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Lord Lewis of Newnham: My Lords, as a member of the committee, I, too, appreciated the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, in producing this very important report.

I substantially agree with everything that has been said, particularly in regard to some of the criticisms that have been levelled. So on this occasion, rather than go through them all again, I will touch on one or two of the more general points involved in this area of work.

The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, made the point that the handling of waste is neither quick nor easy. We heard that this waste problem started 50 years ago. The noble Lord, Lord Flowers, reminded us that, in the 1970s, his commission was very effectively pointing out the necessity of looking at the waste problem. After another 25 years, we are now beginning to address some of these issues.

Three groups of radioactive waste are generally being considered: high, intermediate and low-level waste. We currently have about 750 cubic metres of high-level waste and approximately 100 times more intermediate-level waste. The amount of low-level waste is very large indeed. High-level waste arises from the dismantling of nuclear reactors and the reprocessing of spent fuel. Approximately one-fifth of this material comes from overseas contracts, so a significant amount of this waste should have been returned.

After 1975, nuclear fuel processing contracts provided for the return of processed waste materials to customers within a period of 25 years. Prior to that, there was no requirement for spent nuclear waste to be sent back. To date, to my knowledge, no waste has been returned, although BNFL claimed that return would occur in 1996. The DTI has recently announced that it has authorised the substitution of high-level
 
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waste for intermediate-level waste when returning waste to the various countries for which it has been processing nuclear fuel.

How this waste is to be sent back to the various countries must be a major concern. It is very toxic material and the introduction of waste into the country from other countries has received considerable criticism. Will the Government assure us that they have considered that before they start this process?

A feature of high-energy waste is the high heat that it generates. I hope that CoRWM will address the problem of the storage of high-level waste before its deposition. Because of the high heat generated, significant periods, up to decades, are required before it is possible to dispose of such waste. That is a major problem which we have to address. We will inevitably be left with a certain amount of waste that has to be kept at the surface so that it can "mature" sufficiently to be deposited. It is not a simple or quick operation.

With the advent of CoRWM, the Minister for the Environment, Elliot Morley, closed down the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee. I accept that certain functions of that committee will be taken over by CoRWM, but who will attend to the remaining problems handled by that committee? I believe that the committee has recently published a report itemising areas that will not be covered by CoRWM. How are they going to be addressed? When is the committee likely to be re-instituted and what will happen when CoRWM disappears?

A new committee, the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, is being set up to deal with the decommissioning of redundant nuclear sites. Clearly, a major amount of nuclear waste will be produced. Although CoRWM will be responsible for the high-activity end of the problem, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee suggests that the amount of waste involved in this operation will far exceed the presently available sites for storage of such waste. What will happen to this area of waste?

I am also very concerned that at the moment much of the low-activity waste can be stored offsite. I know that Brigg has been used over a period of time for the storage of some of this waste, but I fear that much of the other waste may end up in the present hazardous sites. These areas are grossly under stress at the moment. I am concerned whether the new waste regulations will affect any of this operation. I would appreciate the Minister giving us some information on that.

Finally, one of my concerns is that if—or even when—we decide to take up the nuclear objective again, we will be in a very difficult situation regarding manning and responsibility. The university nuclear departments have been run down—whether this has been done deliberately, I do not know. We will end up with exactly the same problem we had with renewable energy when we had to buy it from other countries. We had to turn to Denmark when it came to wind farms. I hope that we will not have to buy out again, although I fear that we will.
 
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8.31 p.m.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, I wish that I could agree with everything that has been said, because it would make my life much easier. But I hope that disagreeing with some of what has been said will at least make this debate a little livelier. However, I do so with some trepidation, because the experience assembled on the committee which has written this report is considerable. Reading the report, and listening to the noble Lord, Lord Flowers, who was, as he said, grappling with this problem in 1976, it struck me that we have been looking for a solution for an extremely long time.

I accept that the report makes some valid criticisms of CoRWM. These were laid out very fairly by my noble friend Lady Walmsley—and I say that not simply because she is my noble friend. She was particularly fair with regard to public access.

In accepting that there are valid criticisms, I wish to dwell on what I believe to be unfair criticisms and what I feel to be plainly wrong. The unfair criticisms in the report include those which say that the committee is taking far too long about its task. We were reminded that this situation has been continuing year after year and very little has been resolved. I accept that, at a political level, the Government may be guilty of that rather nice acronym NIMTO—"not in my term of office". Indeed, the previous two Administrations have possibly been guilty of that. I do not think it is reasonable to accuse CoRWM of dragging its feet for that reason. Looking back at the minutes of the various meetings, I discovered that it has speeded up its timetable. It will report in July 2006, not November 2006, as originally set out.

The other criticism I thought particularly unfair concerned the membership of the committee. It is not for me to say whether it is large or wide enough; I accept that it might benefit from expansion. But while members of the Chemicals Stakeholder Forum, for example—a body which is mentioned in the report—have wide experience of analysing information, by no means are they technical experts regarding these chemicals. Noble Lords could examine the membership of the Food Standards Agency which is tasked with looking at a wide range of issues, many of which are extremely technical and relate to BSE and so forth. Hardly any of the members are technically expert in those issues. They simply call in the expertise and analyse it. So although I understand that there may be a good argument for expanding membership of this committee it is very unfair to look simply at its make-up and say that it is not composed sufficiently of experts when that is the case across a wide range of committees on which your Lordships have pronounced very favourably in the past. There are a number of reports which I do not have time to go into now but of which I have quoted two examples.

I will also touch on another example of where I think the committee's conclusion is quite wrong. It criticises CoRWM in paragraph 4.10 for having a lengthy
 
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discussion on what would happen if, when a decision was made, the majority held a view to which the minority could not subscribe. Your Lordships' report says that this,

"could be taken as a satire on bureaucratic processes in general".

That conclusion is entirely wrong because if your Lordships cast your minds back a few months to the report of the committee examining radiation risks of internal emitters—a subject close to the one with which CoRWM will be dealing—the majority came to one conclusion and a minority came to a similar but stronger conclusion about the harm that ingesting minute amounts of radiation could do to organisms, especially humans. I am sorry to tell my noble friend Lord Taverne that that evidence is contrary to the evidence that he presented to us in his speech.

Lord Taverne: My Lords, the trouble with the Cerrie committee was that it never considered the hormesis theory because it spent all its time fighting against the two representatives of Greenpeace who Michael Meacher had appointed to the committee who made its life pretty well impossible.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, there is an interesting debate to be had about that committee, but perhaps at another time. I thank my noble friend for leading me neatly to another matter that I was disappointed the report did not address. The report drew its evidence about this committee's work so narrowly. I accept that the inquiry was supposed be a short one, but the other stakeholders—Nirex, BNFL and Greenpeace, which were key players—were not asked how they felt about the work that CoRWM was doing, how they felt about working with CoRWM and what level of confidence they had in the committee. Therefore, we have not understood how the rest of the organisations which will be working with CoRWM feel about the future, the time-scale or any of the other issues that your Lordships have raised.

In raising these points I want to underline that I am not arguing with the report because I am a cynic about nuclear power. It is well known in your Lordships' House that I am not a supporter at the moment of nuclear power because of the problems of waste and safety. However, like other noble Lords who have spoken, I accept that it is important to keep every effort applied to dealing with the current mountain of waste. I am extremely disappointed that the Government have chosen to allow imports of nuclear waste from other countries which cannot deal with it themselves. It was highlighted earlier this month that Italy, for example, is going to send us its nuclear waste, and that the Government have not even seen fit to publish the terms of the contract between Italy and Britain so that we can see what they are.

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