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UK Government's Energy Policy

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, but such systems are still not 100% efficient. Using water turbines—placing water further uphill than the turbine—is only about 80% efficient. That is still good, but it will work only with the right geography. It will not be available across the United Kingdom. I welcome the idea, but there are other means. We can use electricity generated from wind to run electric currents through water to generate hydrogen, which is being used in cars and buses, but that technology is decades away from being affordable. There are solutions in the future and over the next few decades, but we face a problem right now in that many of our power stations—coal, gas and nuclear—will close in the next 10 years, and there simply will not be enough electricity. Again, the environmental movement needs to think about this. At the moment, there is a lot of good will towards it—most people in most parties have signed up to most of the agenda—but we are all politicians and we recognise some realities here. If the flat-screen TVs go off and the lights go out, the public will not be worried about the possibility of global warming in 50 years; they will tell politicians of all parties, ““Get your act together right now. Get the electricity back on right now, and we don’t care how you do it.”” If we are not prepared to do it in the quickest way possible, someone else will get elected who will, and that will probably mean coal-fired power stations going up all over the place. So we need to think about that, and the environmental movement needs to think about it as well. Nuclear power does not generate any carbon dioxide emissions. It is reliable. There is no issue about security of supply. People say that the uranium is going to run out in 50 years’ time, but most of it is mined in places like Australia, which are inherently stable countries. We do not have more than 50 years’ worth that we know about because we are not looking for it. In any case, there are two isotopes of uranium, and for reasons that scientists could explain better than I could, we are only using one of them at the moment. The other isotope is in plentiful supply, and we could adapt and use it if we wanted to.