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

My Lords, nuclear energy is coming back into its own. Nothing illustrates that more decisively than President Obama, through the use of his presidential power to offer loan guarantees, giving the green light, two weeks ago, to the construction in the United States of the first nuclear power station there for 30 years. However, the western world is waking up late. There are apparently 56 reactors now under construction around the world, the majority in Asia. It is a tragedy that, when the West discovered what the Government here describes on page 12 of the NPS as, ""the urgent need to decarbonise the economy"," it did not take the opportunity to go for nuclear power. Instead it defined renewable energy to exclude nuclear energy and went down the fairytale route of wind power, a blind alley down which it continues today to pour scarce resources. The advantages of nuclear power are well set out on pages 10 and 11 of the NPS, starting with the comprehensive and vibrant sentence: ""Nuclear power is low-carbon, economic, dependable, safe, and capable of increasing diversity of energy supply and reducing our dependence on any one technology or country for our energy or fuel supplies"." Nuclear power is the real thing. It confronts and answers the need for a constant, abundant and cheap source of electricity, unlike wind power which is irregular, scarce in the sense that it consumes huge resources to provide very little, and produces electricity at up to three times the cost of nuclear power. Wind power also occupies much more land space, provides far less permanent employment—let alone qualified permanent employment, to which the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, referred—and its turbines have a half or a third of the life of nuclear power stations. Nuclear power requires little addition to the grid as new stations are to be sited, for the most part, close to the present ones, and there will be no need to extend the grid substantially, whereas wind farms are to be sited far away from where the electricity they generate is required, to the great detriment of the landscape and of household Bills, because enormous extra grid lines have to be built. The crucial difference—one not mentioned in the NPS and one which derives from all these comparative disadvantages—is that wind power requires subsidies of over £1 billion per annum today, paid for by the consumer, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, emphasised, and nuclear power requires none. If I understand it correctly, the substantial costs of decommissioning nuclear power stations are provided for by the generating companies with a 4 per cent charge added to electricity bills. I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm that taxpayers have not paid in the past, are not paying today and are not being asked to pay in the future for the decommissioning costs of nuclear power stations. The tragedy is that over the past 10 years we have lost our leading role in nuclear energy. Our new stations will have to be built by foreign consortia; we will have to wait in the international queue for their attention; and, in any case, we cannot expect production from new stations for up to 10 years. Meanwhile, as stated in the NPS at paragraph 2.2.1, up to 22 gigawatts of existing coal and nuclear power stations are due to be phased out. A ban has also been placed by the Government on any new coal power stations without carbon capture and storage—a completely unproven technology on the scale required. As the contribution from wind power has to be ignored when calculating the generating capacity required to meet peak demand due to its unreliability, the result is a rapid increase in our dependence on gas. It is gas-fired power stations that are above all being built today. At the same time, our own gas fields are depleting rapidly so that by 2020, it has been calculated, we will be 70 per cent dependent on imported gas, yet our own gas storage has not kept pace with this development. We can store only some 4 per cent of our annual requirements compared with France’s 24 per cent and 19 per cent in the case of Germany. Therefore, a very worrying 10 years, at least, stretch ahead. In fact, there are two worries. The first is black-outs. This concern seems to be shared by Ofgem. Last month, Alistair Buchanan, the chief executive, was quoted as saying: ""It is the scale of collapse in energy supply from 2013 up until 2017 that is profound and worrying"." It was he also, I think, who said: ""In 2017 we get to the really sweaty-palm moment in terms of … shortages"." The second worry is the soaring price of electricity. Every new green measure seems to bring with it an additional charge to electricity consumers. I have seen one estimate that the funding of the £200 billion investment needed to reach the Government’s targets would produce an increase in electricity bills of 100 per cent—in other words, a repeat of what we have seen since 2003. The first very obvious result of this increase in electricity bills is a relentless rise in the number of those in fuel poverty—to over 4 million today, despite the Government’s target to have it abolished by this year. However, apart from the effect on households, the less easily discernible but equally if not more dangerous effect is that on industry’s costs. That was the subject of a Question at Question Time today. The result is simply bound to be an exodus of some firms and plants to places where they can continue to operate competitively, and the bankruptcy of others. As this will mean job losses, is this wise at a time of recession? There is the usual section in the NPS devoted to climate change, where confident but, in my view, entirely unjustified assertions about the changing climate are made. I had something to say about this in our previous debate which I shall not repeat. However, I notice that on page 27, at paragraph 4.1.7, the IPC is warned to take account of the risk of tsunamis. Can the Minister perhaps say how the IPC is expected to do this? Will it be required to fly in experts from the United Nations or perhaps from Japan? And if it is told by experts, as it is bound to be, that there is some risk of tsunamis, what is it expected to do about it? Does it require the power station to be moved uphill? On page 19, the NPS warns us to expect, ""increased ... intense rainfall events"." What is the IPC expected to do about them ? No doubt these warnings derive from the Met Office, which is one of the four official sources for the weather data relied on by the IPCC. The Met Office does not appear to have had an entirely happy time recently. On 5 January, I expressed surprise in the House that it had not abandoned seasonal forecasts since they had been proving so unsuccessful. The Met Office has now obliged. Last week, the Times announced that, ""the Met Office is to abandon the seasonal forecasts that have brought it so much recent humiliation"." One might have thought that if the Met were going to abandon forecasts for a few months ahead, it would at the same time abandon forecasting the climate 100 years ahead. No such luck, I am afraid. On the same day, the head of climate monitoring at the Met Office chose to confirm with all the authority of his office that our climate was changing rapidly—in all regions of the planet, he said—and he and his group stated that there was a 95 per cent chance that human activity was to blame. I should like to ask the Minister: when saying that it is retiring from making seasonal forecasts, is the Met Office withdrawing the forecasts that it has already made? In November, it went public with the prediction that 2010 would be one of the hottest years on record. Has that now been withdrawn or does it belong in the category of longer range climate forecasts in which the Met Office still claims expertise? In fact, it is to a large extent made up of global warming missionaries, as can be appreciated by a glance at the latest issue of its magazine Barometer, whose zeal to demonstrate the result to which they are committed colours their forecasts, I suspect. I find the Government’s expectation that energy consumption in this country will not rise over the next 15 years, as the Minister repeated this afternoon, extremely difficult to share, given the expected large increase in population and past trends, unless of course a severe increase in electricity prices brings about another recession and a collapse in demand. That is hardly something to be wished for. But if that does not happen and consumption starts to rise again, as it always has done in the past, then the supply projected by the Government will not be sufficient. That is before one begins to consider the needs of electric cars, the sales of which the Government are also keen to promote with subsidies, without any evident concern for what this might do to electricity demand. Governments once used to talk about the need for joined-up government. There is very little of that on show today in the field of energy, albeit that this particular NPS reveals the Government to have taken a most important, if tragically belated, step towards securing our future energy needs.