My Lords, I am also not from Cumbria, although I shall have the pleasure of visiting Sellafield in two weeks’ time. I know that it consumes a vast proportion of the Minister’s budget in DECC, and I look forward to that visit.
My question is more one of logic. The Explanatory Memorandum states clearly, as does the legislation itself:
“This Order will bring certain development relating to geological disposal facilities for radioactive waste, and the deep borehole investigations necessary to determine the suitability of potential sites, within the nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP)”.
I suppose that my question is this: whether one likes it or not—whether one is pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear—there is a certain logic to the idea that a radioactive waste disposal site would come within the decision-making
of a major project. This was set up by the previous Government, as my noble friend Lady Miller has pointed out, and taken on by this one. It sort of fits within that. The exploratory deep borehole investigations seem to be a measure on a completely different scale, so I do not understand the logic of having both of those in. The exploration side seems logically to fit far more within the standard local authority planning system. I would be interested to hear a comment from my noble friend about why both these scales of project have been put into this order, rather than just one or the other.
While I am on my feet and we are on nuclear waste, at the beginning of this Parliament we looked at the national policy statement for nuclear power generation, and it has always slightly amused me that a footnote states:
“Geological disposal of higher activity waste from new nuclear power stations is currently programmed to be available from around 2130”,
some 115 years from now. I wondered whether the Government intended to keep their foot on the accelerator on that policy.