RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCES BILL [H.L.] (Hansard, 2 February 1960)

VISCOUNT STANSGATE
The point I wish to make is akin to the point made by my noble friend but is a little more specific. I was approached by the Essex River Board who complain of two things: first, that they were not sure from the Bill whether they would get evidence of where radioactive material was to be dumped—they might, but it was not certain. The second point they made was that it was not certain that the services of their inspectors, who cover a vast acreage in the area, would be used. I thought the arguments were good. Of course I am not an expert on this matter, so I sent a letter to the Lord President who very kindly said that he would deal with it.
What I will do to save time is to make the points very briefly and leave the matter at that. I will hear what the 805 Lord President has to say and then, in consultation with the Board or other river boards, put down Amendments at a later stage. I think that would be the simplest and most time-saving method. As to the first point, whether they do necessarily get the information, your Lordships will realise that river boards have enormous areas to cover. There are streams running into their areas. This Board is of course mainly concerned with an estuary. It is not sufficient to say,"We will send the information to the local authority", because many local authorities may come into the area which the board controls. Therefore, their first point is that in Clause 1 it should be made certain that they are included in the list of people who receive particulars of the certificates.
The second point they make is that it should be made certain that if discharge is to be made into their rivers they should be notified. That should not be left to be done if the Minister considers it desirable. I need not expound that point because if atomic waste is to be added to a river when various local authorities have discharged sewage into it, its composition becomes very much a matter concerning the health of the neighbourhood. Similarly, in Clause 9 it is said that they may be, but are not necessarily to be, consulted; the same point occurs in Clause 8, which provides for consultation with such other persons as the Minister may consider appropriate. Finally, in Clause 12 it is said that the Minister will appoint inspectors to carry out this work. These authorities would very much like to know to what extent the right honourable gentleman will take advantage of the large corpus of expert service which is at his disposal in the personnel of these river boards. Those are the points I wish to make. If the noble and learned Viscount the Lord President can give me a general idea, after I read his words in Hansard I will consult my correspondents and see whether it is necessary to put specific points in the form of an Amendment for a later stage in this Bill.

§ VISCOUNT HAILSHAM
I am obliged to the noble Viscount for raising this point and doing so at this time. It is a little difficult to put the answer succinctly, and at the same time accurately, without going into a great deal of detail at this stage. The first point I 806 would make—and in a matter of this complexity I think it is important to see the wood for the trees—is that, as I explained on Second Reading, the purpose of the Bill is to take responsibility for controlling the disposal of radioactive wastes away from the vast and heterogeneous mass of local authorities who would otherwise be responsible and to give that responsibility to a Minister or Ministers. I have read the very reasonable letter which was written by the Essex River Board. There were in it some passages which led me to believe that they had not really appreciated that this was the purpose and justification for the Bill which represents what Her Majesty's Government, after listening to the advice of the Advisory Committee (which they published as an Appendix to the White Paper), decided was the right policy and which the House accepted after hearing my explanation in the Second Reading debate. I do not want to go over the whole of that argument again because it was not challenged at that time and I thought the House found it a convincing case.
The short arguments were the difficulty of detecting radioactive substances in the quantity in which we shall be dealing with them; secondly, the extraordinarily limited number of personnel who are really capable of handling the kind of substance of which we are speaking—and I only wish there were this large corpus of inspectors available who are capable of handling nuclear questions at the present time; and thirdly, the long lapse of time which must occur between the emission of a dangerous substance and the discovery of damage which would render it almost beyond the capacity of a local authority at present to deal with. Lastly, there is the fact that these radioactive substances will cut across a number of local boundaries, both functional and geographical.
All these considerations have led to the proposals in the Bill which are to take away responsibility from various local authorities, of whom the county councils, river boards and water undertakings are only examples—though very important examples—and to give it to the central national authority. That is our view, and this is the whole philosophy of the Bill—that it is a national rather than a local problem. Subject to that, of course, we recognise the vital 807 necessity of informing local authorities about registrations and authorisations and consulting them—and by that I mean all responsible local authorities—in appropriate cases where their interests and the discharge of their proper functions are involved; and it is almost impossible to define this in advance with cases of the kind and variety with which we are dealing.
In the Bill we have two broad classes of case in mind. The first is where the local authority itself must take special precautions, and that is dealt with under Clause 9 (3); and secondly, nuclear sites and Atomic Energy Authority discharges, which are dealt with in Clause 8 (2). In those cases local authorities, including river boards, where appropriate, will be consulted, although some of the examples are so very difficult to deal with that there is room (although the Act lays down the policy) for interpretation in the discretion of the Minister. I realise that the noble Viscount himself has not yet made up his mind about this but there are Amendments on the Paper, not in the interests of river boards but of other local undertakings, which are more or less in this sense, so that we shall have an opportunity, one way or another, of discussing this in detail.
May I just put one or two thoughts into the mind of the noble Viscount to show some of the difficulties with which we are going to be confronted in this relatively uncharted field? First of all, I would stress the urgency of some of the cases. One of the most valuable uses—not the most valuable but certainly a valuable use—of radioactive isotopes in public administration is in detecting failure of some kind of public service. A labelled substance, as it is coming to be called, is put into a drain pipe or water pipe in order to see whether there is a leak in the pipe, and the label is traced. In fact, very small and weak quantities of radioactive substance are used for that purpose, quantities so small that they could not possibly do anybody any harm. But consultation with local authorities on the formal basis envisaged by the Essex River Board in its letter, and some of the Amendments which we shall be discussing, might preclude that use altogether, since, because of its nature, that use is urgent; and consultation with local 808 authorities in the way in which it is proposed is a complicated and lengthy process.
Or, to take an example even more common, there is the urgent radiotherapy treatment of individuals in hospital. Obviously those patients' faeces are likely to become to some extent radioactive as a result of that treatment. It is not necessarily the right way of going about things that, before authorising the disposal of substances of that kind, the river boards have to be told, because that waste will go into a sewer and from the sewer into a river. That may or may not be so, but in a number of cases consultation will not be necessary, although, as it is carried out under authorisation, information will be given. That is the kind of philosophy behind this Bill as it applies to the local authorities. I tried to deal in the former Amendment with the question of information. The most careful consideration which we can give to it shows that on the whole it is more likely to succeed if the various authorities have one place or one class of place to go to to get the information than if a duty is put on the Minister to assemble and pay an army of clerks and to go through a distribution list of a vast number of heterogeneous authorities in the case of each kind of authorisation or each premises. It is not only the case that there are at the present moment 1,000 users of this substance in Britain.
I think it would be useful if I added a few details about the kind of thing we shall be dealing with in point of quantity, in order to give the noble Viscount some picture of what I am trying to talk about. In the course of discussions with the local authority associations, including, I think, the River Boards Association, who were consulted fully before we introduced this measure, some work was done by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government with a view to ascertaining what would be involved in practice by wholesale consultation. For several years the Ministry have kept records of all deliveries of radioactive material made by the Atomic Energy Authority and of all import licence applications relating to material which is identifiably radioactive. As I have said, there are about 1,000 users in Great Britain at the present time. An analysis 809 made of all known deliveries in February, 1959, exactly a year ago, showed that about 500 curies (that is the unit of measurement) of radioactive material were recorded as having been delivered that month. The bulk of these 500 curies was contained in sources which were either by their nature incapable of local disposal—that is to say, they would be dealt with under Clause 10 and not under the main part of the Bill at all—or would not become waste but be returned to the Atomic Energy Authority for re-irradiation when their radiation dropped below a certain level. The Department estimated that not more than 26 curies out of the 500 could lead to waste suitable for local disposal; that is, suitable for disposal under the main provisions of this Bill; and, at the most, not more than 10 of the 26 curies would emerge as radioactive waste.
These 26 curies were accounted for by no fewer than 969 deliveries to 134 different places, and these were made up as follows. Five curies out of the 26 were contained in a single delivery of tritiated water. The 8.8 curies, in 159 separate consignments, of which 114 were to hospitals, were of radio nuclides with a half-life of less than one day, which means they have negligible proportions almost as soon as they are emitted, if you take the kind of period of time in which the river board would be interested. Seven curies consisting of 310 consignments (276 to hospitals), were of the isotope iodine 131, which has a half-life of eight days and is very short-lived. Three curies, consisting of 220 consignments (138 to hospitals), had a half-life of less than a fortnight. Finally, 2.5 curies, consisting of 279 consignments (165 to hospitals), were of radio nuclides with a half-life greater than a fortnight, but nearly 200 of these 279 consignments were in amounts of less than 5 millicuries, a millicurie being one-thousandth of a curie. It is plain from these figures that 'the controlling Ministers, my right honourable friend the Minister of I-lousing and Local Government, and in certain cases the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in this country, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, in that country, might find themselves making several hundred decisions a month. Many would relate to radioactive material or radioactive wastes in such tiny amounts that there 810 could be little ground for imposing detailed restrictions on the user, and still less for engaging in the protracted process of prior consultation.
My right honourable friends then considered whether it would be practicable to prescribe a level of radioactivity in the material above which consultation should take place, and that was an attractive suggestion. But the difficulty is that the biological effect of radioactive substances varies so drastically that no such general limit would be applicable to all cases. The recommended maximum permissible level for tritium in water is 4 million times as high as the comparable level for Strontium 90. The conclusion was therefore reached that there was no way of separating out, for the purpose of formal mention in a Statute the cases in which consultation should take place, and that on the whole it would be better to leave the amount of consultation to develop in the light of experience.
I would consider any Amendment designed to improve this Bill on the merits of that Amendment, but this matter has been considered and discussed in very great detail with the local authority associations, including the River Boards Association. Whilst, of course, as I say, I will consider on its merits any Amendment the object of which is to give a greater sense of security to a local authority which felt any need of it, consistently with the general purpose of the Bill, I think that, on mature consideration and, if it is wanted, after further discussion with the Ministry, they would probably come to the conclusion that this Bill in this uncharted field does as much as can be reasonably expected.

VISCOUNT STANSGATE
I am extremely grateful to the noble Viscount for the trouble he has taken in preparing his reply. It contained a mass of material that cannot possibly be absorbed by a listener, but I noted one thing; and that was that in hospital there might be some faeces which were radioactive and which therefore required to be put straight into the sewer. That is the sort of case that appeals to the river board. We have under the Essex River Board towns and villages that discharge their sewage, and it is a very serious problem from the point of view 811 of the purific value of the river. I am not entirely satisfied, although I was very much impressed by the noble Viscount's reply, and I am grateful to him. I will take advantage of what he says. I will send a copy of his speech to my correspondents and if they think it proper, and I think it proper, I will put down an Amendment at a later stage in the Bill.

§ LORD TAYLOR
Could I add one small point to that? Where a discharge from a hospital is radioactive it is, I think, usual to confine it in a container in the sewerage system of the hospital until it has ceased to be radioactive, and as this stuff has a short half-life it is discharged into the major sewer only when it is properly decontaminated.

§ VISCOUNT HAILSHAM
I think that is correct. If the noble Lord looks at the definition of"radioactive substance" at the end of the Bill I think he will find it could not be said conscientiously that in all such cases, however safe it may be, it would still not be a radioactive substance within the technical definition. I quite agree with what he said as a description of the position. It is precisely for that reason, among others, that one says that in many cases the formal process of consultation is unnecessary, and in some cases impossible because of the urgency of the matter.

§ VISCOUNT HAILSHAM
I beg to move that the House do now resume.