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Energy: Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6)

My Lords, I speak today from my background as the former chief executive of the Environment Agency, where I had responsibility both for the regulation of nuclear waste and for flood defence and coastal processes. I start, however, on a personal note: if someone had said 15 years ago that I would be standing up to commend the Government on adopting a policy of developing more nuclear power, I would have questioned their sanity. I welcome the policy statement. Perhaps it would be useful briefly to touch on why. My concerns before I became the regulator for nuclear waste and the authority for flood and coastal erosion were about safety and environmental issues. We have made such huge progress in both the management of nuclear waste and understanding of environmental impact and flood and coastal processes that I believe that the further development of nuclear power is to be commended in the context of climate change. It should be seen not as a permanent solution but as a bridging technology, because the impact of nuclear power is still huge in terms of cost and waste management. Moreover, the risk of safety going awry will always be there. If we can see the policy statement as a way of gaining additional generating capacity in a reasonably short time while we develop a richer, carbon-reducing energy mix for the future, we should press on. I have become much keener on nuclear power as a result of some of the other propositions being made for carbon-reducing energy generation technologies, particularly the Severn barrage, but I propose to keep my powder dry on that until Thursday’s debate, when your Lordships will no doubt hear far more about it. My support for the nuclear policy statement has three provisos. The first is the waste issue. The noble Lord, Lord Broers, hit the nail on the head when he said that the pace of development of a long-term deep depository is glacially slow. We need the Government to assure the House that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will make ongoing and credible progress in the development of a geological disposal facility for higher-activity solid radioactive waste, both for the legacy waste—I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Broers, about some of the issues at Sellafield—and for waste from the new-build programme.