Clause 41
Energy Bill
2:30 pm
Malcolm Wicks (Minister of State (Energy), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Croydon North, Labour)
I will be brief.
We are creating a framework for ensuring that the operator of a new nuclear power station is responsible for, and makes prudent provision to meet, the full costs of decommissioning and their full share of waste management costs. By full decommissioning costs, I mean the costs of dismantling the nuclear power station at the end of its generating life, removing all station buildings and facilities and returning the site to a state agreed with the regulators and the planning authority, and the release from the control of the nuclear site licence. This is likely to be a state similar to greenfield, depending on the state of the site before the construction of the station. By full share of waste management costs, I mean the costs that are directly attributable to disposing of new-build higher activity waste in a geological disposal facility, a contribution towards the fixed costs of constructing such a geological disposal facility, a significant risk premium over and above those costs—to take account of uncertainties around the cost of constructing such a facility and the time when it will be able to accept new-build waste—and the cost of waste pending transfer for disposal.
Amendment No. 25 will ensure that an operator will have to set out, as part of the decommissioning and waste management plan, what activities they would undertake by way of detailed technical and operational planning for the decommissioning and waste management and disposal activities that take place once the station has ceased generating electricity for the final time. It is important that this activity can be regulated as part of the funded decommissioning programme, because it will ensure that the operator starts to think in detail in advance about how those decommissioning activities will take place. As clause 41 is drafted, the operator will be required to set out in its decommissioning and waste management plan how it will account for the decommissioning and waste management and disposal activities throughout the life cycle of the station. By making this amendment, the Government want to ensure that the operator of a new nuclear power station also makes provision for, and sets out, the preparatory activities associated with decommissioning and clean-up of the power station.
Amendment No. 26 allows the Secretary of State, if needed, to make an order that will mean that the preparatory activities specified in amendment No. 25 can become designated technical matters. A designated technical matter is one that must be provided for in the independent fund for decommissioning and waste management. It is also therefore, by definition, an activity on which an operator can spend resources from the independent fund. The effect of amendment No. 26 is to ensure that not only will preparatory activities to the decommissioning and clean-up of a power station be regulated, but that the operator must make financial provision for those activities when the station is generating electricity. I ask hon. Members to consider these technical amendments.