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Nuclear Industry

I will not, because I need to finish my speech to allow the Minister and the spokesman for the official Opposition time to speak. I just want to make a final point, which arises out of several comments that have been made. The nuclear industry needs to be open. A number of hon. Members have said that it has had a terrible record. The Chairman of the Committee made a very eloquent statement yesterday in the House when he commented on the statement. The industry has a terrible record of secrecy, which undermines confidence. Many other people have also said that. Bill Nuttall, the academic, says exactly the same thing in his works on nuclear renaissance. That is the message of the CoRWM report and Professor Gordon MacKerron. However, there is a fundamental problem with that argument. That is, that nuclear power, because of its inherent technical links with nuclear weapons and weapons technology, can never be purely private. It will always have a security element. It is interesting, for example, that the person who was recently appointed to head the Civil Nuclear Constabulary is not a career police officer; he is a career intelligence officer from the Secret Intelligence Service. There will always be a link and, because of that link, the industry can never be wholly open. That applies both to techniques and to materials. I agree that the industry would do itself a lot of good by being as open as possible. However, I think that it is an impossible dream that the industry could be as open as other industries.