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Energy: Radioactive Waste Management (S&T Report)

My Lords, I speak as a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee, although I was not involved in the initial report on the management of radioactive nuclear waste back in 1999, and only peripherally involved in the 2004 report which was under way when I joined the committee in 2004. So this report is the only one with which I have been personally involved. The report comes after the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management had reported. Although in the 2004 report, we were extremely critical of CoRWM, especially at the length of time that the committee was taking and its concentration on stakeholder engagement to the exclusion, we felt, of scientific analysis, when it came to it, there was much in the CoRWM report that we welcomed. In particular, we welcomed the following points: first, its agreement with our 1999 report that deep geological disposal at present represents the best procedure for the management of high-level and intermediate waste—I take on board the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; secondly, that the site for such disposal should be chosen not just by its geological suitability but by the process of consultation and the willingness on the part of the local community to participate in that process; thirdly, that a robust programme of interim storage must play an integral part in such a long-term strategy—if for no other reason than that it is likely to be at least 30 years before any long-term storage facilities are completed and ready for use; and, lastly, that the implementation process should be overseen by an independent body. It is that latter point which, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, suggested in his introduction, has caused much of the discussion surrounding the current report which we put before the House. Although CoRWM endorsed the idea of an independent body, it nevertheless watered it down and the Government have watered it down yet further. The original 1999 proposal was that a new statutory body should be created with responsibility for developing an overarching and comprehensive implementation strategy. In other words, it should be a major board independent of government which would have responsibility for ensuring that the policy of deep geological disposal was developed and carried through—independent of government but answerable directly to Parliament. The reasons why the committee put forward that idea were, first, that we felt that the Government had by 1999, after a series of very unfortunate developments with Nirex, when proposals had been turned down by lengthy inquiries, lost credibility and trust in the eyes of the public on nuclear issues and that a body was needed where discussion and decisions were open and transparent. Secondly, because the programme for deep geological disposal would be so long-term and expensive, there was a need to take it away from the vagaries of political manoeuvring—a 30-year programme outdistances the life of many a Parliament—and give it to a body with long-term commitment and credibility. I have been trying to think of an equivalent analogue in terms of other boards. We have boards such as those of the British Library or the National Archives, which are guardians of our written and, increasingly, our digital heritage. I also thought of the National Physical Laboratory, which was set up at the end of the 19th century to safeguard the independence of weights and measures. But I do not think that any of them are direct analogies to what we are suggesting here. I do not know that there is a direct analogy, but it should be a board with overarching responsibility, but not necessarily for implementation, merely for making sure that the policy is implemented. The CoRWM proposal was, as I said, a watered-down version of our proposals, and the Government have watered them down yet further. In their response, they made it clear that policy decisions would remain in the hands of the Government themselves, with Defra being the responsible department for managing nuclear waste, but with implementation in the hands of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which was itself responsible to the DTI. I guess that it is now responsible to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The independent body—the reconstituted CoRWM, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has indicated—would merely have the role of scrutiny of the NDA’s actions and of advice to government, alongside that of two other committees: the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely Implementation Planning Group and a new departmental committee, the Repository Development Monitoring Committee, both of which are official committees made up of civil servants, not of outside members. In the mean time, the NDA itself was to be subject to the scrutiny of a plethora of regulators—the Environment Agency, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Scottish and Northern Ireland environmental protection agencies—while the Government were also setting up a new national expert group of scientists to advise them on these nuclear issues. It is therefore hardly surprising that the committee has criticised the Government for muddying the field—amid this plethora of institutions, it is difficult to find out who is supposed to do what—and for watering down the original proposal to make it almost meaningless. Are scrutiny and advice the same thing? The Government’s response seems to use them interchangeably. And what teeth does this imply for the new CoRWM? What if the Government simply neglect its advice? To do them justice, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has indicated, the Government have listened to some of these criticisms and have clarified roles and enhanced the independence to be given to the new CoRWM in the revised terms of reference issued in July. It is, for example, to be able to lay its reports directly before Parliament, and in this sense to hold the Government and their agencies more directly to account. Nevertheless, it remains a very limp reflection of what the committee originally proposed. I have two further points to make, which arise from the proposed timetable for geological disposal set out in Chapter 6 of the June 2007 consultation document, Managing Radioactive Waste Safely, which makes it clear that no work on the actual, physical work of developing geological disposal facilities will begin until at least 2020. The period up to then is taken up first by the geological screening and discussions with possible partners. The process is seen to take two to three decades, and there is construction only in the last quartile of that period. My first question is therefore about what happens between now and then. The assumption must be that we maintain the stockpiles of high and intermediate-level nuclear waste in their current locations on NDA sites. This was the subject of CoRWM’s second main recommendation—that a robust programme of interim storage must play an integral part in the long-term management strategy. The Government accepted this recommendation completely, and we were promised that the NDA’s review of interim storage needs would be brought before the Government and form part of the future strategy. In our report, we raised the issue of nuclear security, and asked that the Government engage in much more open dialogue with local communities and stakeholders on the risks associated with the current storage facilities. Among the evidence that we received during this inquiry was a very long paper from Dr. David Lowry, who I understand is an expert on nuclear security, in which he asks questions about the security aspects of nuclear storage. We followed this up with the NDA and the Minister and, as our report reflects, were reassured that the Office for Civil Nuclear Security—the OCNS—kept a strict eye on these issues, and that the NDA and OCNS work to a site-security plan on all sites. Obviously, the details of these plans must remain secret. Nevertheless, as Dr. Lowry points out on page 75 of the evidence that is published with our report, it is alarming that, in an exhibition at Sellafield hosted by BNFL and prepared by the Science Museum, the following statement was apparently among the displays: "““The high-level liquid waste that comes from reprocessing is stored in constantly cooled tanks at Sellafield. These tanks represent one of the world's most hazardous concentrations of long-lived radioactive material and are, therefore, a prime terrorist target. An attack on these tanks, similar to the one in New York in September 2001, could have extremely serious consequences for much of the UK and Ireland””." I do know when the exhibition took place but would guess that it was two or three years ago. Will the Minister therefore assure us that the Government are well aware of these risks and have taken or are taking appropriate action? In particular, with the build-up of high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel as a result of the decommissioning programme, can we be assured that further concentration of such material at Sellafield will be sanctioned only if it can be safely housed? As I said, since geological disposal is still some two to three decades off, we are talking about an interim not of two to three years but of 20 to 25 years. My final question also relates to this timetable and the costs of deep geological disposal. Among the papers distributed to the committee was an answer to a freedom of information request to the NDA to provide the figures underlying the graph in its annual report for 2005-06 relating to NDA annual site costs at undiscounted current prices. I note that the figures show a satisfying drop in expenditure each year from the current level of £2.3 billion and level off at around the £500 million mark in 2030. Do these figures include the cost of building a deep geological disposal facility, and, if so, is it really assumed that the costs will cause no substantial increase in expenditure over the five to 10-year period that it will take to build such a facility? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s answer to both those questions.