waste
and new build, the new build is likely to be private. I do not
think there is another country anywhere in the world that has
embarked on private nuclear build, it is generally there is either
input from central government or regional government. Are there
any implications for waste management from privatised ownership
of the new nuclear build?
Professor MacKerron: This is not
an area which either in my capacity as a researcher or as Chair
of CoRWM I have ever investigated in any great detail, so it is
not an area on which I have any expertise. I cannot offer any
help on that.
Q447 Mr Clapham: Given that the new
nuclear stations are going to be rather different from the older
ones—we have a mixture of Magnox, advanced gas-cooled reactors
and then, of course, the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell—is
there likely to be a difference in the type of waste? For example,
some people are saying there will not be as much low level and
intermediate waste but there is likely to be more high level waste.
Will there be more high level waste and is that likely to have
implications for storage?
Professor MacKerron: We have looked
at that on the committee. We have made the initial assumption
that the spent fuel from any new nuclear reactor programme would
not be subject to reprocessing, to separating out the plutonium,
the uranium and various other fission products. If that were the
case then the waste from a new build programme, let us say notionally
of 10 large reactors, would increase the total volume of spent
fuel to be managed by of the order of five times, but it would
only increase the volume of waste across the board by about 10%.
The reason for that disparity is that historically we have nearly
always reprocessed spent fuel so that the spent fuel turns up
in the form of plutonium, uranium and intermediate level and other
wastes. If it were not so reprocessed in the future it would be
concentrated as spent fuel, but there would be only marginal additions
to the other categories. Of course, we do not know whether or
not the spent fuel would be reprocessed, we made that initial
assumption and nobody quarrelled with it. Just to go back to the
overall question about volumes: while the total volume might increase
by only of the order of 10% if there were a programme of 10 reactors,
the total amount of radioactivity to be managed would go up by
a factor of about three. Both those figures are misleading. It
does not mean that because the radioactivity goes up by a factor
of three that the problem is three times more difficult; nor does
it mean because the volume only goes up by 10% it is only 10%
more difficult, there is something in-between those two numbers.
The interesting thing is what is the footprint of that waste relative
to existing waste, and the answer is it is somewhere between those
two rather extreme figures. I think both need to be borne in mind
in thinking about the scale of the issue that would be raised.
Q448 Mr Clapham: Obviously when Government
is thinking in terms of making the decision, how far do you think
we must be down the line towards actually making a decision on
the solution of geological storage before the order is given to
go ahead with the new build?
Professor MacKerron: It is very
hard for us to say. That is the kind of political question that
is somewhat beyond our remit. The only thing I would say is, as
I said to the Chairman earlier, although we have had reasonably
favourable indications from Government that they quite like our
recommendations, you have to bear in mind that we are an advisory
committee and our constitution does not allow, I am glad to say,
advisory committees to make policy. Clearly Government will have
to endorse the policy if it chooses to do so, and it will then,
no doubt, choose to move some way down that path in order to implement
it. When the problem is in some sense managed is very much a political
decision. Clearly our recommendations do not solve the problem,
our recommendations are the first step in what we think will be
quite a long process, and we hope very much it will be successful
but it will still be a long process, of managing the waste into
the future.
Q449 Mr Clapham: And an extremely
costly one. We are talking in terms of £90 billion at the
present time for decommissioning. There has been a figure of £20
billion suggested, and it may well be in excess of that, for the
storage. Can we afford it?
Professor MacKerron: There is
a question of what we can afford to do if we do not. If we take
the current state of radioactive waste and think about its safe
and secure management into the future there is a certain irreducible
need. If we were to decide nationally not to go for disposal but
to continue to store, there would still be very large costs and,
of course, they would then be costs that would impose themselves
on future generations to a larger extent because if you continue
to store and refurbish or rebuild stores there are significant
costs there and they would then be ongoing for many decades, and
possibly even centuries. One of the advantages of a geological
disposal option is although it will still take time, it means
that the generations closest to those who have benefited from
the original activity will still be bearing most of the cost,
both in terms of financial and radiological impact, and further
future generations will be exempted from those costs, and under
the `polluter pays' principle we think that is a rather good idea,
but we still recognise it is a lengthy and, as you rightly say,
costly process.
Q450 Chairman: Can I clarify a couple
of things before I bring in Tony Wright. At the risk of being
pedantic, what you are saying is the high level waste increases
which would be associated with a programme of new build are largely
the product of ending reprocessing rather than the build itself.
Professor MacKerron: What will
happen, we think, is if there is new build, as with any existing
reactor, you get spent fuel. Most, if not all, pretty much all,
of the high level waste in this country is contained within the
spent fuel. Sometimes through reprocessing it gets separated and
the stream known as high level waste is then solidified and made
into glass blocks and left to cool for some time. If you do not
reprocess it then all that high level waste is contained within
the matrix of the spent fuel. The amounts of waste you produce
are very similar, we think, to any potential new reactors from
the amounts of waste that you produce from existing reactors,
it is just the form in which they show up and need to be managed
is different if the choice in the future is not to reprocess them.
Q451 Chairman: You did also say,
if I heard you correctly, that new build would need its own waste
assessment, I think that was the phrase used. Can I just ask you
to clarify that.
Professor MacKerron: The very
minimum thing you can say is that there is an existing statutory
requirement to justify any new radioactive practice which requires
an assessment of the justification for that practice. Clearly
one of the things that would be done if there was new build would
be the creation of radioactive waste and the existing legislative
framework requires that that be assessed. How big that assessment
would be and what form it would take would clearly not be for
us to determine, but what we do want to be sure is all our recommendations
are not, as it were, a green light to saying it is easy, you can
just stick it in the CoRWM repository because we know that people
may wish to argue the ethics and the politics of the creation
of new waste because there is always the alternative in relation
to new wastes of not creating them, of using some alternative
energy source which creates no new wastes, and that is ethically
and politically a different question from the inevitable need
to manage existing wastes.
Q452 Chairman: It means by a process
of reductio ad absurdum that the work you have been doing
up to now, quite understandable—again this is not a criticism
of you—refers entirely to the legacy waste, which has to
be dealt with anyhow, and is therefore completely irrelevant to
the main Energy Review itself.
Professor MacKerron: I do not
think it is completely irrelevant because clearly if it were the
case that Government decided in favour of our recommendations
and moved ahead with them there would be some movement in the
management of legacy wastes and it would be foolish to imagine
that would not have some impact on the political debate, and I
would expect it to do so. We are keen to say, because it was the
basis of our being set up, that fundamentally our recommendations
are in specific terms about legacy wastes.
Q453 Chairman: Of course, how you
charge for any additional use of a very expensive capital facility
is quite an interesting decision for the Government too between
marginal costs.
Professor MacKerron: It is a very
interesting decision and one that will have political as well
as economic elements, I imagine.
Q454 Chairman: The cross-subsidy
could go in either direction.
Professor MacKerron: Undoubtedly
it could.
Q455 Mr Weir: On what you were saying
about the impact of new wastes, would that make a difference in
the way the repository was formulated and how a community might
look at it if they were looking at whether to take a repository?
I imagine that with historic waste there would come a point where
that would be it, there would be no more going on, but if a repository
was taking new wastes for many, many decades to come you could
have new waste coming in, transported into that repository, and
ever growing.
Professor MacKerron: That is an
issue which we have looked at. We looked at the case of Finland
quite closely. We are very strongly of the view that if a community
is negotiating a package in which it agrees to be the host for
a deep repository, it would need to know the extent of the inventory
they were signing up for, how much waste they were going to get.
If there was then a decision later that more waste would be created
and there was a desire to use the same facility for those wastes
then we are saying you would have to go back to that community
and try to renegotiate the total inventory and accept that you
may or may not be successful. The Finland analogy is that the
initial negotiation with a community that has agreed to host the
waste is purely for legacy wastes. Subsequently Finland decided
to build a new reactor and another negotiation took place in which
the community then made a second decision that it was willing
to accept the waste from the fifth Finnish reactor as well. We
think the process in the UK would be an analogy to that in negotiating
with host communities here.
Chairman: That is very interesting. You
may need to put your different hat on for these questions.
Q456 Mr Wright: I think this might
be one that you have not got a hat for. This is on wider new build
issues. Quite clearly this is an important topic we are concerned
with within the Committee. Witnesses have emphasised the importance
of long-term carbon pricing and the creation of a level playing
field for creating the incentives for nuclear. The industry in
particular has said that it does not want Government subsidies
or guaranteed prices. Do you think that carbon pricing is the
way to finance new nuclear build? Do you not think it will prejudice
investors against technologies that are not market-ready but could
play a role in the longer term?
Professor MacKerron: I will take
off my CoRWM hat now and put on my hat as the Director of Research
Group at the University of Sussex, and let me make that absolutely
clear. I have not been studying this issue for the last several
months because I have been very busy with CoRWM but I have looked
at some of these issues in the past. It is very difficult to say
what would work and what would not work. It is very difficult
to calculate what the financial risks would be of new nuclear
build. I have also heard that industry representatives say they
do not wish to have subsidy and I imagine that Government would
not be anxious to offer such subsidy. I have said, and on the
public record, that I do think there are important questions of
the kinds of guarantees or, for example, the capping of liabilities
that private investors might wish to see if they were willing
to make such investments, but I am not in touch with that community.
I have not researched it recently but I imagine there would be
an important question on the terms under which an agreement might
be made if private investors were to be willing to reduce the
risks to a level that was commensurate with the return they thought
they might get.
Q457 Mr Wright: The Sustainable Development
Commission has told us how it fears a decision in favour of nuclear
will lock us into a centralised grid network. Is it possible for
the Government to pursue a policy in favour of both nuclear power
and also microgeneration?
Professor MacKerron: It is possible
to pursue both, and up to a certain point. A lot depends upon
the extent of any future commitment there might be. If there was
a commitment in any way like that which the French Government
made in the 1970s which ended up with about 80% of their electricity
coming from nuclear then you would have to say once one got anywhere
near the level of commitment to nuclear it would be impossible.
You could run the two things in parallel in my opinion for some
years, as long as you did not commit very large amounts contractually
to the construction of a large number of nuclear power stations
upfront, and whether the Government would ever do that or not
I cannot tell you.
Q458 Mr Wright: What sort of percentage
would you consider would be a large number in terms of electricity
generation?
Professor MacKerron: It is very
difficult to give you a number. If it were the case that the Government
made an upfront commitment to the building of 10 large reactors,
which is the kind of thing that elements of the industry have
said for some years might be desirable, then that would clearly
be a serious discouragement to other ways of managing networks
if it were really a contractual commitment that was adhered to.
I would have thought that would be a fairly financially and economically
risky path, but of course it might be taken. Anything significantly
short of that would allow you to pursue different options simultaneously
for some time to come, and a reasonably risk-averse government
probably would not wish to close too many options too quickly.
Q459 Mr Wright: Finally, do you think
a programme of new nuclear build would displace current efforts
on renewables and energy efficiency?
Professor MacKerron: Well, it
is very hard to say. It depends on the context. A programme of
new nuclear build might be accompanied, and I speculate entirely
here, by some reinforcement of the incentives given to renewables
precisely because Government might fear that commitment to a nuclear
programme might act on its own as a disincentive. It is very difficult
to say because Government is likely, one hopes, to think of these
things as a package and not just a commitment, if it is inclined
to make it, to nuclear power. I think energy efficiency is more
likely to be some sort of discouragement because I do think that
in cultural and social terms a message that somehow nuclear power
will look after the problem and it will be done in a centralised
way with lots of Government involvement might seem to send a message
that personal and individual responsibilities, and community responsibilities
for carbon emission reductions, including energy efficiency, were
less important. These are difficult things to contemplate. I would
say as a basic answer that much depends on whether Government
reinforces the material and other incentives for things like renewables
and energy efficiency at the same time because I do not imagine
it will make any commitment in a policy vacuum.
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