National Policy Statement for Nuclear Energy Generation

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, like the Minister, I look forward very much to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Maclean. With her reputation and past work, I am sure she will bring a fresh mind. Fresh minds are certainly needed in this area, where technology is changing extremely fast—faster than some people realise.

If I could find a word to sum up my feelings about EN-7, it would be one borrowed from the Prime Minister, who uses it quite frequently. I am afraid it is “disappointment”. I am disappointed. When I went to get EN-7 from the Printed Paper Office, I thought the office had failed to give me all the adequate paper, because when I read it through, I could not find very much addressing all the energy issues that are preoccupying the people of our nation and the industry. I am sorry to say that it left me very disappointed. It is not very different from EN-6, which mentioned SMRs. It is not all that different from EN-1, published back in November 2023, which also mentioned SMRs and so on. There is a difference: the move towards more criteria-based decisions for sites, which I will come to in a moment, and more references throughout to SMRs. They are included in the words, but not very much in the action.

I sound—and feel—negative. When I opened it, I found that the very first sentence of the entire document, about demand doubling, is wrong. It does not seem to be understood by the department that we are running at about 65 gigawatts of electricity—these figures are rough—which is 20% of our total energy use. The talk in the first sentence of the document is that demand will

“more than double by 2050”.

As I said, 65 gigawatts is 20% of total energy use, so double will be 130 gigawatts. That is miles below what will be required for an all-electric decarbonised economy. It will be well above 130: most people who examine these things closely say that it will be more like 250, and some say 300 gigawatts. That is the kind of clean energy volume we have to mobilise, and I totally agree with the Minister that nuclear is essential to it. With 3,000 hours of windless time around the United Kingdom and in this part of northern Europe, we will need a massive nuclear contribution, miles above what we have now or are likely to have in the next two or three years. The official figure is 24 or 25 gigawatts. I would like to take a bet—except I am not a betting man—that we will wish we had 50 gigawatts by the time we move into the 2030s. I am very glad to hear that, from the Minister’s and the Government’s point of view, there is no limit on what we should be building; it should be determined by other factors.

As for SMRs, which the rest of the world is busily ordering, I can find nothing here on the obvious siting differences arising between putting down on the ground sets of four, six or eight smaller reactors, depending on their size and the total required, and putting them down on different areas from the usual list, which appears on page 10 and is the list we have all been looking at for the last 20 or 30 years. It seems to miss out the possibilities of all the other abandoned, closed or still-suitable sites.

I am not arguing for a moment that the world is ready for individual SMRs to be placed at the end of this or that street or in this or that locality. I do not think the public are ready for that. There has been absolutely no education of or discussion with the public on the question of ionised radiation machinery being spread around the country. I am talking entirely about sites that either have been, are still or could be safely and securely nuclear. What about all the old Magnox sites? What happened to them? There are Trawsfynydd, Berkeley, Hinkley Point A and Sizewell A—followed by B, which was the only one that was rescued from the ones I announced in the lower House in October 1979 when we wanted nine new reactors, but only one emerged from that plan. There are Heysham 1 and Dungeness B, which I have visited and has, I think, already closed, and there are the old coal-fired stations. In California, industries are saying that they do not trust the grid any more and cannot feel safe with it. They are buying up old coal stations and installing SMRs in them, very small ones, to get the reliable electricity they need for their production, so nothing is needed there.

I am looking forward to EN-8. I hope it is now being drafted, telling us the possibilities of setting down sets of small reactors from the various producers telling us that they can produce fully operative, commercially competitive models by the early 2030s, which is years ahead of anything being considered for Sizewell C. They say that the new one at Hinkley C will be completed in 2029 but, quite honestly, heaven knows when it will be. The original idea from the then chairman was that we should cook our turkeys for Christmas 2019. I think that the original deals approved by the Cameron Government and the first contacts with EDF under Tony Blair’s Labour Government were talking about an original expenditure of £9 billion. Then it became £17 billion, then £19 billion, £23 billion and so on. The latest figures I have seen are £46 billion- plus. One figure says £51 billion. Obviously, inflation affects that, but the expansion of cost has been enormous. I marvel that we want to proceed with a replica in the rather charming belief that we will have learned all the mistakes from Hinkley C and therefore it will all cost less and be much quicker. I do not believe a word of it.

There is nothing on offer about a central point when you come to building and siting nuclear power stations, which is that SMRs can be fabricated in a factory. There is not that business of trundling trucks smashing up country lanes and destroying the environment for years and years on end, which of course is one of the driving forces of planning objections and delays. If you can bring in fabrication in the factory, you gain an enormous advantage, take a great deal of heat and tension out of local objections and probably cut years off the construction time. There is nothing on the advantages of a more distributed electricity system, which is what we are discussing and what many people are beginning to analyse, and which the use of SMRs and AMRs would greatly contribute to.

That means—and this is a very important planning thing—fewer pylons. If we can distribute our electricity—if we can get to the point at which we can convey North Sea electricity through switching stations into hydrogen by electrolysis, and move that in the same way that we move petrol today; and if we can then localise and get to market electricity or an electricity vector such as hydrogen—we will need fewer pylons. That would save years of planning objection, difficulty and political problems. I am amazed that there is nothing about that.

There is nothing on the fuel side. Some companies have said that they can manage perfectly well without enriched uranium at all. They are going to use already irradiated plutonium, of which we have a store at Sellafield, which we are guarding at considerable cost. That is a whole new possibility.

Above all—I know I am a little over my time—the factor that is really missing in this is finance, on which there is nothing. The fact is that small reactors can be financed profitably and will be in the future. There are several companies ready to do that without government money, whereas the big boys—the giant gigawatt machines—will cost the Government money, which means that they will cost the consumers, who are already overloaded, and the taxpayers money. Both Sizewell and Hinkley C, the big ones in the pipeline, are already in deep financial trouble. We remain to see and hear how they will get out of it.

The whole world is into this new design system. Countries are ordering and building SMRs. Canada is putting four in Ontario. Denmark has said it wants to start, after years of being anti-nuclear. Indonesia has ordered 20. Poland is in the business, as are Korea, Japan, the United States and, of course, China and Russia. They are all building small nuclear reactors. There is a very long queue building up, and we will be at the end of it unless we move very fast indeed—faster than this EN-7 indicates or suggests.