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Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill

Before the Minister responds, I would be interested in whether we should have a review of the societal demands of how we treat the decommissioning and waste of nuclear, because it seems to me that we are operating against a set of principles that have become detached from the reality of how you can manage this more cost-effectively. A large body of evidence says that geological disposal is not needed, because you can just do subterranean management. If it were not for the widespread lack of understanding about the nature of the problem and the way it can be dealt with, we would not have to incur these costs. If there is a review, we should go back to basics.

The same is true of decommissioning. The simplest and cheapest way to decommission is to leave it alone and then decommission it. The desire to bring it back to greenfield status is utterly unnecessary. These are highly concentrated industrial sites that serve clean energy to millions of people. We should not be seeking to return them to greenfield on an accelerated timescale, unnecessarily incurring huge costs to the taxpayer. We should have a review, go back to basics and consider all of the above in terms of what we should do with our waste and decommissioning.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
819 c430GC 
Session
2021-22
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
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