My Lords, I apologise for my delay in arriving; I misunderstood and thought that the Committee was adjourned until the end of the special session, which was slightly delayed.
I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. Amendment 3 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Teverson would require a geological disposal facility, or GDF, to have been constructed in the United Kingdom and be operational before the Secretary of State could designate a nuclear company under this Bill. The amendment’s objective is to bring some focus to the issues of nuclear waste and decommissioning, which were largely and curiously absent from the debate at Second Reading.
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As we know, high-level nuclear waste is deadly for thousands of years—longer than any human civilisation has ever survived—yet we seem strangely cavalier about the fact that we intend to create more of this deadly waste without any current means of permanent disposal or any certainty about the costs of delivering a permanent disposal solution. To my mind, it is morally unjustifiable to create dangers such as this, to be encountered by people thousands of years hence, in order to satisfy our demands today. However, for the purposes of this amendment, I will focus particularly on the costs of a geological disposal facility and how they will be accounted for in determining the costs of new nuclear generation.
We know from the GDF Annual Report 2020–2021 that the geological disposal facility is intended to store not just legacy waste, such as the waste created by new nuclear generation—waste that, as is pointed out in the report’s introduction, will have to be stored safely and securely
“over the hundreds of thousands of years it will take for the radioactivity to naturally decay.”
We also know from pages 24 to 26 of the report that, this year, the lifetime cost of that geological disposal facility leapt to an estimate of between £20 billion and £53 billion. This represents an increase of between £8 billion and £41 billion on the previous estimate of £12 billion. That itself represented a more than three- fold increase on the original estimate for the GDF of £3.7 billion, which can be found in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s annual report for 2008-09. So today’s upper estimate is more than 14 times the original projected cost of the GDF.
The truth is that, today, no one knows what the costs will be in the end. Whatever the nuclear industry tells us about the cost of disposing of this waste today, I would place money on the actual figure being many times higher. I should be clear that I do not blame the NDA or its subsidiaries for the difficulties in arriving at figures that can be relied on, because such estimates involve a number of highly complex factors that must be projected over immensely long periods. The NDA’s annual report for 2020-21 states in respect of its wider nuclear liabilities:
“The quality of the forecast becomes less certain further into the future”.
The same report estimates the current total nuclear liabilities for the NDA group at £135.8 billion, with a range between £115 billion and £246 billion—figures that have mushroomed from the £30.57 billion quoted by the NDA when it made its first estimate. Even that figure of £135.8 billion is probably already out of date, as I assume that it does not include the revised estimates for the GDF. Perhaps the Minister can clarify that in his response.
All this shows that we will not know what the GDF will cost until it has been constructed and is operating. We cannot know the real cost of nuclear generation and decommissioning in the absence of that information. It follows that the Secretary of State will lack the information to determine whether a nuclear project represents value for money, which he is required to determine under Clause 2. For those reasons alone, it is our belief that we should not move forward with new generation until a GDF is operational. However, there is also a more profound reason: we have no business creating more deadly waste until we have proven that we are capable of cleaning up the nuclear mess that we have already made. I would beg to move, but I believe that my amendment has already been moved and I thank my noble friend Lord Foster for that.