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Plenary, 14 Apr 2005

14 Apr 2005 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Nuclear Power

Ballance, Chris Green South of Scotland Watch on SPTV

In the case of Hunterston, the timeline assumption is that most of the cost of decommissioning will be spent not in the first two years of the budget, but in 60 years' time. According to the NDA, that is because the eternally optimistic nuclear industry hopes that the decommissioning costs will be cheaper in 60 years. What a legacy we are leaving.

Fifty years ago, the industry that is so optimistic about future costs promised us electricity that would be too cheap to meter, and 25 years ago, during the inquiry into the dumping of waste in Mr Mundell's Galloway hills, it promised us that a waste solution was just round the corner. Hunterston A alone will produce 6,384m3 of intermediate-level waste. Where will that go? It will also produce 33,000m3 of low-level waste. Where will that go? The low-level waste depository at Drigg is almost full—there is no room there and there is no store anywhere else. It is estimated that the current decommissioning programme will produce enough material to fill 15 Drigg-sized depositories. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management is not even considering that problem.

As my speech has been so heavily interrupted, I must turn quickly to the AP1000, which raises significant safety issues because it has only one containment vessel and minimises the scope for operator intervention. As regards security of supply, if we build 10 such reactors—not one of which has yet been built anywhere in the world—we will have only the word of our happy-go-lucky nuclear industry that every part of their intricate systems will work. If a problem occurs, we might overnight have to close down every single one for months. Where would that leave security of supply?

As for climate change, if one examines the full life cycle of a nuclear power station—including uranium mining, fuel enrichment, construction and decommissioning—one finds that nuclear power produces five times more CO2 than wind power and almost as much as gas.

Health and safety should have destroyed the nuclear industry decades ago but economics is now killing it, so let it rest in peace. Let us look to the renewable future. Let us see the Executive investing £500 million in marine renewables. Let Scotland lead the world.

I move amendment S2M-2691.3, to insert after the fourth "waste":

"notes that the industry proposal to base electricity supply on identical reactors of the unproven AP1000 design would undermine the security of electricity supply; notes that the amount set aside from nuclear generation revenues over the last 50 years to pay for decommissioning of existing nuclear power stations is only sufficient to fund the first two years of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency's 30-year programme and therefore that the multi-billion cost of decommissioning existing nuclear power stations will have to be paid for by future generations of tax payers and therefore considers that nuclear power is economically unsustainable; further notes that, over its whole life cycle, nuclear power is not carbon-neutral and agrees with the Chief Executive of the Energy Saving Trust that ‘to present nuclear power as one of the main ways of combating climate change is short-sighted'; believes that renewable energy and energy efficiency offer a truly secure and sustainable energy future".

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Plenary, 14 Apr 2005

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