Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. This is the first of our sessions in a new inquiry making the case for nuclear energy. We will be revisiting the nuclear road map of the last Government and examining the new Government’s ambitions for nuclear in UK energy strategy. We will assess how they intend to deliver them. Welcome to our panel today. Can you introduce yourselves?

Hi. I am Sam Dumitriu. I am head of policy at Britain Remade. We are a campaign group that wants to make it easier for Britain to build things again.

I am Dr Douglas Parr. I am the policy director at Greenpeace UK, a longstanding nature and climate campaign group.

Hello. I am Fiona Rayment. I am the president of the Nuclear Institute and a professor with the Dalton Nuclear Institute at the University of Manchester.

I am Professor Stephen Thomas. I am a retired professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich.

Thank you all very much and welcome. I will start with some questions about the current nuclear strategy and how it compares to the predecessor road map. Fiona, the civil nuclear road map to 2050 was published in January 2024. What do you say are the benefits of having a road map? Do this Government need to be explicit about the path they are following?

It is really beneficial to have a road map because it helps with investor and supply chain confidence. In terms of enabling this, with where we are up to at the moment, we are nowhere near the 24-gigawatt current target. With what is currently happening in the UK, with Sizewell B, Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and the potential of three units with Rolls-Royce SMR, we get to just above 9 gigawatts at this moment in time. There needs to be more pace in terms of driving that forward, but I believe that having a target enables that confidence to be developed.

What do you think needs to change to get to 24 gigawatts?

Key aspects of driving any nuclear programme relate to building very mature supply chains, having a skill base that can drive that forward and having a regulatory system that enables decisions to be made at pace. These are three key elements that are really important for this to happen. The challenge that we have had in the UK is that the last nuclear power plant, prior to Hinkley Point C, was built in the 1990s—Sizewell B. After that time, we lost the ability to construct large nuclear power plants. Rebuilding that capability again has been key. If you look at what has happened with Hinkley Point C, even going from the first reactor unit to the second reactor unit, there has been an acceleration in schedule as that supply chain has started to mature. If you continue with that replication going forward, you could see that you would start to accelerate the ability to build in a much faster timeframe. If you look at other countries, that is exactly what we see. There are examples of that, for example with the United Arab Emirates, where the Republic of Korea APR-1400 power plants have been built in seven years per reactor, delivering a total of 5.6 gigawatts to that economy. I really feel that driving that maturity of the supply chain and ensuring that the skills are available for that, with that regulatory system being fit for purpose, is appropriate. If I can pick up a slight point on regulation, we have just had the recommendations from the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce. These recommendations focus very much on having a less complex regulatory system, so simplifying the process, in addition to having more congruence between regulators and, finally, having a more proportionate decision-making process associated with that, which takes overall impact into account, including financial impact. That is really important. I really welcome these recommendations in terms of how we can maybe get to a situation where a really good regulatory system that we have in the UK could further be enhanced to help us get to our 24 gigawatts going forward.

Sam, the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce says that there needs to be a nuclear national priority that emphasises urgency and balances safety with delivery. Is that the key to moving things forward?

Yes, I believe that it is an incredibly important ingredient. The big challenge Britain has with nuclear power is, if you compare our costs to other countries, we are about six times the cost of a new nuclear power plant in South Korea on a per-kilowatt basis. We are between about a third and a half as cost-effective as France and Finland. We used to build nuclear power plants for much less. Sizewell B was built for about half of what Sizewell C is set to cost. Regulation is a really important impact here. We often talk about the specific costs that regulation might impose. For instance, EDF will spend something like £50 million on an acoustic fish deterrent and speakers to play to avoid fish entering the intake pipe. We talk about that cost, but that cost is not really why nuclear power plants cost something like £38 billion to £40 billion in the UK and only about £9 billion in South Korea. It is how those regulations affect your ability to access the things that cut costs in other industries. They limit our ability to gain from learning between different projects. We have seen a huge decline in the cost of wind and solar because we have built a lot of wind and solar, and learnt how to do things cheaper as a result. When you have frequent design changes and site-specific stuff, that kind of standardisation and modularisation is much harder to deliver. It is harder to innovate. When you want to come up with ideas that could save money, the regulatory barriers mean that you do not always bring them forward unless you think it is going to be worth all of the time and delay. Supply chains cannot invest when there are constant legal challenges potentially delaying projects. That makes it much harder to build up those skills in the workforce. If you want to finance a fleet, there is much more risk associated if there are all these regulatory issues where a project could get right up to the planning approval stage and then get rejected at the last minute, or even in a court case afterwards. All these things undermine our ability to build nuclear cheaply. It is really essential that the Fingleton review’s recommendations are implemented in full. It is really important when we think about targets, because one thing I see is the value of setting yourself a target. I can think of the target around testing during covid, but also the target around clean power 2030. You start asking yourself questions: “How do we actually deliver this? What are the blockers?” If you are just going about business as usual and you do not have anywhere where you are working towards, some of those questions get dodged. Then, all of a sudden, you realise that there are a lot of big barriers that we need to change, and that creates the impetus to change them.

How would you phrase the target? What target do you think it should be?

I think that 24 gigawatts was a good target. We are not on course to reaching that, based on the policies that were put in place. The kind of regulatory reform that John Fingleton has proposed is necessary to do that, but it is not just regulation. We also need to make sure that that target has the financing policies backing that up. We have got quite sophisticated in the debate around how you finance large-scale nuclear. We are pretty immature in the debate on how you finance small modular reactors, where potentially there are a lot more options available to you. The most interesting, I think, is the ability to get some of the US tech giants to pay for decarbonising our grid.

I want to ask about nuclear’s role in the overall electricity mix. For context, my constituency hosts Heysham 1 and 2 nuclear power stations. I think that that is helpful context. According to the Government and others, nuclear is the only proven low-carbon technology that is capable of supplying baseload energy. Stephen, can you explain, in words that my constituents will understand, what baseload electricity is? What is baseload energy? What do we mean by it? How does nuclear provide it? Are there credible alternatives that can meet the electricity need in this country?

We have asked the Government what their definition of baseload is and they cannot provide one. From a very simplistic point of view, you could say that it was the lowest point of demand in the middle of summer at night, and that might be 20 gigawatts. There is this connection that, because you have a baseload, which we clearly do, you need baseload power stations, which makes no sense to me. It is like saying that you have a factory that operates 24 hours a day and you need workers that will operate 24 hours a day. You need the resources to meet demand when that demand exists. You do not need baseload power stations as such.

That is really interesting, because that goes against other evidence we have received, which is always very interesting. Can I dig in a bit more to that? In terms of stability of the grid, do different forms of electricity have different impacts on the way our wider system operates and our ability to get the energy where and when we need it?

You asked me about alternatives and I did not answer.

I did. I am sorry, yes. I would like to hear that.

Shall I come back to that? If you are going to ask about alternatives, you are assuming that nuclear is an option. If you look at the history of British nuclear power programmes, you would have to say that it probably is not. If you go back far enough and look at the Thatcher programme, one out of 10 got built. If you look at the Blair programme of 15 gigawatts by 2030, none will hit that.

That is a slightly separate question from the one I am hoping to get at, which is a more technical one. Do we need things like nuclear or what gas-fired power stations currently provide? Is that a necessary part of the way our electricity system works?

In the future we need flexibility. We lose flexibility when we take away fossil fuels because fossil fuel stations are the ones that can be started up and closed down on request. You are going to have to look for flexibility in things such as demand-side management, so that, when supply is tight, you can ask people to reduce their demands a little bit. You certainly have a lot of scope for batteries and other storage devices, which are coming down in cost very sharply. You also have car batteries, which give you a lot of flexibility, because you generally do not need to charge at a particular time. When supply is tight, you can use it to power your house.

You are talking about distributed small storage capability. Could I ask if anyone else in the panel would like to come in on that question before I move on?

You asked the question about baseload. It is the minimal demand that needs to be supplied to the grid at a point when there is not that much demand in the system, so what that minimum supply is. Over the last seven decades in the UK, nuclear has provided that minimal demand through Magnox, the advanced gas reactor fleet and Sizewell B. It enables you to minimise the spikes that you might have through importing gas or electricity from outside of the UK. It removes that reliance on imports. Also, we have seen that, if you have an over-reliance on any one particular technology, you can get spikes. We had spikes with the gas prices in 2022-23 because of that over-reliance on one technology, so there is a real rationale to have a mix in place.

Given that nuclear power stations have shutdowns in operation, as I know well from my local area, if we did go for nuclear-powered baseload, how much would we need to deliver that, given the predicted electrification?

If we look at the predictions in the world and the UK, there are some recent assessments that have come out from NESO, etc. They talk about needing just under 100 gigawatts by 2050, so somewhere in the region of 95 gigawatts; 25% of that mix would get you to about 24 gigawatts of nuclear energy. We have said, in terms of predicting that baseload, that it would be probably around that sort of figure that you would need. That is how we get to that 24 gigawatts number.

I think that Doug wanted to come in on that and I also wanted to ask Sam a question about the Government’s plans for nuclear.

I have a point on alternatives, because there are a couple of questions here if you tease it out. One is how you produce the terawatt hours that you need to produce for the system over days, weeks and years. The other one is the grid management and how one provides for the frequency control and balancing services. Let me address the first one first. There are a number of modelling studies from places such as LUT, Imperial and UCL that say that use of high amounts of nuclear, or indeed any nuclear, is not a very cost‑effective way of going about providing that level of electricity delivery. The issue, therefore, is how you manage the system in order to provide at times when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. That brings you to the question of storage, which has been the holy grail, if you like, of renewable systems over a long period of time. The world of storage is changing very rapidly. For example, the value-for-money assessment that was done on Sizewell C used values on costs of storage that were based on a DECC publication from 2000[1] that was in turn based on analysis that was done in 2018. If you compare the value of lithium-ion batteries in 2018 with the costs of them in 2025, you find that they have more than halved. That value for money assessment, at least in relation to the ability to use batteries to store electricity, is well out of date. Batteries do not solve the whole problem. Do not get me wrong. There is also a lot of innovation happening in the long-duration storage sector. Large amounts of nuclear are essentially a bet against that innovation coming along fast and in a modular way, which will see the sorts of cost decreases that we have seen elsewhere.

I am going to pick up some elements around energy security. There are two aspects. I will start with the security of supply. We have also heard arguments that reducing reliance on fossil fuels strengthens security by limiting dependence on foreign supplies of gas. Do you agree with that? Does replacing the gas to derive electricity enhance the energy security, or does it just substitute one form of dependence for another? I will start with Doug for that one, but I am keen to hear from others. Then I would like to move on to broader aspects of security.

Reducing reliance on overseas gas supplies is good. There is no question about that. The issue is that you substitute one for another and whether you become dependent, for example, on uranium supplied from elsewhere. You could say that you become dependent on China for supplies of solar panels, but there is a distinct difference. Once you have the solar panels, you have the solar panels. They are your own. You can use and operate them. If you use the other technologies that I talked about earlier in order to deliver the system security that you need, you improve your overall security. There is also much merit, if we are potentially moving into an area of hybrid warfare, in having distributed electricity generation and supply.

Does anyone else have any brief points on that?

Civil nuclear has always strengthened the energy security in this country. It provides diversity to the energy mix. It provides reliable, clean, locally produced power. That is really important. We are not reliant on subsea infrastructure. It reduces exposure to oil and gas spikes. It is available 24/7, even when there are extreme weather conditions. That is really important. Yes, nuclear, in some aspects, is replacing another energy reliance. The key is to understand what that new reliance is and how you manage the risks associated with that. If you take one of the significant risks of nuclear, which is fuel, if you make a decision to have a secure fuel supply chain, you can stockpile that fuel and it means that your power plants are safe and secure for years. You build more time into that security in comparison to what you would with any other system.

When you are comparing fossil fuels and nuclear fuels, you are not talking about the same scale of cost as a whole of energy. If there was a concern with access to nuclear fuels and prices spiked, it would not have the same impact because most of the cost of nuclear comes from the actual capital outlay initially.

I would like to move on to more physical security of energy supplies. We have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere—and you alluded to it as well, Doug—that idea of energy as a target of war, via kinetic means, cyber-attack or anything else. You could argue at the moment that oil and gas is vulnerable. I guess that the question there is whether we currently protect oil and gas well enough, thinking about it as a strategic asset. Do we have the physical security, from a military and defensive position, in place? What more can be done? Similarly, on nuclear, when we are thinking about building new nuclear, to what extent do we need to think about including stockpiling? Do we need to think about that as a strategic target and are we doing enough on that? Does the road map do enough on that to consider power and energy generation in those terms?

In terms of security of supply with gas, we have been in a very vulnerable position for quite a long time because we have no storage, effectively. We have just a few days. We always relied on producing so much in the North sea that we could just turn up the taps from the North sea, but those days are long gone. We need to think about security of supply, depending on how long we are going to be relying on gas. That is a major issue. Oil and coal are very storable, if we are going to have to keep using those, but the issue with gas is the first one we need to deal with.

Is it that, up to this point, we have not thought about physical security of our energy supply, including transit of LNG, in the same way? We have not thought about how we secure our energy supply in every sense.

If I were to look at the vulnerabilities in terms of physical impacts, if we have an energy system where we are extremely reliant on interconnectors, they seem to me to be the weakest point in the chain if you were to attack them. The thing that concerns me more around security—I do not think it is an overriding concern—is that it is not necessarily how much we rely on other countries for the actual equipment, but rather the level of control and involvement they have in the ongoing running of the projects and their scope for control. If you look at solar and wind, for a large proportion of the parts that go inside the wind turbines and that make sure that we can run the solar farms, there will be Chinese involvement there. We can try to get rid of it, but it will be very difficult. Lots of stuff that we say are not Chinese imports actually probably are Chinese imports that are just classified wrong, in terms of people can get confused when things go into ports. Nuclear is very different in the fact that we have made a conscious decision to take China out of the supply chain much more and give it much less scope for control during when we were looking at the Bradwell project. On that front, nuclear probably presents the strongest security case.

Doug, do you have anything to add to that, particularly on that element about Chinese technology?

I cannot really speak to the level of Chinese technology involved. I would observe that China is still a major investor and operator during the construction at Hinkley. If we are moving into an era of SMRs, which can be sited anywhere, I cannot give you a security breakdown, but it is clear that you are creating a number of hazard sites around the country. There is the level of security protection that would be needed under that hybrid warfare situation. That proliferates the issue.

Can I just ask you about that idea in particular? We know that Ukraine has a more distributed power network now as a result, so that it is not just one target. It felt that that more distributed network is less vulnerable. Yes, there are more targets, but, fundamentally, you cannot take them down as easily, because you can move things around. There are probably arguments on both sides of it. Fiona, what is your viewpoint on that point of physical security?

You need both. You need to have some large assets and think about how you end up having a distributed network also. It is important to have both. You do not want all your eggs in one basket. I cannot comment on oil and gas, but what I would say about nuclear is that security on nuclear sites is paramount. We have multiple nuclear sites in Scotland, Wales and England, and we are regulated and legally obliged to deal with nuclear security through the Office for Nuclear Regulation. It comes in and does inspections on a regular basis. That would not change in terms of any new nuclear system. There is a maturity in terms of how you deal with that in the nuclear industry. At point of generation, we have sites that are made safe and we protect from a physical security point of view. In addition to that, there is also a lot of work ongoing at the moment looking at cyber-security and how these sites are and continue to be protected from a cyber-security threat. We are finding there is more of that cyber-security threat now, with what is happening in Ukraine and in the east.

Hinkley C is funded through contracts for difference and Sizewell C through the regulated asset base model, and we are going to start paying for that through our bills this month. Sam, what impact are these models likely to have on consumer electricity bills in the long run?

The RAB model, in terms of Sizewell C, will increase our bills, but not by that much compared to many of the other costs that are coming down the line. It is important that, with the different funding models, there is an advantage with CfDs, in that the construction risk is at least taken off the taxpayers’ or bill-payers’ hands. Because that construction risk is there, and we are looking for private finance in these projects, because we are not taking the same sort of role the state has traditionally taken with nuclear, we are in a situation where that can make things very difficult to finance. The reason we have moved to the RAB model and are looking away from that CfD model is essentially that nuclear is very expensive to build at current levels in Britain and not in other countries to the same extent. If we were to look at ways of reducing those costs through things such as regulatory reform and making sure our supply chain is more mature through adopting a fleet model, those costs will come down and more alternative funding mechanisms will be open. In the future, we will be looking at small modular reactors, which open up a completely different form of financing. Potentially, we could look at the very small modular reactors, so micro-reactors. We could be looking at opening up some of the CfD pots so that they would compete with other technologies, such as floating offshore wind, for instance.

On the point of how much it is going to cost us, because this is our first year of the project at Sizewell, it will be very low. In 18 years’ time, if it is built on time, in simple terms, that surcharge will be 18 times what we are paying this year. If we have two or three of them under construction, it becomes a significant addition to our bills.

Fiona, do you think that these models provide sufficient protections for the taxpayer if construction costs increase more than expected, which we have seen, for example, with Hinkley?

You have to look at it in the round in terms of some of the other costs that are currently happening in the system. Currently, variable generation is costing about £2.50 a month for the taxpayer. Transmission costs are around £3.30 per month per taxpayer, and we are assuming that that will go up over time as well. That £1 per month at the point of construction for Sizewell C is less than what we are talking about in terms of some of these other variable costs that we are having to take into account right now. One key opportunity that we have here is that, because you are talking about building a power plant that is within a local community, you are then able to provide that electricity for that local community. Therefore, you do not have the transmission costs that you have for some of the other variable power systems that we currently have in place. My plea would be to take it in the round and not just look at the pound per taxpayer, but look at all the other costs that are coming in as well.

Do you think that there are other protections there specifically? If construction costs spiral and it is more than you are predicting at the moment, do we have protection? I think that what Sam was saying is that, under contracts for difference, you remove that risk from the taxpayer, but what about under the regulated asset base model?

Under the regulated asset base model, the risk is shared between the taxpayer and the investor.

Potentially, it could increase, and we are not protected from that.

Yes, the risk is shared between the taxpayer and the investor.

Stephen, in your evidence you noted that there was a potential for other Government projects to be crowded out by the money allocated to nuclear. What projects do you think we should be worried about?

The first thing that we need to be doing is energy efficiency measures. If we look at transferring space heating to electrical means, if that is going to be affordable for anybody, we need to improve the housing stock so that their demand for heat is reduced. That is the very first thing we need to be doing and we have not been doing it for 12 or 13 years. The next thing we need to do is renewables, because we have a very uncertain demand future. Everybody assumes that electricity demand is going to go through the roof because of AI, but we do not know that yet, so we need flexibility. Energy efficiency gives you that. Offshore wind is quick to produce. Three or four years’ construction time and it is there. We need to build in flexibility, not take long-term decisions that might prove to be completely wrong. In 2005, the Government forecast that electricity demand would grow by 25% by now. It has actually fallen by 22%, which is 160 terawatt hours, which is the output of 24 gigawatts of nuclear power, rather spookily. If we are making those decisions on the basis of a road map, we had better get our assumptions right, or else we are going to be investing a lot of money in assets that we do not need. As a final point on that, the 2008 White Paper on nuclear power forecast that an EPR could be built for £2 billion, so £3 billion in today’s money. The latest estimate for Hinkley is eight times that per reactor. Again, we got one of the fundamental assumptions horribly wrong. You can think, “We know much better now. We will get it right this time,” but are we not doing the same thing with assuming AI is going to produce this great demand growth? Are we not doing the same thing by assuming SMRs will be cheap, easy to build and safer?

Is it not possible that your assumptions about things such as our ability to provide enough storage, for example, could be wrong? Any of these assumptions could be wrong. We have to work with the information we have at the moment.

The consequences of getting a nuclear decision wrong will be felt for 20 or 30 years, so the time it takes to bring that project to fruition. In that time there will be the opportunity cost because of the money and effort that is going into a programme that might well not materialise. We can easily change direction with storage, energy efficiency or offshore wind, but we cannot change direction with Hinkley Point.

The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce says that nuclear programmes suffer from large cost overruns and schedule delays, which is a point you have been making. Why?

If you look at the projects we have, Hinkley has been under construction since 2018. If there are no more delays—and that seems implausible, given that, in seven years, there have been five delays and cost overruns—we have seven years to run, so you would expect it to cost more. How has planning and regulation delayed that project? Look at Sizewell. That was committed to in 2016 by EDF. EDF decided that it could not go ahead with it in 2018. There was four years to get the RAB model through the required legislation and then three years for the Government to find enough investors to fund about half of the Sizewell project. Where was planning and regulation in those delays?

We are back to planning and regulation as the real key challenges and changing those.

The other thing is more proportionate decisions. That is a key element of what has come out of the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, which will enable the application of as low as reasonably practicable. That “reasonably practicable” part of ALARP is a really important area to assess.

Do you want to tell us what ALARP stands for?

It means that, in terms of anything that you do—

What does the phrase stand for?

As low as reasonably practicable. It is a really important thing and it is what we do in terms of the nuclear sector. Everything that we do is based on best available technology and doing things that are as low as reasonably practicable. That deals with a balance of risk. That balance of risk should take into account the impact on the decision making and what that will mean. If you take something that happened recently at Hinkley Point C, we had the discussion around the protection of fish and thinking about what the costs were associated with that. When you took the three separate systems that were put in place in the estuary to protect a small number of fish, it added £700 million to the cost of the nuclear power plant. That is not reasonably practicable, in my view, and therefore that is the thing. The proportionate regulation is a key aspect of driving us to where we need to get to.

Stephen was talking about the likely extra increase to consumer bills over the period of the construction of Sizewell C. I will ask Doug a related point. The OBR noted uncertainty in its projections of the RAB model. If costs increase, is it right that billpayers should take the financial hit?

It comes back to why you are constructing this particular risk-sharing in the way that you are doing, to what purposes and with what ends. It is right back to the point I began with: why is nuclear getting all this privileged support? As it says in several Government documents, the backbone of the future energy system is going to be offshore wind. It is well known that offshore wind is facing higher financing charges. Is it getting any relief or Government help on those financing charges? No, it is not. Why are you in the situation of protecting certain sectors of our energy system from these financing costs, when there are financing costs in what is going to be a more critical sector, and yet there does not seem to be much going on in order to help and support those?

I will put the challenge in your question to Sam. Is this right that there is privileged support for nuclear that does not exist in other areas?

We need to take into account that nuclear is a different technology. Nuclear projects are much bigger than your average offshore wind projects. Offshore wind and renewables do benefit from a range of Government support. When we talk about the free market in energy, it is something like what you call merchant solar or merchant wind. There is very little of that compared to stuff that is under contracts for difference, where, essentially, you are paid a guaranteed price. If it is very windy and you are producing power but there is not that much power needed on the grid at the moment, you still get paid to an extent. In some cases, you get paid to turn off. These are called constraint costs because perhaps there is just not enough space on the connections between Scotland and England. There are lots of things where renewables benefit from Government support. Some of that support is reasonable. It is worth noting that these Government support schemes and long backing have led to cost declines in wind and solar. We were backing wind and solar projects when it was not economical in the market to do so because we were banking on long-term cost reductions. We need to take the same approach for nuclear. You build up that supply chain, get people and get that maturity so you are not building these designs that are first of a kind, which is what we associate with the cost overruns. That is how you bring down costs in the long run.

This goes to some of what we have been hearing about the challenge of managing these costs and projects, which time and time again we have done so badly on, as you have all been telling us. Do the Government have the talent and skills to get the value out of these contracts to ensure that these are managed effectively?

There is a big challenge in infrastructure in general in Britain. It feels like a bit of a funny debate right now. We are focusing on nuclear’s cost overruns as an argument against nuclear. The problem is that we make lots of infrastructure that we need to build very expensive to build. We do not see this as an argument against things such as rail, trams or whatever, but they are very expensive for us to build. Part of the reason is that our regulators have really poor incentives. They are not incentivised to support these and make proportionate decisions. They are often focused on minimising the risk of something going wrong, but they do not share in the benefits of it going right.

If only the regulation was right, the people in Government would not have a problem at all and everything would go swimmingly.

It depends on the sorts of projects. If you have a project with a lot of state involvement, over time, one problem is that, when the state tries to run a project, it has lost a lot of that expertise. The state used to do a lot of stuff. It does not do that anymore, so it relies on that being outsourced. As a result, you end up in a situation where we have a limited ability to scrutinise these projects. We need to rebuild that capacity, particularly for transport, but also for things such as nuclear and, particularly, the national grid.

We have covered some of this, so feel free to be brief. Sam, the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce said that the UK is the most expensive place in the world to build nuclear projects, as we have said. Why is this and what lessons can be learned from other countries?

When we look at countries that have done it cheaply, South Korea stands out, but it is also different eras of time, for example when France built its initial nuclear programme, from which we are still benefiting from today via the interconnectors. It is about sticking to a design. It is about not imposing disproportionate costs. It is about having single points of decision making. One problem is there are so many different regulators that have important decisions to make. When Hinkley Point C or Sizewell C gets its planning approval, that is only the first stage in being able to build the thing. I was told that they managed to get it down from over 200 to 160 permits that were required, and many of them were from different organisations, so the Marine Management Organisation and the Environment Agency. All had different standards. There are all these delays as a result of that and some of them led to lawsuits that delayed projects further. Having that single point of decision making and ability to make those decisions, can speed things up significantly. When we look at these regulatory reforms, we need to work out how we can be proportionate in every way. One thing I like about the US approach is that it uses a clear value of radiation exposure, for instance, when it is looking at whether safety features are relevant. It would be much better if we had a much more rigorous and easily comparable approach. One problem with our regulation of nuclear is that we often treat different risks differently. We would accept a degree of risk taking in other fields, but we would never accept the same degree of risk taking in nuclear in terms of risk of loss of life or something. That leads to safety upgrades that have almost no benefit to people. You are looking at the equivalent of, “We have prevented the radiation exposure of spending a weekend in Cornwall.” That is not a good use of money and not a good use of what, ultimately, will end up on our bills. It is working out how we can be more proportionate.

I am wanting to move on to things such as nuclear doses later, so I might park that for now. Different regulators look at different aspects. If regulation is streamlined or changed, how do you ensure that what those regulators care about, whether it is the environment, marine life or whatever, is still captured while making it a more effective regulatory regime?

Part of it is talking about this commission approach that the Government are considering at the moment. That is a good thing: making sure that people are all getting around a table so everyone is aligned around the same goals. In terms of environmental protection, we need to look at whether we can get better bang for our buck, in terms of nature protection, elsewhere. The Fingleton review, for instance, points to a comparison to the £700 million spent on fish protection. About £200,000 was spent on removing a weir from a river. That unlocked something like 180 kilometres of habitat for Atlantic salmon. All of a sudden you had a much bigger nature win for a fraction of the cost of what you are spending on fish protection. It is looking at those kinds of landscape-style recoveries.

That is really interesting. I want to move on to Fiona now and talk about design and replication. According to evidence we have, Sizewell C anticipates a saving of around 20% compared with Hinkley Point C, which they say demonstrates the value in replication of design. Do you think that trying to replicate design is a good approach? Will it drive down costs?

If you go for replication of design, it helps with the building of a mature supply chain to enable that build going forward. I am absolutely for that replication as much as possible. When we saw the initial building of unit 1 at Hinkley Point C, that was taking time to build. When we got to unit 2, there were a number of successes that began to happen there, where the schedule was cut by about 30% overall. That would eventually relate to costs as well going forward. You can see that, by replicating that design at Sizewell and using a similar and more mature supply chain to take that forward, along with the skills and expertise that have been used for that, you will start to drive further costs with Sizewell C. You can see that you would do that going forward with more build as well for a large power plant. I absolutely agree with the replication of design helping bring the cost down and move the schedule to the left.

Doug, does the Government’s choice of SMRs at Wylfa signal that they have effectively given up on large-scale nuclear projects?

I do not know what is in the Government’s mind on all sorts of things. I perhaps wish I did, or perhaps I do not; I do not know. It would make sense to give up on large-scale reactors, given the experience that we have already had. I would caution against the idea that modularity is going to be some kind of solution to the problems of cost overruns and drive down the costs of nuclear power. The experience that we have had so far—it is true that that is limited experience—whether it is in China, Russia or I think I read that there was one in Argentina, of small modular reactors is that they face exactly the same problems that we have seen with large-scale reactors. They start off cheap and then, by the time you try to build them, they look very expensive, if they ever get built at all. The argument of modularity, which has merit, deployed in relation to things such as solar and wind, does not really stack up for SMRs. In the case of solar and wind, you are producing vast numbers of solar panels and have been doubling every few years to produce hundreds of gigawatts per year, in China principally, although not just there. The same is true of wind. The same is true of batteries and so the same is becoming true of electric vehicles. These are small items that you produce a huge number of. That is not the same as what is being proposed with Rolls-Royce and its three reactors at Wylfa. Do I know what the cost of those reactors is going to be and so what the burden on the taxpayer is and whether it is worth doing? No, of course I do not, but I do not think that anybody else does either. If anybody else says that they do know, they are either a fool or a soothsayer. As one of my fellow travellers on this says, there are only two truthful answers to the question, “How much does it cost to build a nuclear power plant?” The first one is, “I do not know.” The other one is, “I will tell you when I have built it.”

I do not think that the Government are saying that they are not interested in large nuclear power plants going forward. I think that they are recognising the fact that there is another opportunity here. There is an opportunity to use a UK design by Rolls-Royce and put that on a very good site here in the UK in Wylfa Newydd. In order to do that, there will be three nuclear power plants there, with 1.5 gigawatts of electricity. That links into what the community is used to in terms of that sort of level of power to the grid. There is also a nuclear heritage there, in terms of the community being able to engage on that site and continue to have high-paid jobs in that area. I honestly believe that there is an option here for another type of technology, which is something, by the way, that the UK has been involved in for many years on the defence side of things, to offer up this opportunity in terms of building it for civil power.

Some people have thought Wylfa for the large scale and Oldbury for the SMRs, out of the two sites, and yet we have ended up with SMRs going at Wylfa.

My view is that I do not really mind whether it is large or small. Whether it is small and we have multiple units or we have two large reactors, both Oldbury and Wylfa are excellent sites for new nuclear power and I hope we have both.

Sam, you have already covered this to some extent. What are the anticipated benefits and challenges of deploying SMRs at Wylfa compared to traditional large-scale nuclear plants? You have already talked about some of the general benefits that you see for SMRs. Are there any that particularly relate to the site?

We were slightly disappointed when we heard that Wylfa was going to be set aside for SMRs over large-scale nuclear. We have called in the past for large-scale nuclear, because, as far as sites go, Wylfa has so many strengths in terms of its port access and its existing groundwork already done in terms of working out how you would put a nuclear power plant there. SMRs should be more straightforward. I would be interested in how you can look at SMRs at Wylfa without ruling out the potential for further nuclear development on the site and whether a large scale could co-exist at one time. That, to me, seems like the big concern. It is an area where there is genuine nuclear heritage. There is a really strong skills base already there. There are people working currently in decommissioning and people who may have worked in the industry until quite recently and are very much willing to come back. It would be a very good site to build new nuclear. It was a shame that the Horizon project failed due to a lack of financing, but also issues around the planning system. The planning inspectorate recommended refusal because of what we thought was poor national policy in terms of national policy statements. When we think about somewhere such as Wylfa, the one catch is that I am very keen on things moving quickly. Places such as Anglesey have what I call a nuclear half-life of support. People who have grown up around nuclear and had family members working in the nuclear industry are extremely well informed about the benefits for new nuclear projects. They tend to be the most yimby people going. They are extremely up for it, and we have seen that around the country. As time goes on, those people are forced to leave to find work elsewhere and they end up getting bid out of the housing market, in the case of Anglesey, by second homeowners coming over from England typically. That is a problem in terms of future support. If a project is going to take 10 or 15 years to get going, I would much rather a faster small modular reactor project goes ahead. It is really essential that we build nuclear on that site.

Do you feel that any of the challenges that you identified that prevented the Horizon site have been sufficiently addressed?

We need to change planning policy around the habitats regulation. Part of the issue is that we take an extremely conservative and precautionary approach to any impacts. One reason why Wylfa Horizon was recommended for refusal was the impact on the Arctic tern. When we think about nuclear power, it is the most land-dense form of power. It affects the least habitat of any form of energy, and that is before you factor in the impacts of things such as mining. Nuclear is one of the industries that requires the least mining. There are huge environmental benefits to pursuing nuclear. The problem is that the habitat impacts of specific projects can be quite significant, though not compared once you spread it across all these other projects. You end up in a situation where people have to make very expensive design changes or come up with really difficult compensation schemes. The idea proposed by John Fingleton was that there would be an alternative pathway to discharging habitats regulations obligations by paying into a fund set at a value. I think that it was based on the acreage of the site and you would pay something like £1 million per acre. That would unlock an enormous amount of money that could go to the most effective nature recovery schemes around the country, all over Wales and on the island itself. That would be the sort of thing that we should be looking at.

While we are talking about SMRs, Rolls-Royce has talked about the value of a UK-based supply chain. Is there a potential that perhaps this is not quite going to happen and that contracts are going to go to other big companies outside the UK? As you reacted, Stephen, in the way that you did, perhaps you could answer that.

If you look at the business model for SMRs, it is to have as few central factories as you can get away with globally. If you look at SMR vendors, everywhere they go they say, “We will build a factory here.” That does not stack up. The reports are clear that they have to source the components cheaply and they have to be of good quality. If you look at countries with supply chain, if you exclude China and Russia, that means Korea. That is, I think, where the Rolls-Royce parts will be made. I think there was another vendor today that came out and said that it would be building their components in Korea. It has the supply chain and the skills. There is nowhere else to go, unless you want to go to China or Russia.

At the end of the day, SMR absolutely relies on factory build and multiple units, so it is a global endeavour. You are not just going to produce these SMRs for one country, and Rolls-Royce has been clear on that. It is looking at Europe at the moment. It is looking at the US and beyond that. Where you get to is, in terms of having global factories, that you could have one in Europe, an Asian one and a USA one, in terms of probably three, four or something like that. The challenge for this country is to make it the best place in Europe for the factory to be built. We have some really strong manufacturing infrastructure here in this country and it would be a real shame to lose that heritage. There is an ask of Government in terms of enabling that to happen.

We are moving on to AMRs, or advanced modular reactors. Maybe it is helpful to remind ourselves of what is what. When we talk about small modular reactors, I have heard that they are actually not that small. They are pretty big. What about AMRs? I think it was mentioned by you, Sam, that the backbone of the British net zero strategy is wind. If that is the case, what we really need is an energy supply that deals with the intermittency of wind. What role can nuclear play in covering the intermittency of wind and solar? Are AMRs better than SMRs? These are important questions to understand to put the whole strategy together. I will go to Sam first.

Fiona would probably be the person to talk to about AMRs, but they can have other industrial uses beyond just producing power. For instance, you could co-locate manufacturing near an AMR and use some of the heat produced by that power station for industrial heat. That is important because decarbonising lots of things is relatively straightforward: we need to produce more electricity and electrify. That is probably how we are going to solve transport and heating. For things such as making steel, we can do it with electric arc furnaces, but for many other things, such as chemicals production, it is hard to do without being able to produce heat. AMRs can potentially solve that problem. What was the second question? It was around the grid.

How does nuclear deal with the intermittency of renewables? That is one of our biggest questions, is it not? People are coming in with storage, batteries and all the rest of it.

As you have a greater share of renewables on the grid, you tend to have a higher systems cost. You need to think about what you are going to do for flexible generation. That is potentially generation where you are not using it most of the time. A battery is great if you are constantly charging it up and discharging it. It is less economical if you are charging it for one part of the year and then you are discharging it. That is not going to be particularly profitable for the battery manufacturer or the battery operator. When you get to 80% or 90% renewable penetration, you start encountering problems. You really have to invest in things such as better forms of storage. You start looking at long-duration energy storage, which is something that we have not invested very much in. Nuclear, if you have that baseload, reduces your need to make some of those investments in technologies that in some cases are unproven or have serious cost problems. There are advantages to having a grid with nuclear in the mix to provide some of those systems benefits while at the same time something such as offshore wind or solar does a lot of the heavy lifting and is the majority of the grid.

You are still talking about a baseload not covering intermittency. The baseload is exactly the reason that many sources of renewable energy cannot be used because they get turned off rather than being used. We cannot turn off nuclear. I hear that new nuclear can be turned on and off again. Is that correct?

If you look at the French grid, they do some load following with nuclear. You will see nuclear switch up when solar is down and switch down when solar is up. Doing some load following is reasonable, but the real argument against doing much of it—I suppose that this is probably a point that Stephen might make—is about the economics. Nuclear is a large up-front investment and you want to spread that investment over as much power generated as possible. Every minute you are not producing at full whack is probably harming the economics of it. If prices are higher at certain times, that might change things. That is the economics side of things. You can load follow with nuclear. It has been and is being done in France.

On the intermittency point, there are claims about what the new reactors will be able to do in terms of load following because limited load following has taken place with existing fleets. As Sam said, it is as much an economic thing as it is a technical thing. It is not great technically for nuclear reactors to do scaling up and scaling down a lot. I would add on, just as Sam was talking about, the industrial side of this. We are already seeing thermal storage of energy being used as a way of managing intermittency. Thermal storage is often basically bricks. You can have those going up to 1,500°C. You heat them up when there are plenty of renewables, and then you can use the energy in there when you want to, for whatever high-temperature thermal processes that you want. You are right that you have to look at the system as a whole, but there are already innovations starting to appear that are also able to manage that process.

Whenever there is a new technology, everybody can come forward and say, “I have this project”. How do the Government assess what is the most cost-effective or what will ultimately cost billpayers the least money? That is a problem, is it not? How much should the Government put their eggs into one basket? When they see a viable project, should they say, “Okay, we are supporting that financially”?

It is really good that Great British Nuclear, which is now part of the Government, is now able to carry out these assessments and look at which technologies offer the most promise, and which technologies can offer more maturity and be able to produce energy in a faster timeframe in comparison to others. AMRs are these so-called generation IV technologies, beyond light-water reactor systems, which offer the ability for co-generation. That means producing heat and power and using that heat for other things, such as hydrogen production to produce sustainable aviation fuels. It enables you to decarbonise the other 80% of the energy mix that is not electricity. When it comes to load following, what you could do with an AMR is just use it for heat until suddenly you need electricity. You can turn that into power by turning the switch and suddenly providing electricity. That is one of the ways of being able to deal with the economics. Load following is something that current nuclear reactors can do, especially outside the UK, but there is an economic cost associated with it. It is much more cost-effective just to run baseload. If you start to think about co-generation, that is where you could maybe have some opportunity there.

How well developed are AMRs as a technology to do what you have just described?

Advanced modular reactors are still very much not ready as yet. There are six different families of reactors. It is quite a broad number. There are over 100 different designs out there. Some of the most mature designs could be online by around the mid-2030s or maybe 2040. That is the sort of timeline that you are talking about.

I have a very quick question on SMRs. I was in the US recently and a couple of people mentioned something that they were working on called the Janus programme, which was the involvement of the US Department of War, as we were instructed to call it, on SMR development because of their nuclear skills. Is that something that you have any insight on, Fiona?

In a previous role I was the chief scientist at the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory. I used to work very closely with US colleagues at the Idaho National Laboratory. That is a laboratory that is carrying out some of that work in terms of the Janus programme. There is a link between what you do in terms of civil nuclear power and what you can use that civil nuclear power for in terms of being able to power various other systems. From a defence perspective, the US is very much looking at microreactors. They are looking at whether these microreactors could replace other types of energy production, such as diesel generators. The Janus programme is one of the examples of that.

This is a real opportunity. You have an investor who wants to work with nuclear in terms of this whole area going forward. Centrica and X-energy is a wonderful opportunity for Hartlepool. It has a high probability of being successful. The regulatory requirements that will change based on the recommendations out of the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce review will be really beneficial. Specifically, that means getting to a situation where we simplify and make less complex all the different regulations across multiple regulators, whether that is the nuclear regulator or the environmental regulator. Having less fragmented oversight and having a commission that will help drive that forward will also be helpful.

As with all these things, I am not a crystal ball reader. Because of the fact that we are talking about smaller systems, there is less likelihood that it will need subsidies to take it forward. There is more of an opportunity for investors to be able to afford the investments that are required. That is the opportunity with smaller systems in comparison to large ones.

Doug, you will have a chance to respond to your accuser in the questions that Graham Downie is going to ask you. Stephen, you wanted to come in.

I just wanted to talk about the AMRs and the misperception that these are exciting new designs. There is nothing new about them. They have been around for 50 to 70 years. When it comes to high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, there have been a small number of prototypes and demonstration plants. All have gone very badly. We are assuming that this time we are going to get it right. In terms of the Hartlepool project, Centrica has been mentioned as being involved in financing it. If you look at what it says in detail, it is likely only to go forward if it gets a RAB-type deal. The Government have put into their subsidies database that the RAB-type deal for Sizewell is going to cost us £50 billion. That is a discounted figure. If you put it in undiscounted terms, you are well over £100 billion. It is a long way from going forward. In terms of what it will produce—I am sorry to get into technicalities—X-energy will produce temperatures of about 650°C. You need about 850°C. One of the problems with the designs so far is that, when you have cranked them up to that level, things go wrong. You need some very exotic materials. It is a very speculative technology.

I will just do a rebuttal, if that is okay. The world’s first high-temperature gas reactor was in the UK. It was called Dragon. It produced heat for the grid. I agree that it has been around for a while. At that time we were not looking at how to decarbonise the whole energy system. We were not really focused that much on heat at the time. The point about the 650°C is a good point that is being made. About 80% of industrial uses are 650°C or below. The other 20% are above. There is a question about where you go for the different systems that you need.

If some subsidies are needed, this is a pretty worthy thing to subsidise. Decarbonising heavy industry is going to be really crucial to doing net zero. As you said, when we did this technology last time, we did not really think about that. We could just burn gas. If that option is now off the table, if coal and things like that are off the table, we need to find alternative technologies. Innovation is really important. That is not just for getting the UK’s carbon emissions down. If we can show this thing works, there could be a massive decarbonisation dividend globally. If we show, “This is how you decarbonise heavy industry,” other countries can then say, “Right, we can do it this way. We can copy that technology.” We will not just be decarbonising the bits of heavy industry that we have left in this country. We can also help countries that have much more heavy industry, particularly developing countries, decarbonise in the same way. That is a thing that is perfectly worthy of a bit of Government investment, frankly.

That is very interesting.

I have a very short follow-up question. Should that be off-grid? Should it be directly attached to a high-energy industrial process and the energy should not even touch the grid? Then we would not have all this constrained payment stuff.

For a lot of these SMR and AMR projects, it makes sense to do them via private wire. That is how you get international investment. However, it is good to have some access to the grid for reliability. We should look at models where you can be turned off at predictable times so that we do not increase the costs on the grid. There are lots of studies in the US showing that the ability to turn off at certain times is what matters in terms of adding much more energy on to the grid. That is the crucial thing. There should be some access to the grid, but most of it should be done by private wire. The grid is just for reliability and back-up in grid downtime.

I am accused of pouring cold water over these things. I embrace that. Why would I not? Look at the history here. The history is that we had an AGR[2] programme under Thatcher. She wanted 10. She got one because she found out how much they actually cost. We then went through the whole thing again. As Stephen alluded to, we were going to get a load of cheap nuclear reactors, starting with Hinkley. We did not. We are going to get some very expensive stuff. The same is true of Sizewell. I sit here, obviously not in the first flush of youth, thinking that we are just repeating ourselves with another round of decision makers who buy into the hype. Once the subsidy tap gets turned on, it becomes incredibly difficult to turn off.

You are agreeing with Christopher now.

It is not just me. Let me give you a quote from Climate Action Network Europe, which is a group of 1,700 NGOs representing around 40 million people around Europe, which includes the UK. Their recent report said—remember how many people are backing this—that SMR projects are “more expensive than renewables, not economically fit to provide flexibility, not very small, distort funding away from realistic renewable solutions, produce more waste than traditional nuclear” and that an EU SMR strategy “risks diverting attention, resources and political momentum away from the proven solutions needed for a fast, fair and effective energy transition”. If you think it is just Greenpeace, it is a lot more than that.

We have heard in previous evidence sessions that, because the UK was at the forefront of other technologies, such as wind, we paid a premium to develop that technology. Taxpayers paid a premium and we did not see the manufacturing base built out. Is this not the same? Again, we are talking about subsidies paying a premium for an unproven technology. Sam, your comment was, “The rest of the world can copy us”. Why should taxpayers in the UK be funding the rest of the world’s innovation? Should we not be following proven technology rather than technology that sounds like it does not even work?

On the climate angle, we are tackling a global problem. If no one copied us, that would be a really bad situation. If we were doing the green stuff and no one else was, we would not be solving the problem.

Could we copy other people who have proven technology?

Yes. We do not make it as easy as we should. Other countries can build nuclear power stations for much less than us. When we try to build their technology in the UK, we tend to see that their designs are modified in ways that are not always proportionate to the safety risk. One example would be the Wylfa Horizon project. When I speak to a bunch of people at Cambridge who are nuclear engineers, they all seem to think the ABWR was a really good design. It is a very safe design. There were three or four in Japan at the time of the earthquake that caused Fukushima. They all had a perfectly spotless safety record. There was an issue about the release of radiation and venting. We would have required them to install these really expensive bulky HEPA filters on their vents, for instance. That was a design that was not required elsewhere. We do something similar on the Westinghouse design. They had one way of doing waste management storage, which had been done completely safely for a very long time. It had a lot more human involvement rather than passive measures, but it clearly had a very good safety record. That is not how we did it in the UK. We said, “Either you have to redesign it, do it this way or do it that way”. Ultimately, one of the suggestions would have changed the entire size of the nuclear island and it would have been a completely different reactor design. That was ruled out. They had these long back-and-forths. We make it very hard to adopt what works elsewhere. When we do infrastructure—this is not just in nuclear, though it is really important here—we should be much more willing to copy what works elsewhere.

I will try to contain these questions into one. Looking at the NDA’s plan for the decommissioning of nuclear, is there anything in newer technologies such as SMRs that will affect that challenge? How do we make decommissioning work properly and effectively? Is overcoming the challenge of decommissioning the largest barrier to convincing the public and Government of the benefits of new nuclear?

In terms of how much waste you get from SMRs, it is very clear that SMRs will produce more waste. Allison Macfarlane, former chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said, “SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically physically reactive waste than LWRs”. The nuclear waste services department of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said, “It is anticipated that SMRs will produce more waste than large gigawatt-scale reactors”. There will be more waste from SMRs. I have lost the plot a bit now.

What were the questions?

You have answered the question about SMRs, but are the setbacks and cost overruns that we see on SMRs—it is the biggest line in the DESNZ budget for nuclear—the biggest barriers to new nuclear that need to be overcome both technically and for the public?

The problem with decommissioning costs is that they tend to get disappeared in the economic appraisal because we assume it is going to take place a long way in the future and we assume that we have a fund that will be earning money for the next 100 years. Even if you are only earning 3% real per year, you will end up with 20 times as much as you start with. Suddenly, this huge liability disappears. The problem is that the assumption does not hold. Can you be sure that the fund that you set up now will be there in 100 years? Can you be sure that it will be earning a positive real rate of interest? The one fund that we have, the nuclear liabilities fund, is going down in value every year because the Treasury is forcing it to invest in a fund that does not even meet inflation. The other issue is that we do not know how much decommissioning is going to cost because very little of it has been done around the world. In the UK, we are more than 30 years away from completing the first decommissioning of any nuclear power plant. We just simply do not know. A very big problem is funding. We just do not know how we are going to do it. We have been taking money from consumers since 1979, and virtually every penny of it has been lost, mostly appropriated by the Treasury.

Is it a governmental problem about not managing resources or a real problem? Is the way that the Government are managing it the problem or is the problem in the decommissioning itself?

We do not know about decommissioning because we are not doing it yet. We have done the easy bits, which is taking the fuel out of the reactor and removing the uncontaminated buildings. When we get beyond 2050, we will start taking apart the contaminated parts of the building. Those are not as radioactive as fuel, but you really do not want to get anywhere near those. You will be creating a lot of intermediate-level waste. At present, we have nowhere to place it.

There are two parts to the challenge that we have in terms of current decommissioning in the UK. You have the legacy waste that was created in the cold war and you have the decommissioning wastes that are now created through the fleet of operating plants that we have had in place, the Magnox plants and the AGR fleet. If you look at what has happened with the Magnox plants and the AGR fleet, the fuel has been removed from the Magnox plants now and the plants are slowly being decommissioned. The intermediate-level waste and low-level waste is being stored in engineered stores on the Sellafield site waiting for an ultimate decision on what we are going to do with disposal. The low-level waste is being disposed of on a site near Sellafield in Drigg at the low-level waste repository. These things are happening. The challenge going forward is very much around continuing to plan for that decommissioning. What is really good now is that, because we have operated plants in the UK for such a long time now, we understand that challenge. You can plan for decommissioning up front now. There is a lot more going into the designs up front around planning for decommissioning to happen. The nuclear industry is the only industry that plans for that final waste route at the point of decision on whether you are going to operate a facility. It is also the only industry, from what I can see, that puts money aside to carry out that decommissioning. I do not think many other industries do that. I think it is a case for doing nuclear, the fact it is being thought about in advance and that the funding is actually being put in place up front to enable that to happen.

I wanted to talk about your second part, which is a large barrier. We still do not really have a good answer for what to do with the high-level waste and spent fuel. A recent review produced last month by Greenpeace Switzerland—it was externally commissioned—identified that there are still deep systematic uncertainties about the ability to store stuff over hundreds of thousands of years because of the nature of what you are putting down there and the impacts of corrosion of metals, gas production and gas escape that will open up channels for radioactivity.

I will briefly interrupt you. Having been in the mine in Finland where they are going to have the depository, they seem to have solved this problem.

I would question whether they have solved it. They have a process for the way forward.

They have addressed the questions that you have raised. Let us put it that way.

They may think they have solved it, but, like I say, there are some profound uncertainties about how the containment vessels and the clay that is said to be surrounding them are going to behave over time under exposure to high levels of radioactivity and probably quite significant levels of heat, given that heat-producing wastes are still being put down there, and what that will mean for the overall integrity of the site. I would be very happy to send that report to the Committee because it outlines in some detail just how much there is still to do at a basic level.

That would be very helpful.

As someone who represents nuclear workers and who lives next to two nuclear power stations, I am very interested in the safety of the nuclear industry as a whole. What was interesting to me from the regulatory review was the fact that radiation dose limits are stricter in nuclear energy settings than they are in nuclear medicine settings, which really intrigued me. Both are lower than defined safety limits and what we believe harms human health. I am going to go to Fiona first. Why do we have different limits for nuclear energy than for nuclear medicine? Is this proportionate to the risk posed by radiological exposure?

In terms of the workers who work within the nuclear energy sector, given the fact that we have people who are working with that material day in, day out, we have set limits at a much lower level to ensure that there are no situations in which they will receive a dose that would cause any sort of damage to them. That is why we have done that. We do that because we are not just working with people who are on the site on a regular basis; we are also working with contractors who could be on that site too. It is basically providing an additional level of conservatism. I do not think we will change that. That is exactly what we should be doing in terms of having nuclear workers working on a nuclear-licensed site and having that level of conservatism applied to that. In terms of working in a medical environment, again, the level of exposure is typically less than what you might have if you were working on a nuclear site near a reactor, a chemical processing facility or a waste facility, hence the reason why these levels are slightly different.

That was really interesting and very helpful. It sounds like there is no appetite in the nuclear industry to change the dose limits, if I have understood you correctly. Just for time, Chair, I want to skip on to something about the environmental impact of energy production and, in particular, land use and density of energy. In my constituency, I have two nuclear power stations, a wind farm and solar, all of which contribute to the clean energy mix, but concerns are raised with me about the use of land for things such as wind and solar, particularly agricultural land. I do not really know who to come to here. I am going to go to Sam first, but there might be people who want to talk about this. What are the differences in terms of energy production per hectare between different technologies? What are the environmental impacts of different types of clean energy generation? We know that the generation of the energy is clean, but what are the environmental impacts of building and decommissioning nuclear, wind and solar, given that they are the three core things that we are talking about?

I will give you acres instead of hectares, but the full footprint of Hinkley Point C is 430 acres. To produce the same amount of power, you would need a solar farm that was 130,000 acres or an onshore wind farm—again, there is land in between so the land is not totally taken up—of 250,000 acres. Nuclear is an extremely dense source of energy. That also responds to environmental impacts all down the chain. There is much less mining involved in nuclear than any other industry. By the way, nuclear has very high standards for mining relative to other sectors. It produces much less waste than any form of energy because, again, it is extremely power dense. The big environmental impact to care about with nuclear is the potential impact on marine life. However, almost any source of energy will have significant environmental impacts in some way, whether that is up the chain or directly when you burn it in the case of fossil fuels. What is crucial is making sure that we are willing to look at the trade-offs between different sources of energy and choose those forms of energy that have the most minimal trade-offs. I see that as a mix of nuclear, renewables and battery storage. Those impacts are much less. We need to think about how we can manage those environmental impacts in the most effective way.

Doug, nuclear promises low energy costs nationally. What thresholds determine whether a local community can block infrastructure that may deliver benefits far beyond its borders?

I would challenge the notion that it promises low costs, but, anyway, let us go on to the point of the question, which is about the point at which communities can challenge. There is a lot of infrastructure that needs building, but in all cases it is important that communities get a say and that that say is listened to and treated with respect, just like the impact on the natural environment is treated with respect. There is no absolute about where the national interest needs to sit in terms of delivering infrastructure. You can have a set of criteria, for sure, but in the end this will boil down to political choices and what choices, in this country anyway, the elected politicians choose to make. That is why I came into this, before you arrived, saying that I question the privileged position that nuclear gets. I understand the concerns that communities will have around grid infrastructure, for example, going through their space. I completely get that. How is there genuine involvement and listening in the development of that? What alternatives are being presented? What national interest is being presented as the rationale for doing it? In the end, it comes back to politics and choices about what you are doing. All I would say is, whether it is a solar farm, whether it is a wind farm, a nuclear power station, grid, battery storage or whatever, community concerns should be treated with respect. Boundaries should be put on them, but they should be listened to when they are raising sensible points.

Fiona, AMRs and SMRs are expected to create fewer jobs through their efficiency than some of the nuclear infrastructure that we have from the past. Should we be delivering this programme, given that it is going to deliver fewer steady well-paid jobs in communities, like my colleague’s, that desperately rely on them?

I will talk about two bits, construction and operation. On the construction side, yes. If you take one SMR or AMR unit, there are going to be fewer jobs in comparison to a large nuclear power plant and probably for a shorter period of time. Rolls-Royce SMR is talking about 3,000 direct jobs during the construction period, but if you include indirect and induced labour, it gets to about 9,000 jobs, assuming that you are going to have three units at Wylfa. In addition to that, you have the factories that are in place as well. As well as having on-site jobs, you are going to have additional jobs in factories that offer the benefit of having a more diversified workforce in comparison to working on-site. There is an opportunity from that point of view as well. The other thing that I would say is that the more units you construct, the more people you will have on that programme. Separately, over and above that, in terms of the operational side of things, as new power plants get more advanced going forward, the number of people that you will have operating these plants will be less, yes, but you will still have created a very highly educated workforce that is getting paid quite well for what they do and driving additional benefit into the economy because of the fact that they will then have the opportunity to go and spend in that economy. There is the secondary indirect labour that comes from that as well.

Sam, my final question is to you. Is the road map clear enough around how Government are going to stimulate the manufacturing and engineering that we need around these developments? The evidence that we have seen in other sectors, such as wind or solar, is that we have had the technology, but we have not had the legacy of manufacturing. Is there enough in the road map to give confidence? Do the Government recognise that?

Ultimately, the biggest flaw in the road map is that it tells you where we want to go, but it does not quite say how we want to get there and it does not quite commit to the measures that will take us there. Probably the best thing you can do to build a domestic supply chain, particularly in something such as nuclear, where not everything can be easily taken to site, is committing to a long series of projects or putting the policies in the place that will allow others to commit to those investments. If you can do that, those manufacturing jobs will come. When you have uncertainty, who is going to open a factory here when there are orders coming in elsewhere? You need to combat that uncertainty.

Thank you very much. Thank you to our panel. We have very much appreciated your evidence and the variety of contributions this afternoon. That concludes the session. The final word from me is to wish everybody a very merry Christmas. I will see you all in the new year.   [1] Note from witness: My apologies I mis-spoke- this should be 2020. [2] Note from witness: Apologies this should say ‘PWR’. The AGR programme was going on at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership but the programme she wanted to initiate was the PWR programme that resulted in Sizewell C.