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National Policy Statements (Energy)

I rise to speak to the nuclear national policy statement in particular on behalf of the Liberal Democrat party, and to state our clear and unchanged view that nuclear power is unsafe, unaffordable, uninsurable, unpopular, not renewable, not decentralised, not particularly reliable, and not the kind of energy that the greenest Government ever should ever be caught promoting. When we are already paying £1.5 billion a year in nuclear clean-up and decommissioning costs from the previous generation of nuclear power stations, when we still do not know how, when or where we will dispose of the last 64 years' worth of radioactive waste, and when country after country is abandoning nuclear power, it is extraordinary that one of the national policy statements before us today seriously proposes embarking on a new generation of nuclear power stations.