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31 Mar 2009 : Column 207WH—continued
I have a vested interest. As chairman of the all-party group on nuclear energy, I am obviously pro-nuclear, but I am also pro-coal, pro-gas and pro-renewables. There is a place for everyone. We should not put all our eggs in one basket. It is important that we serve the needs of the people of the United Kingdom. Energy is a reserved matter. We deal with the energy of the country. It is a bit disingenuous to say that people can have all the gas, oil, electricity, renewables and whatever that
they like. At the end of the day, the people of this country have stood and fallen together. We have fought side by side in wars, we fight side by side in industry and we compete against a world that would be quite happy to have half the resources and people that we have. That is important, because it is where our future lies.
The new build will cost this Government next to nothing. The companies will supply the money: that is part of the deal. If they want to build a new power station, they will supply the money—that also includes the decommissioning. We must also consider security of supply. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned Russia and the middle east, and there is a British Gas project in Nigeria to liquefy gas. We must look to gas to meet our needs into the middle of the next decade. The right hon. Gentleman also referred to the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change and said that the gap can be filled. I hope that he is right.
Questions were asked about gas storage, which will be important to cover the decommissioning of our old nuclear power stations. We have problems with coal, because a European Union directive requires power stations such as Cockenzie and Longannet to be closed by 2015, unless they can meet emissions requirements, which is doubtful as they are old. So we have an even bigger problem. If those coal-fired powered stations close down, and if our nuclear power stations are decommissioned and closed, we must consider where we are going. There will be a gap, and gas and renewables will have to fill it, but during the cold spell in the winter renewables provided 0.01 per cent. of our energy needs in Scotland. That is a long way from the 50 per cent. of renewable electricity that the hon. Member for Glasgow, East was talking about. We must have a base load that will run industry and keep the lights on.
Where do we go next? Education has been mentioned, and I was at an all-party group meeting this morning when we talked about that very subject. British companies are lining up to work with universities—some are already doing so—to provide apprenticeships and university degrees for the nuclear industry. They know that there is a shortage in the work force, and they want to fill it as quickly as possible. The right hon. Gentleman said that for those young men and women the world will be their oyster, and it certainly will because the amount of work in the rest of the world will mean great prospects of highly paid jobs anywhere in the world. However, we also have a place there, because our education system is second to none, and with the right drive and support from the Government, we will get there.
The safety of nuclear power stations in this country is also second to none. In all the major disasters, barring Chernobyl—we all know what happened there and the number of lives lost—no one was killed or poisoned by radiation. Although the power station at Three Mile Island was lost, the safety precautions worked. The safety record in nuclear power stations is great compared with the number of lives lost in the coal industry, which must amount to hundreds of thousands throughout the world. Tens of thousands are killed in China alone almost every year. Many people die on a regular basis in the coal industry, so the nuclear industry does well.
My hon. and learned Friend the Minister will have to consider waste management. We know that there will be a report in the autumn and we hope that it will tell us exactly what we must do. Those of us who were lucky
enough to go to Sweden last year and see its experimental project in Oskarshamn could not fail to be impressed by what is being done with the waste material. I do not agree with the adage that Scottish waste must stay in Scotland and Welsh waste must stay in Wales. It is British waste, and the United Kingdom Government must deal with it. That is the deal, that is how it is at the moment, that is how Parliament has set its store, and we must go along with it.
The right hon. Gentleman said that he would come back to planning. I do not know whether he did, but if he did I missed it. The Government have bitten the bullet and introduced the Planning Act 2008 to ensure that what happens in Scotland will not happen elsewhere. If an area wants a new power station requiring billions of pounds of investment to provide jobs, if a company wants to supply the money to build that power station to provide that work, and if the Government want it to supply electricity to meet people’s needs, that should not be stopped by an obscure planning rule, which is what happens in Scotland. We want to ensure that that does not happen in the rest of the United Kingdom.
John Mason: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish people do not want nuclear power, they should not have nuclear power?
John Robertson: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman said that, because his party’s investigations showed that 52 per cent. of the Scottish population wants nuclear energy, and only about 24 per cent. does not want it. The Scottish people would rather keep the lights on than use political dogma to turn them off, as the hon. Gentleman’s party would like to do. I really thank him for that intervention, because I had forgotten about that information.
This has been an excellent debate, and I thank the right hon. Gentleman once again for introducing it. The most important thing is that the British people have the lights on, and that there are jobs and investment in this country.
11.56 am
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD): I congratulate the right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) on securing this debate. It is good to see a Conservative Member ferociously and unashamedly in favour of nuclear power. It has been a little difficult to track the Conservative party’s attitude over the past couple of years, particularly during the passage of the Energy Act 2008. It has been unclear whether it was pro or anti-nuclear, and sometimes it seemed to be both at once, so it is a little rich of him to criticise the Government for inconsistency.
The right hon. Gentleman raised some important points. First, on timing, he referred to what is sometimes perceived as the energy gap and the likely tightening of energy supply as various power stations come off line over the next 10 or 15 years. Obviously, there are various ways of trying to cope with that energy gap, and my favourites and those of the Liberal Democrat party are energy efficiency, fossil fuel technologies if they can be provided with carbon abatement—on which development is promising, although without much help from the Government—and an increasing role for renewables. However, I have not seen any evidence that nuclear power can play much of a part in filling that
energy gap, because there is not much evidence that any new generation nuclear power stations will come on line before 2020 at the earliest. Today is the deadline for the nomination of new nuclear sites, and perhaps the Minister will confirm that the timetable is still running to schedule.
Albert Owen: Last week, I had an Anglesey day when representatives from the community of Anglesey came to the House. The chairman of the county council is a Liberal Democrat, who is in favour of nuclear power because he can see its benefit in the local community. He is also in favour of extending the life of existing power stations. Is the Liberal Democrats’ official policy to extend the life of nuclear power stations to help to bridge the gap that the hon. Gentleman is talking about?
Martin Horwood: No, the consistent policy of my party’s Front-Bench spokesmen and our party conferences over the years has been to phase out nuclear power as soon as possible. We are a democratic party, and we have different opinions. We welcome a diversity of opinions, but they have never managed to persuade the majority to be pro-nuclear.
The right hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned process, and some interesting issues arise. I am sure that he does not welcome it, but we are in an EU-determined process called justification, which the Minister might like to comment on. Some legal opinion has it that when the justifying authority—the Secretary of State—has decided that nuclear is justified, it becomes difficult to reopen issues of safety and the rationale for nuclear power in later years. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s opinion on whether the justification decision is irrevocable once taken, and why it should be done in that way. The EU does not determine who should be the justification authority, so it does not have to be the Secretary of State. There could have been a public inquiry, or he could have nominated the Environmental Audit Committee or the Committee on Climate Change or perhaps even the Sustainable Development Commission, which is the body established by Government to advise them on sustainable development.
The Secretary of State has already made his pro-nuclear position clear, so it is fairly clear what the justification decision will be even before all the public consultation, but the Sustainable Development Commission has considered the issue as well. It wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) in 2006, saying:
“Our final position weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power to find that there is no justification for bringing forward plans for a new nuclear programme at this time and that any such proposal would be inconsistent with the Government’s own Sustainable Development Strategy.”
The commission raises issues of long-term waste, cost, inflexibility, the undermining of energy efficiency, and international security. I agree with all those points.
Let us consider some of the sustainability issues involved in the debate. It is now often suggested that nuclear is part of the answer to reducing carbon emissions, yet the Sustainable Development Commission calculates that 10 GW of new nuclear generating capacity, replacing 10 old nuclear power stations, would contribute precisely
4 per cent. of savings in carbon emissions after 2024, which is hardly a quick or sufficient contribution to reducing carbon emissions.
The Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills has said in a report that many of the engineers working in the industry are approaching retirement and not enough young people are being trained. As other countries become more interested in buying nuclear skills, we may find ourselves with a skills shortage in this country.
Mrs. Gillan: I believe that I heard the hon. Gentleman say in reply to the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) that he would like to see Wylfa shut as soon as possible. In his calculations, how would he compensate for the 18,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day that are saved by the operation of the Wylfa power station?
Martin Horwood: The general position is that we need transitional technology over the coming decades to replace the contribution of nuclear and other industries, because it is true that renewables alone will not fill that gap. However, the obvious candidate is carbon capture and storage. That technology, as the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) pointed out, was being progressed in projects such as that at Peterhead, which have been truncated by the Government’s rather measly and limited carbon capture competition. We could have put much more effort and initiative into becoming a world leader in carbon capture; instead, we are being overtaken left, right and centre on that technology. That is the technology that I see as the important transitional one over the coming decades.
Then there is the question of whether UK plc will really benefit from what is proposed. In a recent report, Sir John Houghton, the former director general of the Met Office and former co-chair of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, highlighted the fact that the only working example of a new generation nuclear power station, in Finland, is already experiencing quite a lot of problems. He wrote:
“The delays and cost over-runs at Finland’s new Olkiluoto 3 reactor (the first nuclear reactor to be built in Europe since 1991) cast doubt on the ability of nuclear to play a large role in the timeframes necessary to effectively deal with climate change”.
John Robertson: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Martin Horwood: I am sorry, but I will not give way again, because the time is limited.
A report in The Times on 17 March revealed that
“Nearly one third of the work involved in the construction of nuclear reactors in Britain will be shut off to UK companies”.
That is according to the French group EDF, which is expected to build most of them. Will the Minister comment on whether nuclear jobs will benefit France rather more than the United Kingdom?
Then there is the issue of waste. We are still paying £1.4 billion a year in decommissioning and clean-up costs for the last generation of nuclear waste. We still do not know where that will be stored, when it will be stored and exactly how it will be disposed of. That is leaving a toxic legacy of high-level nuclear waste for generations way into the distant future. The Nuclear
Industry Association has confirmed to me before now that it still thinks that that high-level waste will be dangerous 1,000 years from now, which means—
Albert Owen: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Martin Horwood: I really do not have time; I am sorry.
Clearly, we need to find a way of disposing of waste that has already been created, but that is no justification for repeating the mistake, not least because the sites, even with low-level contamination, can take 100 years to be cleaned up and decommissioned fully. Most of them are coastal, so a sea level rise and an increased risk of flooding is clearly also a danger. There are so many dangers that it would be foolish to go down this road again when we have not solved the problems of the last generation of waste at all.
Energy security is often mentioned. The idea is that somehow nuclear is a more reliable form of energy than something such as gas, and the spectre of Russian gas negotiations is often raised. In fact, a large proportion of our gas comes from that well known and unstable country, Norway. Very little of it comes from Russia. As for uranium, about 44 per cent. comes from very stable countries—Canada and Australia. After that, 16 per cent. comes from Kazakhstan and then the list includes Russia again, but also Niger, Namibia, Uzbekistan and other well-known stable countries. That suggests that the international supply of uranium is not quite as secure as we might think. Certainly, if there are new generations of nuclear power stations worldwide, there will presumably be a price hike in uranium as well, which might threaten once again the economics of nuclear power.
Mr. Mike O’Brien: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Martin Horwood: I will give way briefly, as long as the Chair is indulgent of me.
Mr. O’Brien: We get our uranium from Australia and Canada, so running fear stories is not wise.
Martin Horwood: It is not really a fear story, is it? If there is increasing demand, with world supply dependent on countries such as Kazakhstan, Russia and Niger, there will be a rise in the price, which is the last point that I made. That clearly threatens the long-term economic viability. Then there is the long-term economic threat relating to the cost of waste disposal and how any future liabilities that we have not worked out will be disposed of. The hon. Member for Glasgow, East referred to the potentially multi-billion pound bill for undisclosed nuclear liabilities. During the passage of the Energy Act 2008, many of us tried to tighten up its provisions to ensure that there was no possibility of the taxpayer ending up footing the bill in decades to come, when presumably many of the companies now involved in developing the so-called funded decommissioning programmes will be long gone. They might well have collapsed and there will be no one to sue in the event of costs rising. Inevitably, the taxpayer will have to pick up the ultimate liability; it is clear that the ultimate liability for a nuclear programme still rests with the taxpayer.
However, the real capping argument against nuclear power at the moment is that we have an urgent need to develop genuinely renewable clean energy sources and the concentration of the Government on nuclear will crowd out the development of renewables. I was, frankly, horrified by the right hon. Gentleman’s attack on wind power. I do not have time to refute it, except to say that it certainly can be refuted. The argument is that nuclear can crowd out renewables in terms of both capacity and investment. The signals coming from Government as to where investment from energy companies should go are mixed. They have given a clear green light to nuclear and they are giving very mixed signals on renewables. They have got it exactly the wrong way round. Renewable energy is clean, green, reliable and safe. Nuclear will leave us with a toxic hangover from the 20th century well into the 22nd and it should be phased out completely as soon as possible.
12.8 pm
Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con): You have joined us for the end of an excellent debate, Mr. Gale. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) mentioned the word “mix” and I think that a mix is the key to our energy policy. On both sides of the Chamber, we have recognised that we face a prospective energy crunch, to which the solution has to be one of diversity. There is broad, albeit not necessarily universal, agreement on both sides of the Chamber that we have been slow to come to the position in which we can send clear signals to the industry that we will have a stable framework.
First, however, let me congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) on giving us the opportunity to have the debate and on his contribution, which, as ever, was serious and analytical. He always demonstrates genuine personal concern for the future of our nation, bringing that to all our counsels. He has done so again today.
I am delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), who is shadow Secretary of State for Wales, in her place. As the presence of the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) also indicates, nuclear policy is a great issue for the Principality.
It is clear from the contributions that have been made that we face a parlous energy security situation in the years ahead, and three factors contribute to that. First, there is the predictable decline in North sea oil and gas output. Some estimate that we will be 80 per cent. dependent on gas imports by the end of the decade, which could have been foreseen many years ago in the past decade. Secondly, we are likely to have to decommission nine of our most polluting coal-fired power stations by 2015. Finally, six of our 10 nuclear power stations are likely to reach the end of their life, unless it is extended, by 2018. Over the years ahead, therefore, we face a significant capacity problem in generating our future energy supplies.
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