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Energy: White Paper

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on his most uncontroversial maiden speech. I say that because, when I came to the House 16 years ago, I was given one piece of advice by noble Lords. They said, ““On your maiden speech you can say anything you like because everyone will be nice to you. On your second speech the knives are out; you had better watch your back””. So basically I am making my speech to his second speech while saying what a wonderful first speech he made. I remind the noble Lord that we have met on one occasion previously, when we were both in teams on ““University Challenge””. I represented the House of Lords; the noble Lord represented the CBI. It goes to show the degree of aspiration to which this House is held by those outside that we were put up against the Oxford University Press while the CBI was against the English National Opera. I believe that we had a slightly harder challenge. I wish immediately to ask one important question, because many noble Lords have raised the issue. What is the noble Lord’s department called? As I passed down Victoria Street, I noticed that there was no D before the letters BERR, so does that make it? If you add the D, there is a slightly more interesting connotation, because it sounds like debris. I wondered whether that was a hangover from somebody in the DTI leaving this as a rather amusing aside for the new department. I am sure that the Minister can give us a conclusive analysis of how we should refer to the department in future. This debate has been held on a number of occasions. As many noble Lords realise, a small but happy band in this House comes back to the issue. As we have had three White Papers, all of which were startlingly similar in the conclusion that they wanted to reach, the arguments have become somewhat calcified. These Benches are obviously of the hair-shirt and open-sandal brigade mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, because of our view on nuclear energy. However, as was said from these Benches, that view is not held by everybody in the party and might well change if situations change. If we moved to thorium reactors, which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned, I would be the first to say that nuclear energy would be a very positive step forward. However, our position is based on the cost of nuclear power and the amount of energy that it produces. We should look at the reality and not put ourselves in the position of the French, who get 80 per cent of their energy from nuclear power. We are talking about 14 per cent of our energy being produced by nuclear power in the next few years, going down to under 10 per cent unless new nuclear power comes on stream. The figure will probably go below 10 per cent; the recent results from the Hinckley Point reactors, and the state of the carbon rods in them, give the impression that they might have to come offline far sooner than we thought, given that we were hoping for an extended life. So in the next 10 or 20 years we are looking at not relying on nuclear to provide a massive proportion of our energy. Obviously, if the planning regime is changed under the White Paper we could bring nuclear power online far quicker than at present. However, we are still looking at between five and 10 years to bring nuclear power stations online. It will depend how many nuclear stations are brought online. If we are looking to meet a significant proportion of our energy needs from nuclear, we are talking about a very large number of reactors being built. It would be interesting to know the cost of that. By going down the nuclear power route, we will lock ourselves into a power system that is 30 years old. We will lock ourselves into the national grid and therefore close the door on distributed energy, which is another policy that the Government are looking at. Nuclear power is seen by many, especially those involved in the environmental field, as a silver bullet against climate change. I have a separate issue with that, because no carbon audit of the life cycle of a nuclear power station has ever been undertaken. Although we have talked about waste and waste management, there has never been an assessment of the carbon footprint of deep geological storage.