Energy Bill

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson), with whom I agreed rather more than with my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher). Colleagues will probably know that I began my career as a radiation biologist; I am an environmentalist by training and early profession. I spent the early part of my professional life living around and working on nuclear reactors of one sort or another. Indeed, I became friendly with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr. Ingram), who spoke earlier, when I was doing my PhD on a reactor right in the middle of a residential area in his constituency. When it was there, the people in the town did not even know it; I doubt whether they even knew when it had been decommissioned and taken away. Nuclear energy has no fears for me. I have been advocating it for the past 10 years. Having listened to this debate, I think that the issue comes down to what we think about carbon, not what we think about nuclear power. If we believe that putting carbon into the atmosphere is the most serious threat that we face today—because of its impact on climate change or its creation of respiratory diseases around the world—we have to prioritise energy sources that can remove carbon or are low-carbon. We should not rule anything out; we should put all low-carbon forms of energy production on the table. I am not sure that colleagues who have so vehemently and passionately argued against nuclear power are prioritising the battle against carbon. If they are, I do not think that they are taking seriously enough the difficulties involved. I am not the first to come to that conclusion. In 2006, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace in the United States, wrote in The Washington Post:"““In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots…Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.””"