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Nuclear Industry

I say with some pride that I have been a member of the board of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology from the days before it was properly budgeted for in this House and had to go begging and borrowing to pay the scientists who did the excellent reports, including the one on nuclear security. I am the member of the board who asked them to do the study they produced. I had no sense of what the conclusion would be. I was seeking knowledge and it did provide the knowledge that, as the hon. Gentleman said, nuclear has the lowest carbon footprint. As the Chairman of the Committee said earlier, the first question was whether we would need to build new electricity generating capacity, and the second was whether we need to replace nuclear with new nuclear. He came out very clearly and said that, on the basis of analysis, there should be no special favours. However, I noticed on page 59 that the Committee said that, whatever happened, it should be in a framework that rewarded low-carbon technologies. That is as objective as we can possibly be and I hope that from that conclusion, in other studies, wind, wave, photovoltaic and other types of power will also be seen as low carbon and given the incentives that they require. I know that there is a dichotomy of views. Some believe that if we support nuclear, both Government and commercial money would flow away from renewable energies. I hope that that would not be the case. It is clear from the recent European decision about the energy options for Europe that those technologies are seen as important. There is no doubt that we need to find ways to use less energy and to advance the use of renewable and low carbon energy, from wherever it comes. In that mix, there must be nuclear energy, and the report points that out well. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s opinion. I have seen the Government’s response, but I want to see whether the Minister has further thoughts. The Government must give strong signals about where they are going. There is no doubt that the legacy of nuclear power was not good. We have a lot to apologise for in its technological legacy, in this country and possibly in others. The worst incident was of course the Soviet Chernobyl incident, where the technology was entirely inadequate and the procedures and processes used were dangerous and caused major upsets. For everyone in this country, there is the psychological legacy of the continual loss of technological integrity in the nuclear industry, with leaks into the sea and breakdowns. We have had a couple recently, even at quite modern reactors in Scotland. There are serious questions to be answered. From my experience of 15 years working with people in the oil and gas industries, I know of a parallel when there was a terrible fire at Texas City. It was down to the fact that the board had called for a 25 per cent. reduction in maintenance costs, so people just lengthened the maintenance cycles and eventually something went seriously wrong. My worry is that, with the pressures of finance—the legacy of our financial model is not good either—the pressure was always on people not to do their best. The concept of the gold standard mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) was not always the one seen by the public. Even at this moment, as part of the process at Sellafield is turned on, the Norwegians are protesting because they see THORP as a further danger to them. That shows that our legacy has left people with a genuine, serious and respectable view that we must prove the technology all over again in the next generation before we can go forward. It is a shame that the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who went across to see the CANDU reactors, is not here. That is British technology that was shipped out during the war years to get it away from the war zone, and it has one of the safest records. The people who developed it were British scientists, sent across to Canada, who stayed there. As usual, we moved on to yet another untried technology and did not bring back the technology that was working perfectly well and has done so ever since at a high level of safety that we would love to have. There is a Scottish dimension to my concerns. The question is not just whether we will need to have renewable energy as a substitute or low energy use. As a Scottish Member, I know that for some time we have exported electricity to England, because we have had nuclear generation. Luckily, we have also had hydro generation. The country that boasts the lowest carbon footprint in the developed world is France, which has 80 per cent. of its electricity generated by nuclear and the rest by hydro. If I recall correctly, it creates about 5.8 tonnes of carbon per head of population per annum. The most vociferous country on renewable energy is Denmark, and its carbon footprint is almost 12 tonnes a year per head of population. It does not have hydro, which is geographically unfortunate, and it does not have any other alternatives because it will not use nuclear. If the winter is really cold, it imports power on the grid from a nuclear power station in France or Sweden, so there is a bit of kidology going on there. It is clear that, if a country is half nuclear and fortunate enough to have hydro or wants to use photovoltaic or renewable energy, it can create a small carbon footprint. At the moment, 38 per cent. of Scotland’s electricity is generated from nuclear power. I was at a seminar in Scotland recently when someone from a technical institute said that they had profiled the longest period that they could foresee Scotland surviving, even with the growth of wind power, without having to cut off the electricity, or switch off the lights, as the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) described it. It would be 16 years without nuclear. The reality of wind power is that all the profiles show that it can replace no more than 18 per cent. of the base load, because it cannot be stored. There is no profile to show that more than that can be replaced and, unless the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) can do so, no one has ever proven differently.