Clause 41
Energy Bill
10:30 am
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
The purpose behind the new clause is to address a general issue with clause 41. I am not sure whether we have yet had the stand part debate, so if I am permitted, Mr. Amess, I will make some more general remarks about funded decommissioning programmes.
Some of the subsidies to the nuclear industry are astonishing. Many are not clearly designated at the moment and many are certainly not designated in the Bill. The purpose of the new clause is simply to make an example of the most spectacularly expensive of them all, but the general principle could apply to many others. We have already discussed—I am sure that we will discuss it again—the long-term storage of nuclear waste and whether funded decommissioning programmes will take account of the full cost of not only bringing a truck to the front door of a storage facility, but the long-term maintenance of the facility. If it is to be an accessible storage facility, as Committee on Radioactive Waste Management considers that it might be, it will have to be maintained in some way for a long time.
The Minister has already referred to the gap between funded decommissioning and the capping of any long-term storage facility, and he mentioned in our earlier deliberations that that might happen in the next century—the 22nd century. That would be equivalent to Asquith and Lloyd George making policy for today, as we are talking about very long periods of time. It is difficult to predict the cost of those plans, and I am sure that Asquith and Lloyd George, being good Liberals, would never have taken on such risky liabilities in their day.