I did not know that my hon. Friend had gathered so many accolades, but I thank him for the work he has done on these energy matters, which is particularly important for his constituency interests and for our country. As I said, if we could get the holy grail of carbon capture and storage, our country would be quids in because of the amount of coal we have. I am sadly old enough to remember what was called town gas; I do not know whether my hon. Friend remembers it. Town gas was made from coal, produced and piped, before we discovered abundant natural gas in commercial quantities under the North sea. Yes, we could go back to that, but we need the technology.
Instead, we have a massive subsidy for nuclear energy. Leaving aside the safety issues for the moment, that subsidy is just twice the price per kilowatt hour guaranteed with indexation. Who is proposing it? A combination of France and China—China with, as I understand it, a reactor that has not yet been built anywhere in the world, and France, through EDF, with the wonderful record we see at Flamanville in Normandy, where the reactor is now three times behind schedule at twice the predicted cost and still has not opened. There is a similar story with a similar reactor, also being helped by France, in Finland.
The Government are contemplating huge subsidies in a panic over energy security, which of course will not guarantee energy security as it will take so long to build a new fleet, as they are pleased to call it, of nuclear power stations. Meanwhile, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North points out, we have the craziness of all this abundant coal yet quite insufficient Government-funded CCS research and development through which we could proceed to the gasification of coal as North sea gas is running out.