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Energy: Radioactive Waste Management (S&T Report)

My Lords, I speak in support of the report of the Science and Technology Committee. Nuclear waste is an essential part of restarting the UK nuclear energy programme. I declare an interest as a member of the stakeholder advisory group of EDF Energy, but my remarks are entirely my own. The report makes some welcome points, particularly about the need for an independent body to advise and scrutinise on behalf of the Government, Parliament and the public about these issues of nuclear waste, and, in particular, the geological places to store it. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response on the report. The report recommends setting up a nuclear research and development facility. It is essential that both bodies have broader terms of reference than envisaged in the report and will be able to explore widely all the scientific and engineering aspects. At the moment it is almost impossible in the UK, even in scientific and engineering meetings, to hear about the wide range of technologies and policies for nuclear energy and waste processing being considered by independent and government experts in the United States, France, Russia, China and even the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Indeed, the only place where some of these issues can be raised seems to be in the House of Lords and published in Hansard. For example, correspondence with the leading French expert was refused by Nature, New Scientist and all the UK national newspapers, even though these are openly available in the bulletins of the American Physical Society, the IAEA in Vienna, and so on. The issue that the UK establishment—here I exclude Hansard—wishes to suppress is the fact that nuclear waste does not need to be stored for tens of thousands of years in geological repositories. That is only one possibility. However, temporary storage is certainly highly necessary to start our nuclear programme, and probably necessary there for many tens of years. But, as my noble friend Lord Sainsbury explained to this House, which many Members have forgotten, on 5 June 2006 in his reply to my Question, "““research into emergent technologies such as partitioning and transmutation is being supported by such organisations as the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority””—" a UK authority— "““and via the UK’s membership of international bodies such as EURATOM. However, as the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management has highlighted in its preliminary recommendations on the disposal of higher activity radioactive wastes, it will be many years before technologies such as transmutation are capable of dealing with such wastes on an industrial scale””.—[Official Report, 5/6/06; col. 1041.]" The implication of this reply on behalf of the department is that one should not preclude the possibility that in future such technologies will be available, and therefore the form of temporary storage in geological repositories should bear that in mind. There is no reference to that in this report or in any other official document that I have seen. Officials in the United States and France talk openly of the possibility of reusing uranium nuclear waste over timescales of hundreds of years when the resources of uranium may well have to be used more efficiently. India, China and Russia are actively looking into those issues. In my discussions in Parliament I have found that no one knows about these possibilities. Some colleagues, indeed, have said—in one case after the intervention of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury—that if these future scenarios were explained they would have a more positive view of nuclear energy. So I urge the committee, the Government and the UK scientific and engineering establishment to join the world discussion and to participate much more fully at IAEA in Vienna where it seems that the UK is represented by diplomats and officials—quite rightly—dealing with very difficult issues; but it should be a major forum where these future strategies and scenarios are considered. They should be thinking the unthinkable about future fission and fusion energy cycles, some of which were proposed by UK Nobel Prize winners as long ago as 1945. Then we could perhaps begin to have a debate about genuinely sustainable policies and practices for nuclear programmes. Using our geological storage over the next decades would be just the beginning of the stage. My experience is that having a longer term vision, which many other countries do, will help the debate and the decisions, as opposed to these discussions about what are we going to do this month, next month or a few months ahead. We must raise our perspective on this. I believe that that will help the political debate.