Energy: Radioactive Waste Management (S&T Report)

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:03 pm on 29 October 2007.

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Photo of Lord Jenkin of Roding Lord Jenkin of Roding Conservative 4:03, 29 October 2007

My Lords, many of the points that I might have made have already been well made by others. I was a member of the original Select Committee in 1999, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, and I have had the privilege of serving as either a member or a co-opted member of all the subsequent committees.

My noble friend Lord Selborne has set out very clearly the preferred structure that we put forward in the 1999 report. There were three main features: a new permanent independent statutory body to do the job; an expert advisory body to scrutinise and report, with direct accountability to Parliament; and, as the noble Lord, Lord May, has emphasised, regular debates in both Houses, with votes to endorse the continuation of the process.

As has been said by previous speakers, we are dealing here with a unique situation. Governments have not hitherto had to address the problem of processes that have to last for hundreds of years. I recently read a report on the various half-lives of the products with which we shall be dealing and it is perfectly clear that this requires a very long-term policy indeed. That was why the 1999 report recognised that existing precedents were not reliable and so we made our own proposal. That proposal has been rejected by the Government, and there seems to be an assumption that it is beyond retrieval. I am not sure that I necessarily accept that.

Then we had the CoRWM proposals—again, an independent body to oversee and scrutinise the programme and its implementation. That too has been rejected by Ministers, who have proposed instead the very watered down advisory body, the so-called new CoRWM.

Finally, we have had the Government's proposals that, instead of the new statutory body, they will entrust the implementation to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which has to add this huge long-term task to its existing, much shorter-term decommissioning role. To my astonishment, Ministers and their advisers pretend that that was always in mind. Indeed, that was among the evidence that we heard. Mr Chris De Grouchy, an official of the department, said on page 31 of the evidence in our report:

"I think that was an issue that was in minds at the time that the Bill was being discussed".

Part of the problem arises from the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who is not with us, had to take the Bill through the House as a Defra Minister when it was clearly primarily a DTI Bill. He was the hapless victim of this rather foolish divided responsibility.

The NDA was certainly not the kind of body envisaged by the Select Committee. In their evidence, the two Ministers we have seen—Ian Pearson, whom we saw last January, and Phil Woolas, whom we saw on 11 October this year—sought to defend their proposals against some pretty powerful advocacy, if I may say so, from members of the committee who know much more about the subject than I do, such as the noble Lord, Lord Flowers, who I am sorry is not able to be with us today. I remain wholly unconvinced by what they are now proposing.

What has happened to the clear proposal, appropriate to a really long-term policy, of there being in every Parliament—not every Session—a full debate in both Houses with a Motion to endorse the process going forward? I have put that to successive witnesses. The chairman of CoRWM said that, although it was not anything his committee had recommended, he thought it was rather a good idea. I think it is an extremely good idea, and it would be a very important part of the process, but it does not appear to be part of the Government's thinking on this issue.

Our view that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority may well not be the most appropriate body to take this forward is reinforced by two rather worrying factors. Last February Sir Anthony Cleaver let it be known that he would not seek a further term as chairman of the NDA, and duly vacated that post earlier this year. Despite having nearly nine months' notice, we still do not have the name of his successor. I put that to the Minister, Mr Woolas, who said, "It's the Nolan rules that make it very difficult for us to move any faster". I do not accept that for one moment. I suspect that the difficulty is that, with the confused responsibilities that are inherent in the Government's structure, Ministers are finding it difficult to find a suitably qualified person to apply for the job. In the mean time the NDA, which is going to have to be responsible for this very long-term policy, has no chairman.

The second worrying factor is that the NDA recently announced a major hiccup in its decommissioning programme. It has divided the decommissioning sites into two groups, a north sector and a south sector. I am told—I have checked this again this morning—that while tenders for the site licences in the north, which include Sellafield, Calder Hall, Capenhurst and eventually Windscale, are at what the NDA calls the "competitive dialogue" stage, the invitations to tender for the southern Magnox sites, which include Sizewell A, Dungeness A, Bradwell and several others, are being held back. Why is that being done? The NDA explained in a statement at the beginning of this month:

"Before proceeding with the remaining elements of the competition schedule the NDA is taking the opportunity to reflect on feedback from its ongoing market engagement activity and is reviewing this with Government".

When we debated those clauses of what is now the Energy Act 1994, we had long, questioning debates about the competitive process to appoint the site licensees to be responsible for decommissioning. Here we are, only a few years later, and the NDA states that it does not know how to do it and has to reflect on the lessons. That does not engender confidence in the process which the Government are producing.

It has been suggested to me by a knowledgeable source that the real reason is that the NDA is not being allowed by the Treasury to offer terms of engagement which are attractive enough to secure potential bidders for the process. It undermines confidence in the NDA's ability to run even its own original remit, let alone to take on the much greater responsibility of dealing with long-term waste. I hope that the Minister, whom I warned that I would raise these points, will offer the House reasons for such a long delay in appointing a new chairman for the NDA and for the NDA's having to withdraw the southern sector from the decommissioning process.

The noble Lord, Lord May, spoke about the interesting distinction that has been drawn between "legacy" waste and new waste. We pressed our witnesses on this matter, because, as he said, it does not seem to make any sense. We received an interesting and revealing answer from a member of CoRWM, Mr Peter Wilkinson, who said at page 10 of the minutes of evidence:

"If you want to maintain the inclusivity of the debate and if you want to ensure as much collaboration and consensual discussion as possible, we have to limit it to the legacy waste. There is a divide in people's minds, certainly in the NGO fraternity and I think in other stakeholders' minds as well. There is a clear distinction between legacy waste and other waste that might arise from a new build programme".

In all simplicity, that means that CoRWM decided to go only for legacy waste in order to keep Greenpeace onside. As the noble Lord, Lord May, said, it makes no sense whatever. At least one member of CoRWM recognised that. Professor Lynda Warren said:

"At the end of the day, I find it personally difficult in my own mind to envisage that there will be a repository here for the existing waste and another one being built over there for new waste".

So, again, I put the question to the Government: do they envisage that the process of inviting volunteer communities will apply not only to legacy waste but to the new waste that might arise from any new nuclear programme? Will that be made clear to the volunteer communities from the outset when the invitations are sent out?

Last week, the Financial Times carried on its front page an article headed, "Threats to nuclear building schedule". Its journalist claims to have seen a "script" of a report from John Hutton, the Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, to the Prime Minister. The article suggests, among other things:

"Problems on the disposal of nuclear waste are also threatening delays. The document suggests that the Treasury is resisting plans to invite councils to bid for the right to house the waste because it fears that only one council—the one that includes Sellafield in Cumbria—will apply. This lack of competition would leave it able to demand extra funding of more than £1bn".

Is it really true that the Treasury is now calling into question the volunteer principle, which was the one genuine innovative proposal put forward in the CoRWM report? If that is true, I regard it as very bad news indeed.

We know enough about nuclear waste to know that there is no technical problem. Deep burial, retrievable in a deep depository in a stable rock foundation, was proposed by the industry more than 20 years ago; it was envisaged by Nirex 10 years ago; it was recommended by the Select Committee of the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, eight years ago; it was confirmed by CoRWM one year ago; and it is being put into practice in both Sweden and Finland as we speak. The problem is not technical, it is political, and the sooner the politicians stop shilly-shallying and get on with it, the better.