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

I also take the point about whether putting sea defences in at Dungeness could help to deal with the moving shingle. The advice that I have received is that it could possibly stabilise the shingle, but the unique feature of the shingle is that it is constantly moving, which is why there are unique ecosystems growing on it. If you stabilise it, you will not get the same ecosystems. I suspect that we will debate this again in future. It has to be carefully looked at. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friend Lord Judd asked whether, notwithstanding the assessment that has taken place on individual sites within the NPS, the IPC will undertake site-by-site consideration of these matters. The habitats assessment has been made at the NPS level but, as with the overriding judgment, it will need to be done by a developer when an application is brought forward. We will make that explicit when we revise the national policy statement. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, who is a strong supporter of the nuclear policy in general, expressed concerns about the cooling towers in the development at Oldbury. The existing Magnox station is direct-cooled. It passes water from the Severn directly through its condensers and back into the river. The new station may have more than eight times the electrical capacity of the current station. If it were direct-cooled, it would need to extract from and discharge into the river in the order of eight times the quantity of water. The fear is that the warm water discharge would impose an unacceptable heat load on the river and the estuary. That is why an indirect cooling system would be required. The sustainability appraisal recognises that, given the height of the reactor buildings and the assumed highest cooling towers, methods of mitigation are limited and that all visual effects will be mitigated fully. If an application came forward, the IPC would have to consider the issue using the guidance on visual impact in the overarching NPS. The IPC would have to judge whether the visual effects on sensitive receptors, such as local residents and visitors to the area, outweigh the benefits of the project. It is also worth bearing in mind that before the IPC will formally accept an application, the developer will have to have gone through extensive local consultation. I understand that one of the developers, Horizon Nuclear Power, has stated publicly that it is looking at all cooling tower options, which may include cooling towers shorter than 70 metres, such as hybrid cell towers, and it will consult on the feasible options as part of its pre-application consultation. I take the point that the noble Lord raised, and I hope that he will accept that, as with the other site, this is not a done deal and that there are specific reasons why cooling towers have been proposed. This will all have to be considered if the NPS is adopted with the sites currently in it. Those matters will have to be gone into very carefully by the developer with the local community before the formal application can be accepted by the IPC. Very interesting points about nuclear waste were raised by the noble Lords, Lord Broers, Lord Teverson and Lord Dixon-Smith, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I want to reassure noble Lords that the issue of waste is important and is taken very seriously. That is why our policy is that before consents for new nuclear power stations are granted, we need to be satisfied that effective arrangements exist, or will exist, to manage and dispose of the waste that they will produce. We have grasped the nettle of dealing with the UK’s nuclear legacy waste. We are committed to doing that in a cost-effective and competent way. We have set up the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. It is responsible for decommissioning and clear-up. It is also the first UK organisation to have a complete overview of all types of civil nuclear radioactive waste, which leads to the setting of effective waste-management strategies. Sellafield is a large complex and nuclear/chemical facility. It has supported the UK nuclear power programme since the 1940s. I agree that the decommissioning of Sellafield is a huge challenge. I chair the Sellafield Remediation Forum, which is a regular meeting of all those concerned to make sure that progress is being made and the issue is now being tackled in a much more coherent way. The forum is making good headway and I can assure noble Lords that the Government are committed to a safe and secure environmental decommissioning of the site. Although one can never be complacent or underestimate the challenges at Sellafield, there are real signs of progress.