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

My Lords, the world of politics is the world of administration of society, and whatever we do will become political. However, if there is a change of Government after the election, at the moment, the policy is to keep the process, but it is possible to keep the process and amend, to a degree, the machinery. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Jenkin for doing his homework on this. The chairman of the IPC has said that what we are suggesting will work. Perhaps we can put that to bed. If we wanted to make the national policy statements subject to parliamentary approval, which at present they are not, legislation would be required. We have to face that. As always, the existing legislation stands and that is what we are dealing with today. What the future holds is very unpredictable at present. Like every other Member, I have to accept that, even though we have at least moderate confidence about our presence in this palace after the election. I want to raise two other issues. My noble friend Lord Cope in a way raised the issue of waste heat from power stations. The problem applies to nuclear power stations just as it does to every other form of generation. We will not have an energy-efficient generating industry until we find a solution to this difficulty. It is a fact, whether we like it or not, that discharging warm water, even if you pour it from a deep pipe three miles out to sea, is a pollutant that changes the environment not only where it is released but downstream. We are extremely fortunate in this country that we have very good sea circulation around our islands that disperses this problem to a considerable degree. However, it would be better to find a use for that heat and keep it ashore. There are real difficulties with that. Siting power stations on the coastline is very good for a host of reasons, but it makes the problem of waste heat more difficult to resolve, because you cannot easily use it for community heating, which was one of the roles that used to be fulfilled by the old Battersea power station. We forget that. It is a huge free energy source available for this country if someone could find a use for it. There is of course another problem. Any use that we find for it must be able to survive—if I may put it that way—during downtime in the power station when it closes down for maintenance, whether planned or emergency. The difficulty with the possible horticulture solution is the need for a backup heating system to enable the power station to shut down. There is therefore an argument for having at least two active reactors in each power station, whereby one at a time could be shut down. Even that would be difficult if the user were paying a business to supply the waste heat from both reactors. We need to recognise that there are real problems with this. Until we solve them, we will have an inefficient energy industry. That gives me no satisfaction, so we must find an answer. There is nothing else that I want to raise, except to say that these documents must be approved. The Independent Planning Commission is ready to receive planning applications or, as I understand it, will be ready from around the end of this month. The brutal reality is that no one who wants to put in a planning application knows how to design that application until we have approved these documents. That is why all our backs are against the wall. I plead that we approve the documents now or, rather, at the end of the process, although the Minister should accept that they are flawed and that a proper review should be undertaken. I do not think that the suggestion that we debate them on the Floor of the House will take the matter forward one step.