Clause 63
Energy Bill
6:45 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 39, in clause 63, page 50, line 14, at end insert—
‘“disposal” for solid nuclear wastes (including nuclear materials declared as waste) means emplacement in a long term storage facility;’.
The amendment seeks to define carefully “disposal”, which is not currently in the list of words defined in clause 63. “Disposal” is important because it crops up earlier on in the Bill, in clause 41. It is one of the technical matters, along with “treatment”, “storage” and “transportation”, covered by the funded decommissioning programmes. Such technical matters, which the funded decommissioning programme must contain, include details of the steps to be taken and estimates of the costs likely to be involved. That is crucial and central to the whole programme of funded decommissioning programmes.
We might think that “disposal” was a fairly straightforward concept, which just means getting rid of the nuclear waste. However, nuclear waste does not really go away in that sense. We all know that we cannot just dispose of it in landfill—or perhaps we are dealing with a variation of landfill. I raised the matter during the evidence sessions with Dr. Roxburgh, who gave evidence for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. He talked about waste disposal being included along with the cost of decommissioning—
“so the complete life cycle cost would have to be recovered”—
in other words, recovered from the private operators. I asked, to be clear:
“By long-term life cycle, do you mean thousands of years in the future, potentially?”
We are talking about the complete life cycle of nuclear materials here. He replied:
“In the sense that once waste is placed in a deep geological repository, I assume that it becomes a property of the Government, or at least that it is on some sort of lease. That issue has yet to be addressed”.
So, strangely, it suddenly becomes rather unclear whether “disposal” in the terms of the Bill as currently defined means disposal by and at the expense of the private operators, or whether there is emerging some new kind of public taxpayer liability, albeit a long distance into the future. I asked Dr. Roxburgh:
“So you are expecting there to be no costs attached to that that will not be covered.”
He replied:
“You will have to ask the Government about that.”——[Official Report, Energy Public Bill Committee, 5 February 2008; c. 59, Q112-114.]
That is what I am doing right now.
Is “disposal”, in the terms of the funded decommissioning programmes, being interpreted—perhaps hopefully by the Government—as simply taking the lorry to the gate of the long-term storage repository? Or is it, as our amendment would make the Bill clearly state, talking about emplacement within it? That is critical, because the long-term storage repository is not simply a neutral facility but something that the Minister himself described as perhaps remaining uncapped and potentially accessible for as long as a century. Potentially, I suppose, if future Governments, in a century’s time, thought it was unsafe to cap it completely and make it inaccessible. They might choose to leave the repository uncapped and maintained at some minimum level long into the future. We can imagine that, on the kind of time scales that we are talking about, even a low level of maintenance could rack up quite a bill for the taxpayer. Even the light bulb in a “Keep out” sign maintained for thousands of years would add up to quite a substantial cost to the public purse. These are serious issues.
When I was in legacy fundraising for Oxfam, occasionally people left substantial gifts to Oxfam in their will. The legacies quite often came with a little proviso that we, for instance, maintained a headstone in perpetuity, because people wanted graves maintained. We are talking about a different kind of grave here, but the risk is the same. Oxfam always removed that provision, by deed of variation, from those wills, because over time those costs build up—they add up to a significant long-term storage liability, to take the analogy a bit tastelessly far. I want to extend that principle to the Bill and make it absolutely clear that the Government are not allowing the Bill, by a small loophole of definition, not to mean actual disposal in the long-term geological repository. The cost of doing that for new nuclear power stations should be recovered from the operators, as was the intention and as was the sense of the Government’s and the Opposition’s statements.
I know that the Government think that the legacy programme bears some kind of responsibility for the long-term repository, and that in some strange way it is paid for by the taxpayer on a more reasonable basis, because the legacy programme exists and we have to work out what to do with the waste. That is true, but over a very long time that will even out considerably. If the nuclear programme continues into the future, in time, the original legacy programme waste will be a minor part of the nuclear waste being disposed of. Therefore, before the Government go down the path of building new nuclear power stations, it is important to establish the principle that the cost of very long-term storage will not be borne by the taxpayer.