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National Policy Statements (Energy)

There is already an issue relating to existing nuclear, as the floor price for carbon will give it an undeserved subsidy for no actual change in behaviour. Planning for the energy gap pales into insignificance beside the time scales that have to be imagined for waste disposal and site safety. It is those long-term dangers that should concern us most. Politicians are often criticised for a lack of long-term foresight, but certainly not this Government. The historian in me is delighted to report that we are making policy today for the mid-22nd century and beyond. On the very long-term scale there is the moral question of whether material that is likely to be dangerously radioactive for millennia should ever be intentionally created, however safely we plan to store it. We can know as little about societies 1,000 years from now as the Anglo-Saxons could have known about us. To talk of long-term storage, accessibility and monitoring arrangements over such time scales is utterly meaningless. We are leaving a toxic legacy to future generations about which we can know absolutely nothing. The NPS does not appear to pay any attention at all to those issues, but it does have something to say on rather shorter historical time scales. In relation to those, Ministers are acting not so much like Anglo-Saxons making policy for today, but like Gladstone or Disraeli trying to determine our current waste disposal policy. The NPS states, on page 239:"““Geological disposal of higher activity waste from new nuclear power stations is currently expected to be available for new build waste from around 2130””" That is on the assumption that spent fuel rods kept on site will have cooled sufficiently for disposal in geological disposal facilities. Every decade of activity will add another decade to the end disposal date. Hon. Members are today being asked to make nuclear waste disposal policy well into the mid-22nd century. Of course, policy making on such a time scale is not remotely practical, and the NPS admits as much. On page 239 it says:"““it is possible that there could be waste on site for longer than the assessment has been able to look ahead. Predictions of potential climate change impacts become less certain the further into the future the assessments are for, and it is not practicable to consider beyond 2100 at this stage.””" That is an interesting contrast with the Weightman report, which explicitly evaluates risk only in so far as that is reasonably practical and does not even address the major cost of evacuation and dislocation that has emerged at Fukushima. Why are we being asked to approve a policy with risks that will be significant into the mid-22nd century when the NPS itself admits that those are not practicable to foresee, and the Government's own safety adviser has not even tried to address them? The NPS talks of additional safeguards to cover these risks, saying that applicants need to"““identify the potential effects of the credible maximum scenario in the most recent projections of marine and coastal flooding””" and demonstrate that they could take ““further measures”” if necessary. I suspect that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the No Need for Nuclear campaign, and all their lawyers, will no doubt take full advantage of those words, with scope for years of argument and debate. If I were an investor in new nuclear, I would not be holding my breath for a return on investment before 2025. The jury is still out on the long-term effects of Fukushima, but it is already clear that even without a major Chernobyl-style meltdown 50,000 people have still been displaced, and there is a bill running to tens of billions of pounds—and, as always, the taxpayer is being asked to foot the bill. The real lesson, if I can paraphrase this in parliamentary language, is: stuff happens, and when it does, nuclear power is the worst possible energy source to have lying in its path. At this of all times, we should reassess our national commitment to nuclear. I know that the radioactive tendencies in the Tory and Labour parties make the passing of this policy statement inevitable, but we must challenge every licence and its capacity to withstand the worst-case scenario of climate change, and we must challenge every hidden and indirect subsidy that will make nuclear power possible.