Lords Sitting of 22 December 1976

Preamble
The House met at eleven of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Durham.

CYPRUS
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their view on the recent reports from the United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus, as reported in The Times of 13th December.
The MINISTER of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, Her Majesty's Government deplore the looting of property on the Island whether it belongs to Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots. It is, however, difficult to pass judgment on the basis of newspaper reports. None the less, the situation as reported confirms Her Majesty's Government's view that the humanitarian talks to discuss problems such as this should be restarted in Nicosia as soon as possible.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. May I ask the Minister whether he can assure the House that Her Majesty's Government still retain a degree of responsibility for the people of Cyprus under the Treaty of Guarantee, and whether he can give to the Greek Cypriots living in the Southern part of the Island any hope of their ever having a chance to go back to their homes? Secondly, what has been done to get any compensation for the many British citizens living in the North of the Island who have had their homes looted?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, as to our responsibilities under the Treaty and Agreement of 1960, I think
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we have discharged them faithfully. The commitment was as I described in this House at the time and I shall on any future occasion be glad to repeat this. It is a tripartite undertaking, and ever since the later phases of the disturbances and difficulties on the Island we have striven with the Turkish and Greek authorities in Greece, in Turkey and on the Island, and also with like-minded countries, particularly in the Nine and the US, to endeavour to do what the noble Baroness rightly stressed is necessary; that is, to get going again the two conferences which the Secretary-General of the United Nations set afoot, with initial hopes of success, first on the humanitarian level in Nicosia (about which I agree with the noble Baroness) and, secondly, more comprehensively, on the analogy of the two Geneva conferences which the present Prime Minister, then Foreign Secretary, initiated and in relation to which he came very close indeed to a sensible solution of this problem.
Lord MAYBRAY-KING: My Lords, while noting with pleasure the reply of the noble Lord to the first Question, may I ask whether in the New Year he will seek to reinvigorate the Co-chairmen's Committee, of which we are one member`? Will he further raise in the United Nations the tragic position of the Greek Cypriots in Cyprus, and will he make contact with the new Administration in Washington so that America may help to use her influence to bring to an end the inhumanities that have been committed in Cyprus and work out a humane and just settlement of the problems of Greece and Turkey there?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I can say at once to my noble friend that the three points of diplomatic activity he has so concisely mentioned are very much part of our continuing policy in this matter. May I, while I am replying to him, apologise to the noble Baroness for not having addressed myself to the two other very important points that she raised? Her second point was the need to get, as she termed it, the Greek Cypriots back to their homes. This and any similar humanitarian problem is most usefully and urgently discussed in the humanitarian conference, as it is called, in Nicosia.

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On the third point, about compensation, may I detain your Lordships; for it is an important matter? I should like to say that a senior officer of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office visited Cyprus and Turkey between 19th and 28th October. I do not think I have had the opportunity to say this in this House before and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so now. During this visit he urged the Government of Cyprus, the Turkish Government and the Turkish Cypriot authorities in Cyprus to give early consideration to British claims for compensation which have been, and are being, addressed to them. I have details of how our own post is handling this and handing over the claims which are being formulated and put together. If the noble Baroness would like to discuss these with me I shall be delighted, as always, to see her.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, the noble Lord does not need to rely on newspaper reports to get information about Turkish looting in the North. The United Nations has compiled a dossier detailing these allegations. Would the noble Lord ensure that this dossier is published so that the evidence is available to the whole world? Does he recall that when a number of Parliamentarians visited Cyprus at the beginning of this year we reported to the Foreign Office Ministers and gave them first-hand evidence which we had received of looting of property in the North, including properties owned by British citizens?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I am aware of the Parliamentary visit, and the noble Lord is aware that my right honourable friend the Minister of State who deals with this part of the world is also engaged in a fairly prolonged and comprehensive fact-finding mission on the Island. As to the basis for the article—written by a most reputable journalist, if I may say so, and, I would add, in a most reputable newspaper—this appears to be the availability to him of utterly confidential official documents which are not in fact, by agreement, available to Member States of the United Nations, not even to those who are involved in UNFICYP. Therefore, it would be quite inappropriate for me to endeavour to secure copies of such a confidential document for Her Majesty's Government's use, and still less to publish
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them, as the noble Lord has so enticingly invited me to do.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I was encouraged by t he reply of the noble Lord because I realise his deep concern on the humanitarian issues in Cyprus. Can he tell us whether Her Majesty's Government have considered the proposal which has been made previously from these Benches and in another place, that a high ranking European should be asked to serve in Cyprus for a long period in order to establish a negotiating position between the parties? This might be a more satisfactory way of reaching a peaceful solution than leaving it to some more formal body.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, if I may say so, that is a substantial and responsible suggestion. We are aware of it. I have no doubt that the Secretary-General, who is the initiator of both sets of talks, will have taken advice on it already. It is well that the noble Baroness should mention it again at this juncture.
Lord DENHAM: Next Question!
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, the noble Lord referred to the humanitarian and political conferences. In view of the fact that the political conference has been taking place for months, if not years, is it not desirable that a bolder initiative should be taken for a settlement of the problem of Cyprus on the lines suggested by my noble friend Lord Caradon?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I would unhesitatingly assure the House that any new initiative, however broad, would be most favourably considered by Her Majesty's Government, always of course in consultation with like-minded countries, particularly in the Commonwealth, among the Nine and indeed in the United States. There is absolutely no doubt about this. It is a matter of feasibility, and it is also a matter of how far at a certain juncture one substitutes for probably the most authoritative initiative of all, that of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
The fact is that both types of conference were set afoot under the auspices of Dr. Waldheim. Both have stalled since

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the spring of this year. We deplore this, but since February the comprehensive discussions on the political future have not, because of inter-communal prejudice and animosity, been able to continue. We are assiduous diplomatically in trying to get them resumed. We equally hope that at the humanitarian level the perfectly reasonable process of having meetings in Nicosia between the parties concerned—wherever the blame lies for any particular incident at any particular time—will be resumed under the auspices of the United Nations.

SEAL SANDS, TEESSIDE
11.16 a.m.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they propose to celebrate European Wetlands Year by taking over Seal Sands, Teesside, for port development.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, no. We have celebrated European Wetlands Year by ratifying the Ramsar Convention and have so far designated 13 sites.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: My Lords, while thanking the noble Baroness for that part of the Answer to my Question, may I ask what will happen to Seal Sands, Teesside? Is she aware that this is a site of the greatest international scientific importance, that it is an important staging post for migratory birds and that it would be irreplaceable if destroyed?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I am aware of the special scientific interest of the site. In the Teesside structure plan, the Secretary of State has proposed that Seal Sands be made available for port development. I must point out to the noble Lord that no final decision has yet been taken and all objections to the proposed Amendments will be fully considered
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before the Secretary of State makes a decision.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that we are grateful for the interest that she has shown in this matter, following the submission made by the Durham County Conservation Trust? Is she also aware that there is constant spoliation taking place on the coastline of Durham by the National Coal Board and other organisations? All the remaining amenities are gradually being destroyed. Would she give these matters her attention?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, not only am I aware of them, but the Secretary of State and the Government are aware of these problems. It is always a question of balancing the environment with the needs of industry and development in that area. I am sure my noble friend is well aware of that side of the problem as well.

NORTH SEA OIL PRICES
11.18 a.m.
Lord BALFOUR of INCHRYE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in the interest of the balance of payments, it is necessary to sell all North Sea oil at prevailing OPEC world prices; or whether they would consider some price differential for oil destined for United Kingdom consumption which, while remaining profitable, would at some lower figure aid British industry and transport.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the Government do not believe that differential pricing of North Sea oil to domestic consumers would be a desirable way of distributing the benefits from oil among the British people. It would be contrary to the Treaty of Rome, since it would distort competition within the EEC; and it would lead to a misallocation of resources, and result in the wasteful use of our national oil reserves. North Sea oil consumed in the United Kingdom will provide a balance of payments benefit

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in the form of import savings. This benefit will naturally be related to prevailing world prices and will be independent of domestic pricing policy.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, does not the noble Lord think he is foresaking common sense for neatness in giving that Governmental Answer? It is clear that it is home industry that needs some help, if that is possible, in order to he able to compete with other countries. This seems to be a way, by utilising our own resources, of giving a slight benefit to ourselves; and we can help industry which, in the long run, will he helpful to the whole nation.
Lord STRABOLGI: If oil were available more cheaply to industry in the United Kingdom than in countries which compete with us in world trade, British goods would be given a competitive advantage. But passing on the benefits of cheap oil would be tantamount to selling our oil abroad at less than its proper market value.
Lord BALFOUR of INCHRYE: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether his reply does not mean that Britain must tag along behind the price levels decided by the OPEC countries, which prices will he based on the enrichment of their own territories and not on world considerations for trade? Would it not be wise to consider some differential so that British industry should have a fair chance in relation to world prices of oil?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, a better distribution of the benefits from oil is obtained if it is priced at its full market value and taxed accordingly. The fiscal regime established by the present Government will, we believe, ensure that the British people will receive a fair share of the benefits from our national oil resources. As regards OPEC prices, the prices for North Sea oil are determined by the companies in line with world market prices. Her Majesty's Government have an interest in ensuring that North Sea oil is priced at its full market value.
Lord HALE: My Lords, could the noble Lord say when the conclusion was reached that the fixing of prices by OPEC
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was an accurate method of assessing the market value or the market shortage? Would the noble Lord also say what steps the EEC are now taking against Saudi Arabia for undercutting the prices of other countries, or against the other countries concerned about over-pricing Saudi Arabia?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I did not say that our prices are governed by OPEC. There are oil producers other than the OPEC countries.
Viscount ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, would the noble Lord not confirm that, unless OPEC keeps prices up, the difficulties of extracting oil from under the North Sea would mean that in fact it would become uneconomic to do so?
Lord STRABOLGI: Not necessarily, my Lords. A reduction in oil prices could also have its compensations for the economy. Over the period that we remain net importers our balance of payments would benefit, and even thereafter there could be gains from a general increase in world trade. North Sea development prospects depend more on the longer-term prospects for oil prices than on short-term fluctuations.

THE JET PROJECT: SITING
11.22 a.m.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the EEC negotiations about the site of the JET (Power by Fusion) Project following Herr Guido Brunner's statement in Brussels on 20th December.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, no official text of Dr. Brunner's statement of 20th December has yet been made available. The Research Council planned for 20th December to consider JET was cancelled last Friday because the President judged that there was no chance of agreement this year. The United Kingdom assumes the presidency of the

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Council on 1st January and will continue to seek agreement on the project and its site as a matter of urgency.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord for that reply, and particularly for his assurance that the Government regard this as a matter of very great urgency, could he say whether there is any reason to suppose that our French allies and partners have a hand in this troublesome situation?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, it was not the United Kingdom. Dr. Brunner did not disclose the identity of the odd man out.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, can my noble friend tell us whether it is still the firm intention of Her Majesty's Government to press for JET to be sited at Culham? Can he also say whether there have been offers made to the present JET design team as a whole to go to America?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, we shall certainly continue to press for Culham, which we believe to be much the best site. With regard to the offers made to the JET design team, I am advised that no formal offers have been received by the United Kingdom members of the team. I am afraid I have no information for my noble friend on the other members of the team.
Lord HAWKE: My Lords, would the noble Lord say how much it would cost us per annum to go it alone?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I have not got that information, because this is a Community project.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, would the noble Lord say whether it is feasible, if we cannot get agreement, for us to "go it alone" with everybody except the odd man out?—I think we all know who it is.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, we had hoped that agreement on siting might have been reached on Monday. In preparation for the Planning Council, the President had held consultations with all the Member States. We had
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given him an undertaking that we would not veto any site which had received the support of all our partners; but it would seem that not all Members were able to give a similar assurance.
Lord KINGS NORTON: My Lords, in view of the fact that there is likely to be a long period of uncertainty, could the noble Lord say whether special efforts will be made to keep the design team together?
Lord STRABOLGI: Certainly, my Lords. The Community Fusion Laboratories are currently arranging an extension of the JET design agreements which will enable the JET design team to remain together for a further six months. Noble Lords will be aware that the Council have agreed to the expenditure of four million units of account to enable the team to continue work, pending a decision on the JET site.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, could the noble Lord help us in one further respect? As this is obviously a matter of very great concern indeed for the energy policy of the whole of Western Europe and of the Free World, could he suggest to his right honourable friend that this matter could be taken up at Heads of Government level and without delay?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am sure that is a very useful suggestion which the noble Earl has made. I will certainly see that it is passed on to my right honourable friend.

NUCLEAR POWER AND THE ENVIRONMENT
11.26 a.m.
Lord SHERFIELD Lord SHERFIELD rose to call attention to the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution on Nuclear Power and the Environment (Cmnd.6618); and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I should like, first, to say how grateful I am to so many noble Lords for coming to speak in, or listen to, this debate on the very edge of Christmas.
The Royal Commission on the Environment is composed of 16 people, eminent in a number of different fields. Under the chairmanship of Sir Brian Flowers, it took up the question of nuclear power and the environment, and published its findings on the 2nd November last as the Sixth Report of the Commission. The Report was signed by all 15 members of the Commission who took part in the inquiry. The noble Baroness, Lady White, is the only Member of this House on the Commission, and I am delighted that she is going to speak.
The report falls into three main parts, though they are not clearly separated. The first is descriptive, the second analytical and the third deals with a number of peripheral issues not directly connected with the environment, such as the dangers of sabotage and terrorism, and future energy patterns. It is clearly and lucidly written but, as your Lordships will have discovered, it needs very careful reading, because the issues are complex and highly controversial. The Commission gives full coverage to the wide variety of evidence it received, and one can find quotations in it to back up almost any point of view. For example, it has already been used—or misused—by the antinuclear lobbies in the United States to support their case.
The report also needs to be considered in relation to what has happened round the globe since it was published. In the United States, the Committee of Economic Development published in September a report on nuclear energy and national security by an authoritative sub-committee under the chairmanship of Mr. Franklin Lindsey. As the title indicates, it approaches the development of nuclear power from the point of view of proliferation of nuclear materials, but it moves over some of the same ground as the Royal Commission.
In Australia a Commission was set up under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Fox to make recommendations about the development of the Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia, and it published its first report on the 28th October. This lengthy document again covers much of the same ground as the Royal Commission, and takes broadly the same line.
Also, on 28th October, again in the United States, President Ford published a
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long statement on nuclear policy. This again approaches the subject from the point of view of proliferation and, among other things, recorded a decision that the United States should no longer regard reprocessing of used nuclear fuel to produce plutonium as a necessary and inevitable step in the nuclear fuel cycle. This statement was doubtless made partly in the light of a German decision to export reactor and fuel cycle technology to Brazil, and partly in response to earlier speeches on the subject by Mr. Jimmy Carter, who, incidentally, served as an engineer on a nuclear submarine. In these speeches, Mr. Carter took a cautious attitude to nuclear power development, but of course his attitude when in office remains to be disclosed. In the Presidential Election, on 2nd November, six Western States, following an earlier poll in California, voted by better than two to one against proposals to restrict nuclear power development, and showed a robust attitude to nuclear energy which had not been predicted.
In Sweden, the new Prime Minister led his Party into the Election on an antinuclear platform, but nevertheless, on his assumption of office, approved the commissioning of the latest Swedish nuclear power station. Almost every day we read reports of developments in nuclear policies and practice, especially in the United States and Europe, and they all serve to remind us that the Royal Commission's report deals with matters of international dimension, consideration and concern. We in this country cannot run in blinkers, but must take account of these and other important developments abroad. Finally, at home, I draw your Lordships' attention to the important gloss which Sir Brian Flowers himself put on his report in his talk to the British Nuclear Energy Society on 2nd December last.
Now, my Lords, for a few remarks on the Report itself. They must, inevitably, be brief and therefore rather general. I hope that subsequent speakers will sharpen some of them up. We should all be grateful for the expository passages of the report. They make some very hard subjects extremely clear for lay readers. The ingenious Dr. Mole at Harwell claims to have detected a number of errors in the paragraphs on radiobiology, but the Report is not a scientific

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paper and a few minor mistakes do not vitiate the excellent descriptions which are given.
In their conclusions on this part of the report, the Commission give a general endorsement of the present limits and standards imposed by international and national agencies, and disposes of a number of misconceptions and exaggerations about existing nuclear hazards. It is an advantage to have these ghosts authoritatively laid. With the organisation, international and national, for the control of health and safety, the regulation of nuclear power construction, reactor safety and waste management and disposal, the Commission have relatively little fault to find. They make some recommendations for altering and improving the existing machinery, and for setting up new bodies. These are, I think, matters for the Government, and I assume that they are under consideration.
Here I want to make only three comments. First, the present organisation is complicated on paper, but perhaps works quite well in practice. Secondly, the officials and scientists involved are probably more objective than the Commission sometimes gave them credit for. Thirdly, the nuclear industry is already more heavily supervised than any other, there is a limit to the number of competent supervisors available, and nuclear development should not be strangled in red tape. It emerges, therefore, that the Commission, after exhaustive examination, find relatively little to criticise about the development of the nuclear industry in all its aspects up to the present time. This is not surprising, because compared with other industries—and I need only mention recent experiences in the chemical industry, at home and abroad—the nuclear has an extraordinary record on safety; not a single fatal accident, no damage to the public, minimal effects on the environment. The whole issue is about the future and, if I may use a jargon word, in futurology a man or woman may hold his or her opinion to be as good as another's.
So far, therefore, it is confirmed that the technology of safety in the nuclear industry has kept pace with the development of the technologies of the reactor
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and fuel cycle. Will it continue to do so? That is the crucial question. The proponents of nuclear energy say that it will. The opponents say that it will not, or ask that the proposition should be proved 100 per cent. before further work is undertaken, which is impossible. So it becomes a question of judgment, and the factors which enter into this judgment are the essence of this debate.
I make the point here, which is also made in the Commission's report, that judgment in these matters tends to be clouded by emotion. Nuclear energy has, owing to its early history, always been an emotional issue, and it has become the whipping boy for those who are in revolt against the consequences of high technology, in general, who wish to stop or set limits to growth, and so on. The proponents of nuclear energy are not, in general, emotional, but sometimes appear to be a little rattled by the sharpness of the attack upon them.
What, then, are some of the factors which enter into this judgment? First, obviously, come the world prospects for energy supply. The Commission have a chapter on this which is not, I think, one of their strongest. The world, even on modest assumptions of growth, will run short of fossil fuels in an uncomfortably short time. What are the alternatives, what are they worth, how can they be developed? That we shall need them all seems certain. Only extremists think that we should do without nuclear power. The controversy is about how much and how fast it should be developed. It has many advantages. It is cheap. The latest figures from the CEGB for 1975–67 in respect of power stations commissioned in the last 12 years are as follows: nuclear 0½ 67p, coal-fired 0½ 97p. and oil-fired 1½ 09p, the figures including interest and depreciation charges appropriate to the year in question.
As coal and oil prices continue to rise as a result of the demands of miners or producer cartels, this price advantage should increase. Nuclear power is efficient especially so in the breeder mode; it is clean and compact. Its demands on transportation and labour are small in comparison with other fuels. The objections raised to it are the possible future hazards arising from the production of plutonium and the disposal of nuclear

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waste. The former concern the dangers of proliferation and diversion and are largely political. The latter is largely a technological problem about which most scientists and engineers are confident and many laymen are not. In weighing up the pros and cons we should have in mind that the expansion of alternative sources of energy—for example, coal—will also have sharp repercussions on the environment and that, by comparison, the volume of highly active waste arising is very small.
There is a question here of two time-scales: the time-scale on which fossil fuels will run out and the time-scale on which adequate alternative sources can be developed. The proponents of nuclear power say that time is getting short because of the long lead time required for development. The opponents say that there is no hurry. The latter go on to raise what has quickly become an ogre; namely, that the opportunities for sabotage, terrorism and blackmail would be vastly increased by an increase in the production of plutonium for fast reactors. The Royal Commission have a chapter on this. The Fox Commission have gone exhaustively into the possibilities. It is not a new theory but one which has been run over the years, particularly in the United States.
I confess that I find great difficulty with the idea. Even the most lunatic terrorist would not, I think, try to make a nuclear weapon or steal a nuclear fuel element; and if these targets were not available, such a terrorist would have an easier task with other targets—for example, oil rigs, pipelines and refineries. I find a similar difficulty with the argument that the development of fast reactors would pose a threat to civil liberties. Would not these be even more likely to be infringed by the strains imposed by growing shortages of energy? But of course all these possibilities are conceivable, they are strongly advanced and they must be taken into account.
I think the main danger lies in the misuse of weapons or materials by governments or governmental factions. It is this that lies at the heart of the problem of proliferation. The Commission could not deal with the military aspects of nuclear energy, and this inevitable omission masks the extent to which the world is already involved in the so-called plutonium
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economy. So in any event it will be essential to improve the system of national and international safeguards. I suggest that a valid distinction can be made between developing nuclear power at home under proper safeguards and exporting the technology of the fuel cycle and the reactor to other countries, particularly to those which have not signed the non-proliferation treaty.
For the Government the immediate task is to decide on the programme of nuclear development, especially how quickly to proceed with the processing of nuclear waste and the development of the fast reactor, after whatever further discussion is considered to be necessary and taking into account the resources which are available. Much uncertainty has been created by recent events and the great debate cannot he allowed to drag on too long. I would ask the Government, as soon as possible, to make the commitment of this country to nuclear power unequivocally clear, so that the expertise that we have built up can be retained; so that planning and development can proceed; so that we can honour our contracts with the Japanese; so that the existing co-operation with our European partners, who are pressing ahead with their programmes, can become closer and more effective; and, lastly, so that our lead in this field which we are, alas! in great danger of losing, can once more be regained. I hope that our debate today will provide some help to the Government in formulating policy.
I only add one point. The report of the Commission and, indeed, the other reports I have mentioned, give the Government every encouragement to delay, linger and wait, and it is the habit of governments not to require much encouragement in this direction. There is an observation attributed, as most such observations are, to Sir Winston Churchill:
"If you bring together in counsel"—
he is supposed to have said—
"the bravest soldier, the most gallant sailor, and the most intrepid airman, their decisions will be the sum of their fears."
That is not the attitude, I suggest, my Lords, in which we can afford to approach the question of energy in general and the problem of nuclear energy in particular. I beg to move for Papers.
11.48 a.m.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, it makes one humble indeed to listen to such a speech as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, who omitted to remind us that in fact he is an expert in this field. It has become something of a Parliamentary cliché to say that the noble Lord has performed a valuable service in initiating this debate but I think I ought to say that the noble Lord has done rather more than that. He has in fact achieved the distinction of fielding for the debate today a formidable team—I should say present company excepted—which serves to demonstrate the value of this House. I doubt very much whether it would be possible to initiate a debate of this kind in any other forum in this country. I have to say that I feel honoured to play even a small and, I can assure your Lordships, a very modest part in it.
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has also served a very useful purpose in the very broad sweep he has taken by reminding us of all the other reports which we should have read, although I suspect that in many cases we probably have not done so. However, the important point is that we must not view this matter through the eyes of "Little Englanders". We must at least take a European view of the problem. In so doing, let us remember that our situation is at least temporarily rather different from that of our EEC partners, in that from 1980 onwards we may have a 30-year period of energy independence. This does not apply to any of the other members of the European Economic Community.
Amid the galaxy of technical talent which is on the list of speakers this afternoon, it behoves those of us who are less well qualified to make only brief remarks and then to try to listen and learn from what the others tell us. I found that in preparing for this debate I was tempted to try to cover all the issues which I felt ought to be covered, but on this last day of term your Lordships will no doubt be relieved to know that I intend to resist the temptation to do anything of the kind and I hope to make a few relatively short comments because I believe that one of the things this House ought to be able to do, as the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield,
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has already stated, is to express some of these highly complicated technical issues in terms which become meaningful to the ordinary lay members of the public.
Indeed, the Flowers Report itself has performed a useful service by taking a cool and authoritative view of a subject which has tended, and still tends, to he rather over emotive and expressed in rather over-emotive terms. As the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has said, this report has been criticised on a number of technical grounds. That is probably good. I believe most people feel that if they are criticised on either side of an argument it probably means that they have the answer somewhere near the right level in between. But it has also been criticised for possibly fudging "some of the issues in an attempt —and it has proved to be a successful attempt—to arrive at an agreed conclusion which all the members of the Commission were able to sign. At the very least that in itself performs the useful function of trying to seek a consensus—a middle road —through all these very difficult problems rather than trying simply to identify the polarised disagreements which are inevitable in studying a problem of this kind.
However, it seems to me that there are certain fairly simple conclusions that we can draw from it. It is perfectly clear that the continued development of nuclear power creates special risks and these risks are bound to increase with the development of fast breeder reactors. In addition to the environmental risk, the report rightly calls attention to the questions of security which, again repeating the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, have to be answered.
It is worth emphasising again the point which has already been made and which I am sure will be made again this afternoon, that scientists have behaved with commendable responsibility throughout the development of this very difficult technology. They have foreseen and appreciated the risks to the extent that they have an unblemished record in taking the precautions which have prevented serious accidents. I hope that the discussion we shall have today will succeed in extracting some of the issues from the labyrinth of technical argument in which they can so easily get lost, so that we may sufficiently clarify the issues that we can recognise the political choices which are involved in deciding on this aspect at least of energy policy.

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The Commission rightly extended its terms of reference to what at first sight might appear to have had nothing to do with environmental pollution. They addressed themselves to the very difficult question of the identification of the need for power, and this is perhaps the single most difficult area in which we are involved. There is a habit of suggesting that the world in general and this country in particular is inevitably going to increase its need for power at 3 per cent. compound interest; and if we extrapolate that kind of a curve, after a few years the energy demands it implies are alarming indeed. However, I think the first thing to be said about that is that for the first time this 3 per cent. growth rate faltered as a result of the price rises which took place following the activities of the OPEC cartel in 1973—or principally as a result of that. It has had unfortunate consequences to which our attention was drawn only the other day. It has upset all the calculations of the Central Electricity Generating Board and it has led to a crisis in the generator manufacturing industry. But even if one claims that that is a special situation which is not likely to recur, I think it is at least worth postulating the possibility that power demand can arrive at a position of saturation where the rate of increase can level off.
We in this country are already using more power per head of the population than the Germans are to produce a higher output, which indicates that if we wish to—and I shall return to this subject in a moment—there is something we can do about it. Some people point out the parallel between power consumption and the standard of living. I should have thought that that was a dangerous argument in so far as there is no inevitable connection between these two figures: even if there is, as it happens, a connection, it may be in the same way as there may be a connection between the number of people emigrating to Australia and the incidence of rabies in Norway. There may be a slightly more causative connection than that, but I do not think it is necessarily a causative connection.
The figures for the United States of America are also cited, but there again we have to bear in mind that a very large amount of the power used in the United States is used for transportation over a
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much bigger area than ours. I would suggest that the experience we recently had as a result of the price rise indicates that in fact we have the power (if we care to exercise it) to control or modify the rate at which power demand is increasing; and this is really a very important point.
The reason why this question of energy forecasting is so important is of course the long lead times in which we are involved in the energy industry. Even to bring in a new coalfield takes something like five years. Building a conventional power station is on the same kind of time-scale and we know very well that the development of a fast breeder reactor must take something like 20 years, so it is understandable that industries such as the Central Electricity Generating Board inevitably are trying to indulge in what the noble Lord has very properly called "futurology". It is something which unfortunately we have to do, and there is a great deal of argument as to what kind of answers we produce; and I have tried to indicate some of the reasons why these answers can diverge so much. We have somehow got to be sure that we can arrange to produce the power we are going to need at the time we are going to need it, and given these long lead times we have to make certain assumptions about what our power needs are going to be.
If we look ahead something like 50 years—and here we are indulging in the mort dangerous sort of futurology —I think we must assume that energy produced from nuclear fusion is going to be the solution. This is free from pollution and the dangers that the noble Lord has referred to and which are referred to in the report, which is the result of fission reactors. Furthermore, the power source is water, of which we have plenty. My information, such as it is, is that most scientists now believe that nuclear fusion will be possible, and I do not think that is in any way vitiated by the little exchange we had earlier on this morning. The fact is that we cannot prove it will be possible; it remains something of an act of faith. But I hope we shall be told by those who know more about this than I do that this is ultimately going to be possible, and that this ultimately will he the solution we are seeking to the energy problems of the world. I mention this principally to

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indicate that any kind of fission technology is essentially a stop-gap to bridge the awkward period of 50 years or thereabouts until such time as we get to the fusion age.
My Lords, in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, one can see a number of reasons why we should press ahead with nuclear power. As the noble Lord has already said, the most compelling reason is that it is already substantially cheaper than what one might call the conventional power sources. The existing nuclear reactors are producing power at something of the order of two-thirds the cost of thermal, fossil fuel-burning stations and, of course, nuclear reactors are much less vulnerable in the long run to the effects of inflation, although there has been alarming inflation in the costs of building the stations.
Secondly, this is a country which increasingly is going to have to live in a world where it earns its living with high technology exports. One would hope that this was perhaps a proper field for us to indulge in, but the record has not been terribly encouraging so far. Most of the power stations being exported round the world now are American designed pressurised water reactors and boiling water reactors, whereas we have gone through the gas-cooled route. That has not proved to be an attractive export proposition. Furthermore, a couple of other essays by this country into the world of high technology, such as both the Comet and the Concorde, have not been howling commercial successes, to put it mildly, magnificent technical achievement though they may be. Another reason for going into nuclear technology is that this will eventually save our import bill when we move again out of our energy independence. It will ensure our political freedom from interference by supplier of fuel, although here it is worth remembering that uranium is certainly a finite resource which could be subjected to just the same kind of cartel operations as has happened to the oil products.
Furthermore, one believes that in the long run, oil and coal should properly be regarded as sources of chemicals rather than being burned underneath boilers, polluting the atmosphere, in order to produce fuel. There are additional advantages, and the noble Lord once
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again very properly referred to these. There are advantages in terms of environmentalism, of going the nuclear route. There exists a book, published in the United States, of which so far I have been unable to get a copy. It is called, The Danger of Not Going Nuclear. I understand that this book points out that some of the environmental impact of the alternative to nuclear power is in fact more damaging to the environment than is nuclear power itself. But we have to face the fact that the existing fission reactors are profligate users of uranium. If we are to have an economy using uranium, there is going to be a great temptation to go to the fast breeder reactors which use uranium something like 70 to 100 times more efficiently than the ordinary fission reactor as we know it.
My Lords, the other point which comes through very clearly in this report is that the whole argument about safety is largely a statistical argument. I suspect I am not alone among noble Lords in very rapidly acquiring a glazed look when statistics begin to be bought in. But the point was made very simply and effectively by Dr. Teller recently in a lecture at the American Embassy. He quoted the Rasmussen Report in the United States which said that the danger from a major nuclear accident or, indeed, a minor nuclear accident, could be roughly considered to be equivalent to the dangers from a falling meteorite. If a large meteorite happened to fall on a city like New York, there is no doubt it would do a great deal of damage. I cannot recall an incident of this kind having taken place in recent years. There may have been minor incidents; I would not know. Dr. Teller went on to say that the statement had been attacked and analysed by all the appropriate authorities in the United States, and they have been unable to blow down this assertion. It struck me as a telling expression which I could find reasonably easy to understand.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, would the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, not agree that we have not got a large industry adding to the number of meteorites?
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, because I was

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just coming to that very point. If you begin to erode the basis of your nuclear calculations and you multiply by 100 the possibilities of proliferating stations and if, of course, those stations are of a nature which are inherently more dangerous by another factor, you are clearly spreading the risks. I am not sufficient of a statistician to know where that leads us.
My Lords, the other question we ought to raise if we are talking about the fast breeder reactor is whether this is a sensible way in fact to spend that amount of money, £500 million for example. If we spent such a figure on 200,000 houses and saved, perhaps, two kilowatts per house, we could end up in fact by having saved the need for more power than the fast breeder reactor will generate. I would have preferred to have seen our efforts directed to reducing the demand for energy rather than going too quickly into attempts to increase the supply. I believe it is technically easier and more likely to produce quick results, and more certain that these results will continue. I would go further, and say that by contributing to the development of some of the non-conventional sources of supply, these could really be regarded—because they will be small contributions in small packets—as additions to the effort to reduce the demand. I suspect that a really serious campaign in this direction would be more fruitful more quickly than rushing into fast breeder developments.
However, the fact is that this kind of a policy does not show any sign of occurring. Therefore, one has reluctantly to accept that we shall have to go on supplying energy for the kind of increasing demand which has been the pattern heretofore. Given these circumstances, we have no option but to continue a steady, but I hope not headlong, development of the kind of technology we are engaged on at present. What I feel the Flowers Report has indicated to us is that those who wish to go on with this kind of technology clearly have an obligation to establish the need and the safety of what they are going to do. If we put the question that way round, the Flowers Report has performed a very useful service indeed.
12.10 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord
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Sherfield, for giving us the opportunity of debating this matter today, even though I shall have to disagree with some of his conclusions. I can at least agree with him that the whole topic of nuclear energy excites passionate emotions, not only on the side of the antinuclear lobby; equally some of the proponents tend to use extravagant language. The noble Lord himself spoke of persons who say that we can do without nuclear power as being extremists. I do not accept that; I think there is a perfectly respectable case to be made out for not having any nuclear power whatsoever, although it is not a case that I am intending to develop today. To use that kind of language in respect of persons who have perfectly respectable arguments is not going to assist us in our debate. Apart from that, I thought the noble Lord made a very valuable contribution to the debate which we shall be having from now on concerning the Flowers Report and its recommendations.
I would begin by paying a tribute to Sir Brian and his colleagues for the very valuable contribution they have made to this subject. I think their report at least provides us with some of the materials upon which to base judgments concerning this important question of the long-term dependence of the United Kingdom on nuclear energy for its energy supplies, and on the fast reactor in particular. My Lords, the Royal Commission's report does not pretend to examine thoroughly some of the matters which were outside the Commission's terms of reference and which may exercise a critical influence on the decisions, including such matters as the risks and possible consequences of reactor accidents, safeguards against diversion of nuclear materials into weapon-making, nuclear theft and sabotage and the possible implications of the plutonium economy for civil liberties, which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, tended to dismiss, but which I shall examine in some detail later on.
Neither did the report of the Royal Commission examine a wide enough spread of energy strategies to cover all the possible nuclear options. Some of these matters have been dealt with in greater detail in the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, which Sir Brian has suggested should be read in conjunction with his own report. I would point out that neither Sir Brian nor Chief Justice

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Fox have attempted to substitute themselves for the democratic process. What we have to do now, I suggest, armed with these reports, is to find ways of conveying the information that they contain to the people as a whole and creating opportunities for extensive discussion. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, that it is time we brought this great debate to an end; I think it is only just beginning and our debate here today is part of that process.
Lord SHERFIELD: My Lords, if the noble Lord will forgive me, I did not say that it was time it was brought to an end. I said it should not go on too long.
Lord AVEBURY: Well, my Lords, these are nuances. I got the impression from the noble Lord's speech that he did not think we had very much more to say on this subject. But if he listens to the rest of what I have to say and agrees with the time-scale I am proposing for the great debate, then I shall be only too delighted. Sir Brian himself argued that we have a decade before we are irretievably committed to nuclear power as a major component of our electricity supply. There is, therefore, in my submission, plenty of scope for the process, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, would agree with that. There is also time for the demonstration beyond reasonable doubt, which Sir Brian said is required, that a method exists for the safe isolation of radioactive wastes for the indefinite future, a question which has arisen in the last few weeks in connection with the proposed extension of the Windscale new processing plant. These two questions are linked, in that it is only through public discussion that doubts on these matters can be dispelled. I must say frankly that I do not think British Nuclear Fuels have assisted their own case by concealing the leak of radioactive material which took place while their planning application was under consideration.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord. Is he correct in saying that British Nuclear Fuels denied the information?
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, the fact is that the leak took place some time
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ago; the trade unions had no knowledge of it, although it is arguable that they should have been notified under the Health and Safety at Work Act.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, may I again interrupt the noble Lord, to inform him and your Lordships' House that a statement has been issued showing that the facts were released straight away, and to the trade union individuals concerned.
Lord AVEBURY: Well, my Lords, I read a statement, which was made by one of the trade unionists locally, who said that in his opinion it was not necessary for the workers to be notified. Perhaps there are conflicts of evidence on this which we can resolve on some other occasion. I think all I need to say is that the Cumbria County Council, who were responsible for granting this planning application, appeared to be unaware of what had taken place. We understand from the papers this morning that the Secretary of State for the Environment is about to call in that application and initiate what I understand to be some form of extra-statutory inquiry about it. I think it is most unfortunate, if this decision really has been taken, that it could not have been announced in another place yesterday, so that not only could there have been an adequate opportunity for honourable Members to put questions when there was a full attendance on a three-line whip, but also the information would then have been available to us from the start of today's debate.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord, to save him from perhaps going on at some length about this, to tell him that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment is still hopeful that he may be able to make a Statement before Christmas.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I know, but if he was going to make a Statement why could not he have made it in another place yesterday afternoon, when everybody was there and could have put questions to him. The information in the Statement could then have been available to your Lordships so that we could have discussed it thoroughly when he had the opportunity. If the Secretary of State is going to make the Statement this afternoon,

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it is too late so far as we are concerned. I am going to assume that the Statement will be made that the application is going to be called in and that this extrastatutory inquiry is going to be instituted by the Secretary of State.
We on these Benches welcome the calling in of the application, but we believe that it is of such major importance that the planning inquiry commission procedure of Section 47 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1971 should be invoked. The criteria under Section 48 of that Act are, first, that the application has been called in, as this one has; secondly, that there are considerations of national or regional importance which are relevant and can be determined only by means of special inquiry. Nobody, I think, would deny that there are aspects of this application which are of national and indeed international importance.
There are some doubts, according to an article in The Times, as to whether the Non-Proliferation Treaty allows us to reprocess Japanese fuel which is of American origin. Although the Americans have graciously allowed one shipment of Japanese spent fuel elements to be taken to Windscale, which was due there on 26th December, any future deliveries under the terms of the contract—which was supposed to earn us £500 million and which was used as the justification for the extension of Windscale—are suspended pending clarification of the interpretation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So we are dealing with a matter of not only national but international importance. I am not altogether sure that these are matters which the Planning Committee of the Cumbria County Council was competent to resolve.
Thirdly, the criterion is that the technical or scientific aspect of the proposed development is so unfamiliar in character as to jeopardise proper determination about a special inquiry. The technology of reprocessing high burn-up fuels has never been successfully applied on a commercial scale. There is an article in this month's Scientific American which says:
"Nineteen years after the first American nuclear power station went into service at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the US still has no commercial facility licensed to recover plutonium and unburned uranium 235 from the spent fuel of nuclear power reactors."
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One such plant which had been licensed was forced to close down permanently because of insuperable technical difficulties in its operation, and another one costing 500 million dollars, which was completed a year ago, is still awaiting a licence to operate. This may have something to do with the recent announcement by the United States authorities mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, that the United States no longer regards reprocessing as an inevitable part of the fuel cycle Obviously, if they are not capable of carrying it out themselves, it would suit them to prevent anyone else from doing so.
To avoid the kind of commercial and technical disaster in the United Kingdom to which I have referred from American experience, I think we should apply the planning inquiry commission procedure not only to the Windscale application but to every single major step forward in nuclear technology. If as a result of using that procedure there are delays, then it would still be a great deal cheaper than writing off plant costing upwards of half a billion dollars.
The case for accelerating the development of nuclear power rests on two assumptions which have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield. The first is the cost of nuclear electricity being lower than the cost of electricity generated from burning fossil fuels, as indeed it has been, as he pointed out, with the accounting conventions that have been applied. The CEGB pays a levy to the Atomic Energy Authority of · 007p a unit of nuclear electricity, an amount which was fixed as long ago as 1967 and which has no built-in escalation to take account of the fall in the value of the pound. I do not know by how much the levy would have to be raised in order to cover the full cost of the reactor development programme. Perhaps the noble Baroness could try to give us that information when she speaks later on. It is at least possible that the relative economics of nuclear and conventional electricity would be radically changed if the full costs of the reactor development programme had to be recovered by a levy on the consumers of electricity. Now that the advanced gas-cooled reactors are being commissioned, I suggest quite seriously that those levy arrangements be reviewed with a view to having the full cost recovered.

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The second assumption mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, is that electricity demand will grow at some arbitrary rate over the next 50 years. Even if one postulates only a very small percentage growth rate, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona, pointed out, if one compounds it over such a long period as half a century it gives one a most impressive rise in generating capacity, and you then find that even on the most optimistic projections of oil, coal, and gas the only way of producing that electricity is nuclear; and with the likely shortages also of uranium you must go then to fast reactors.
The trouble with these imaginary 50 year projections is that very soon the deductions which arc made from them assume the importance of Holy Writ. Sir John Hill, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, for whom I have the highest regard, has committed himself to estimates which show that the installed generating capacity will reach 555 gigawatts by the year 2030. Since growth on that scale throughout the whole of the industralised world would obviously not be feasible without fast reactors, the inevitability of the fast reactor becomes unquestionable. For Sir John Hill it is not a case of if; it is a question of when.
Up to the year 2000 these projections of the Atomic Energy Authority were corroborated by the estimates given to the Royal Commission by the Department of Energy. The Royal Commission, on the basis of different assumptions regarding market penetration of electricity, offered a scenario in which the installed capacity by the year 2025 is only one-third as much as in the official version. That would still give a very substantial nuclear component. It would give you 80 gigawatts compared with between 304 and 426 in the AEA scenario.
If we start to argue the rival merits of the two sets of figures, however, we are overlooking this questionable feature that they both have in common, that a 2 per cent. growth per annum in primary electricity consumption will take place over this very long period. The errors which result from extrapolating previous growth rates even over a period as short as six years have been absolutely staggering, as the CEGB has found. If one looks at the CPRS Study published last week, it
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shows how disastrous these errors have been from the point of view of the wretched suppliers. On page 3 it says that orders for turbo-generators have varied from a peak of 16.3 gigawatts in 1964 down to zero in the last three years. It is absolutely impossible to carry on any kind of business, I would suggest, with fluctuations as large as that. While I do not go all the way with the CPRS in their recommendations, I suggest that we should seriously consider in 1977 placing one order for a twin 660 megawatt station, because if one looks at the longer term the level of orders would have to be larger than 1,320 megawatt a year if one is simply going to replace existing plant as it reaches the end of its useful life.
The CEGB in its accounting assumptions suggests that the useful life of generating plant is 30 years, so that something slightly over 2,000 megawatts a year should be ordered even if there is no growth at all in simultaneous maximum demand. But if that is the order of magnitude of the need, then we certainly should not be thinking of taking the billion pound gamble of CFRI, and the size of the thermonuclear programme would be the minimum consistent with retaining a nuclear reactor design capability. I believe that this is by no means an impossible scenario, as we can see by looking at the last few years. Since 1973 the consumption of primary fuels has in fact declined, but simultaneous maximum demand is not a quantity which is given. It can be varied, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona, has pointed out, within limits, by Government policies such as insulation standards, the cost yardsticks for local authority housing, or the degree of self-financing that is required of the nationalised industries. So that simultaneous maximum demand is a dependent variable and not an independent one as it is so frequently treated by the forecasters. Even if one looks at the Department of Energy's seven different scenarios given in the discussion document, Energy R & D in the United Kingdom, while recognising that external factors may influence the cost of primary fuels, and hence of electricity, these scenarios make energy consumption very largely a function of gross domestic product, which comes to the same thing as saying that they are hardly influenced at all by variations in our domestic policies.

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My good friend Dr. Walter Marshall, the chief scientist of the Department of Energy, offered to recalculate these projections to incorporate some normative factors which I suggested to the Royal Society of Art Symposium on 19th June this year. I suggested taking his low growth scenario but with the energy conservation effects taken from the high energy cost model, and the coal and renewable resources contribution taken from the non-nuclear model. I still think it would be useful if this particular scenario were to be examined, as Dr. Marshall had promised, and the figures made publicly available. Indeed, anybody reading the document is invited to suggest possible alternatives which, the Department say, they will examine.
I suggest that a large nuclear programme and the development of fast reactors is unnecessary in the sense that, if we want to do so, we can plan for a much lower energy future. Nobody has actually asked people if they want continued economic growth or, if so, what kinds of growth they would prefer. It is certainly by no means obvious to me that people would be happier if much large quantities of energy were available to them. But if they were disposed to think, as they are encouraged to do by big business, trade unions, politicians and the media, that a policy of maximising economic growth is desirable, I think they would still require to be satisfied that undesirable side-effects of growth can be properly dealt with.
They might not be prepared to agree with Professor Beckerman that when any dis-benefits of growth appear to be intolerable to the community, the problem is simply one of misallocation of resources; the alternative consideration which people might bear in mind is whether the potential risks of a large nuclear programme are such that they cannot be corrected simply by a mere reallocation of resources.
Earlier this year, when we were discussing the Atomic Energy Authority (Special Constables) Bill, we tried to point out some of the implications fo civil liberties of the measures that might have to be taken against nuclear theft and sabotage, which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, curtly dismissed. These considerations were also at the time brushed aside by the Government. However, they have now been given quite powerful reinforcement
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by the Sir Brian Flowers Commission and by the Fox Report.
What is the threat? There is the threat of sabotage of nuclear installations leading to substantial damage and release of radioactivity, and there is the threat of the theft of plutonium and its use by criminals or terrorists in explosive devices. The Flowers Report discusses sabotage without trying to assess the vulnerability of nuclear plant, and as the Commission admit that they do not know the details of the security arrangements which have been made or are in operation, the risk must be a matter of conjecture. The public can never be given this information because it would make life easier for the terrorists and therefore we must take it on trust that the precautions are satisfactory. However, the Fox Report says:
"It seems doubtful whether, as the number of facilities increases, it will be possible to provide sufficient defences to render every installation safe against attack by even small numbers of well-armed trained men."
If it is asked, as Lord Sherfield asked, why the terrorists should pick on nuclear targets rather than, say, a chemical plant or an oil rig the answer is that in addition to causing damage amounting to tens of millions of pounds, an attack on a nuclear facility would be treated as a far more spectacular coup by the public at large and the media, which is what terrorism is all about. Another answer, of course, is that we do not as yet consider it necessary to place armed guards on chemical plants.
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord is he wants to encourage, and give new ideas to, terrorists?
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I am doing no more than using the information that is provided in the Flowers and Fox Reports, and if the noble Lord will look at those reports he will find that the discussion which I am suggesting we should have is largely based on the material which is available in published form.
With regard to the theft of plutonium, the Flowers Reports says that if we have to deal with the possibility of groups consisting of about a dozen terrorists, helped by insiders
"… the security arrangements required would be extensive and their implications for society should be considered."

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Fox believes that an attacking force consisting of as few as three well-armed trained men would be difficult to thwart. These are not my opinions; they are taken from the reports. It goes on to say that if such a group managed to steal a few kilogrames of reactor grade plutonium, they would be able to construct a bomb with the yield of perhaps 100 tons of TNT which could be transported in a small vehicle. Fox goes a little further and says that terrorists could use reactor grade plotonium to make a bomb with good prospects of giving a yield of several hundred tons of TNT, and he goes on to point out that if there is some uncertainty over the yield. that would be of very little concern to the terrorist.
If the authorities are convinced that such a device exists with the potential of killing a few thousand people—somewhere between 2,000 and 50,000 according to Willrich and Taylor—in a densely crowded city centre where immense property damage would occur as well, the threats which were made by the terrorists would have to be considered very seriously. The Flowers Report says:
"We are by no means convinced that the British Government have realised the full implications of this issue."
To begin with, the authorities would have to monitor employees in plants where fissile materials are held and members of the public with whom they were or might be in contact as well as members of organisations thought to be of a subversive nature. The Flowers Report regards the use of informers, infiltrators, wire-tapping, checks on bank accounts and the opening of mail as highly likely, indeed inevitable, to catch members or suspected members of extremist or terrorist groups, and if there is supposed to be a large number of individuals or factions prepared to use plutonium, widespread surveillance, he says, could scarcely be avoided. Fox says that witnesses expressed concern that measures designed to minimise the chances of the diversion of plutonium might constitute an infringement of civil rights.
It would be necessary, for instance, to investigate the personal attitudes of employees and applicants for jobs. Some suggested that if the use and transport of plutonium became a regular feature of the nuclear industry,
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"the degree of investigation and surveillance would be unacceptable in a democratic society".
Sir Brian, in his lecture to the British Nuclear Energy Society on 2nd December, said:
"On the issue of the possible effects of illicit activities directed towards the nuclear programme and the threat to civil liberties of security arrangements, the Royal Commission was given very little help by official bodies".
One suspects that this may be because the Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Authority have not applied their minds to this problem. It has been discussed in some depth, however, by Robin Grove-White of CPRE and Dr. Michael Flood of Friends of the Earth in their paper Nuclear Prospects, A Comment On The Individual, The State And Nuclear Power. Sir Brian said of that document that it was a little dramatic for his taste but that it deserved to be studied as it was the best we had to go on at present.
We are here dealing with a very dramatic threat and it is therefore hard to avoid being dramatic in its treatment. The possibility of nuclear malevolence has to be taken seriously, and the Government in some ways take it seriously, otherwise, as I have said, they would not have taken powers to arm 400 special constables in the AEA. But having taken every possible precaution against the diversion of nuclear materials, we then have to consider what would be the appropriate response if, nevertheless, criminals succeeded in penetrating the defences or if it is thought possible that they may have penetrated the defences. The consequences of the malevolent use of plutonium are so serious and devastating that every possible means of recovery of the material would be justifiable, including for example powers of general search without a warrant.
However, as it is impossible to predict in advance when such an incident might occur, the enabling legislation to conduct such general searches would have to be passed in normal times, and as Flood and Grove-White point out, the public would have to be made aware of the purposes for which such a Bill was intended in the debates on it; when the powers came to be invoked it would be profoundly alarming to public opinion, and even if the threat turned out to be a false one, it might subsequently generate a demand for even tighter security measures. It might be argued that general search powers

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should be a feature of the normal law so that there would be no interval for the obtaining of Parliamentary approval; if the authorities had reasonable, or indeed any, grounds for believing that members of a certain organisation had stolen a quantity of plutonium, it is hard to imagine that the Judges' Rules would be strictly followed in questioning the members of the suspected organisation.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, might we invite the noble Lord to explain his thoughts a little? Is he seriously suggesting that it is wrong for a democracy to defend itself against the people who want to destroy it?
Lord AVEBURY: Certainly not. I am explaining that much stronger measures would have to be taken by society to defend itself against the possibility of illicit use of plutonium than we should like to contemplate in a democratic society, and it is the development of nuclear power, particularly the reliance on plutonium, that would cause these security measures to become necessary. I was about to say that we used forms of torture in Northern Ireland against suspected terrorists, and when we had an inquiry into those circumstances a former Lord Chief Justice and a very distinguished Parliamentarian declared the procedures adopted to he justified. But even if one disagreed with that, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, one can understand the concern of the forces of law and order—and I think that this is an answer to the noble Lord—whose interest it was to protect the ordinary citizens of Northern Ireland against the activities of these terrorists who were killing and maiming so many of their fellow citizens. But how much stronger would the argument of the former Lord Chief Justice and that distinguished Parliamentarian have been if, instead of being armed with a few kilogrammes of gelignite, those concerned had come into possession of a few kilogrammes of plutonium?
My Lords, I am afraid that I have spoken for too long, but that is partly because I have been interrupted. In conclusion, how are we to come to grips with issues like these which are so far outside the boundaries of the Department
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of Energy'? Flowers strongly supports the idea of a high-level, independent body to provide advice on energy strategy, taking account of economic, social, technical and environmental considerations; a body for which we on these Benches have argued in numerous debates over recent years—and we are not alone in that. We understand that the Secretary of State has been moving in this direction, too, but in his scheme the advisory body would be dominated by managers and union leaders from within the energy industries with a token consumer and perhaps even a token conservationist. We would say that such a composition would not promote the "freedom and originality of thought", the
"independence from institutional pressures and from the need to justify existing arrangements and policies"
which Sir Brian rightly says ought to be the aim. If war is too dangerous to be left to the Generals, energy policy is too important to be left to the British Nuclear Forum.
Sir Brian has identified the strength of the vested interests and the pressures which make it impossible to say that the world need not be dependent on nuclear power beyond the end of this century. We are being driven inexorably towards confirming the Faustian bargain of plentiful energy supplies in exchange for the commitment to a material which could be used ultimately to transform and even destroy society. I hope that this debate today will help to slow down and halt that trend.
12.45 p.m.
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, as one of the very few lay Members on the list of speakers in the debate I should probably not have had the temerity to intervene had I not had the benefit of two and a half years' education as a Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Most of the noble Lords who have indicated that they wish to take part have a distinguished record in science or in engineering, or even in both, and I understand that even the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham has a scientific background. We have with us more particularly the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, who was such a notable pioneer in the civil use of nuclear energy in this country,

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admittedly some years ago in the period of bright confident morning which I doubt will ever recur.
As a member of the Royal Commission I should like to pay my own tribute to the chairman, Sir Brian Flowers, to whom I think all of us who worked with him would acknowledge much of the merit of the sixth Report which we are debating is due. His own knowledge of the subject and his continuing membership of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority gave him an unrivalled advantage in directing our inquiries. The widespread, indeed world-wide interest, which the report has commanded has, as he himself publicly admitted, set him at odds with certain of his colleagues. Since the report has appeared I myself have been astonished at how unscientific the reactions of scientists can be. They are indeed all too human. So we have witnessed in the correspondence columns of The Times and elsewhere a very sharp polorisation between what in shorthand we may call the nuclear lobby and the rest. I hope that one of the aims of the debate today will be to reach a better understanding between the two sides.
The Royal Commission itself tried very hard indeed to take an objective view, siding neither with the more extreme environmentalists who are basically I think in revolt against modern technological society as a whole, and who find nuclear proliferation, military or civil, their most rewarding target, nor with those who because their life's work has been involved with the nuclear programme feel compelled to defend it at all costs, too often regardless of the misgivings of people who may be quite as sincere, and even possibly as intelligent, as they are, but who pose long-term difficult questions which demand an answer.
One cannot emphasise too much—the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, who introduced the debate drew attention to this—that the Royal Commission was particularly concerned with the long-term aspects of the nuclear programme; much more concerned with that than with the present position, or with what may happen even in the next decade. As we have said more than once in our report, we are trying to look ahead at what could happen in, say, 50 years from now, and most of what we say has to be considered in that
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context. That does not mean of course that we did not pay attention to what is the current situation, and we commented on it as seemed required; for example, our criticism of the standard of housekeeping to be observed at Windscale at the time of a visit which took place in 1974.
But we were equally at pains to emphasise that even such deficiencies must be kept in perspective, and that it helped no one if the Press ran scare stories over incidents which had done, or were likely to do, very little actual damage. I should like to get Windscale out of the way early in my speech because I should expect that the noble Baroness who is to reply for the Government will probably wish to refer to it. The Royal Commission considered the proposals for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel at Windscale and came to the conclusion that on balance if such reprocessing was to take place, it was better that it should take place in as few areas as possible and at installations such as Windscale where, by and large at least, they know what they are doing and are geared to stringent precautions. Since then we have been overtaken by events, and as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, mentioned, the United States, and now I think France, are themselves coming into the field and putting forward claims to a copyright, as it were, in nuclear fuel supplied originally by themselves.
We were more concerned, frankly, about the possible dangers involved in the transportation over vast distances of such materials, and we were not able to accept what we took to be the view of the Secretary of State for Energy that the return to the country of origin of such materials was a desirable option. Of course, as a Royal Commission we were not in any way involved with the subsequent controversy which arose over the planning application, but I would join cordially with the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in hoping that my noble friend will be able to say something about this before the end of this debate, because I think it will be grossly discourteous to this House if she does not. The Secretary of State has indicated that he is going to say something before Christmas, which gives only the possibility of one more Parliamentary day in the other place; and if he is going to say something, then I think we ought to be told about it.

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This is not the occasion for going into the whole question of the planing procedures in this country, but I must emphasise my own view that it is not appropriate, in a situation such as Windscale, for a final decision to be taken by the county council, although obviously their views are very important; and I would very much hope that the Department of the Environment will seize this nettle and apply their minds to a definition of categories of installations which are really too hazardous or too important to he subject to the ordinary planning procedures. This definition should enable us to take action at a much earlier stage than can at present he clone, when one has to wait to see whether or not the Secretary of State will call in the planning application and he can then take his time in deciding whether to set up a special inquiry. I feel that we have a very considerable hiatus in our planning arrangements in this country in dealing with nuclear installations, in particular, or with other major hazardous establishments, such as some of the great chemical works. I cannot believe that it is beyond the wits of the Department to find a more satisfactory way of dealing with such situations. I have considerable sympathy with the management and the workers at BNFL, who have been kept on tenterhooks for a considerable time now and who have to look forward to another period of uncertainty as to whether or not they can go ahead with the project which they wish to embark upon.
As to the way in which the information was handled about the silo leakage, on which the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, I suspect, will wish to enlighten us, frankly I think it was done in the most fumbling way imaginable, whatever the details may have been, and showed an insensitivity of judgment as to how the public, not to mention the Minister responsible, would react. This is the gravamen of much of the implied criticism in the Report of the Royal Commission: that we felt that the attitude of those concerned with the administration of our nuclear endeavours in this country was simply not geared to the quite understandable apprehensions of the general public. I found this the most disappointing aspect of our investigations; and, my Lords, one does not have to he a nuclear physicist to judge the quality and attitude
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of mind of some of those who are in charge of our nuclear activities.
Those of your Lordships who have read our report must have observed the expressions of disquiet to be found on so many of its pages. These criticisms were clothed in the most restrained language. The Royal Commission was not, by temperament or training, an alarmist body—quite the contrary—and we all recognised and paid tribute to the dedicated work of those in charge of so much of our nuclear development. But at the same time some of us, at least, were often depressed by what we felt was the blinkered outlook which could preclude adequate consideration of matters not directly in the line of vision. We were depressed by a certain rigidity of mind, and in some cases by what I have called the impenetrable complacency of those in high places. A Micawberish attitude does not go well with a substance as potentially risky as plutonium.
Perhaps I may illustrate my point by reference to a few quotations from the Report. For example, in our discussion of the need to safeguard plutonium from possible illegal diversion, we were obliged to conclude:
"We are by no means convinced that the British government has realised the full implications of this issue".
This was after we had received a bromide from the Cabinet Office and after our chairman and two of our members had discussed the matter confidentially at the highest level—and nothing that Sir John Hill, chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, has since written in The Times has caused me nor, I would suppose, my fellow Commissioners to change our view. Bland assertions are the least convincing of all, and they usually indicate that the respondent has not adequately understood the question.
I have been concerned, also, to have seen a letter—a very good letter; a very persuasive letter—from the Prime Minister to one of his constituents, who sent it to me. I quote one paragraph:
"On the questions of security against sabotage and acts of terrorism, the Government have recently carried out a wide-ranging survey of the risks and problems involved".
I should say that this letter was dated the 8th November.

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"In the light of this survey, security measures have been strengthened. We are confident that these are adequate—a view shared by the Royal Commission".
My comment on that, of course, is that it entirely misses the point.
The Royal Commission is gratified that possibly its observations have caused a review of the current security measures—a little strengthening of the fences here and there; a few more guards put on, possibly, here and there—but, of course, this is not what we were worrying about. We were worrying about what the situation could be if one had the proliferation of fast-breeder reactors on the kind of scale which is contemplated in the estimates and scenarios provided for us by the Department and by the Atomic Energy Authority. That is the situation we were concerned about, and the fact that nobody seemed to be thinking about it. That is what was worrying us; and, of course, this kind of assurance gets one absolutely nowhere in the light of what was really troubling the Royal Commission. The fact that, even now, that should not be recognised at the highest quarters is, I think, considerably disturbing.
My second quotation refers to the management of radioactive waste. Here, the Royal Commission said in paragraph 427:
"The picture that emerges from our review of radioactive waste management is in many ways a disquieting one, indicating insufficient appreciation of long-term requirements either by government departments or by organisations concerned … a much more urgent approach is needed.".
Again, in our report we tried to spell out the circumstances which led us to that conclusion. Again, what concerned us most was the impression—and, as a lay person, I can speak only in such terms—that one received from our witnesses that they were not sufficiently concerned at what legacy we might be leaving for posterity.
My third quotation is from the chapter in which we discuss at some length energy strategy, to which reference has been made already several times in this debate. Again we have to conclude in paragraph 479:
"… we regard the approach to future energy supplies that forms the basis of official strategy as unconvincing".
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, said that you could quote us in any direction; but
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the three passages that I have quoted give a fairly conclusive indication of what the Royal Commission felt in three major areas of concern in this whole matter: in the fields of security, of waste management and energy strategy. Our witnesses in these three fields failed to convince us. I would respectfully suggest that this fact should cause some disquiet in all quarters of the House, even if on various matters of detail you may fault us, criticise us or disagree with us.
Furthermore, we were far from content with the way in which it seemed to us that energy supplies, or potential energy supplies, and specific user requirements are matched, or fail to be matched. If, as Mr. Benn has recently suggested, energy should be regarded as a form of currency —a view which I, for one, would be inclined to support—then it seems to me obvious that the accounting procedure should be radically overhauled and stripped of the historic impedimenta which each separate energy-producing industry has acquired over the years. It was one of our strongest impressions that each of the different energy-producing industries in this country has naturally grown up within its own context, with its own history and its own problems and that there is no one at a high enough level yet to be able to disregard some of these historical incrustations in reaching a national fuel policy, using our resources in the most intelligent and most economic way.
We concluded among other points that the official strategy would be unnecessarily wasteful of primary energy resources. We were not particularly favourably impressed by the efforts so far to ensure adequate conservation of energy. We know that there has been an advertising campaign; but how much more have we really done in practical terms to ensure that we make the very best and most economic use of all the energy resources at our disposal? We were not impressed by the proportion of our research and development resources which had been devoted hitherto to alternative methods of meeting our needs. I am aware that some increase has been made—and I think a little more is in prospect—in the research and development of alternative sources of energy; but again there was no conviction about this, no real sense of urgency. One felt that those in authority were entering

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into such matters with great reluctance and really only in response to popular and largely lay pressures.
We made it quite clear that we did not reject the nuclear option, as such. It would be quite irresponsible to do so. We accepted that some ongoing work is essential, particularly in order to keep our own scientists abreast of developments and able to take a full part in future programmes. I, myself, was much disappointed at the announcement made yesterday in Brussels that yet again European work on the fusion project has been deferred because we cannot agree among ourselves on where it is to be sited. One must not be too romantic about the possibility of fusion. Plainly the technological problems are immense before it can be brought to practical use. Nevertheless, it is an alternative which offers many advantages over the fission process and therefore one wants to feel that there is a sense of urgency about making progress in this direction, a sense of urgency which I found conspicuously lacking in a number of the official witnesses who appeared before us.
We summarise in paragraph 512 what, for the lay members of the Commission at least, was our major difficulty. What we simply could not swallow was the attitude we described in that paragraph; namely, the basic belief of the Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Authority that nuclear fission, using the fast breeder reactor, is the only real option for meeting our future energy needs. Once you take that as a starting point, in effect you disregard every other possibility and you do not pay sufficient attention to dealing with the inevitable hazards which such a programme would bring in its train. The minds of too many of the official witnesses who appeared before us seemed, to some of us at least, to be virtually closed to anything other than the fast breeder reactor programme. This, I think, was what made them so reluctant to pay adequate attention to the long-term problems, which the Royal Commission tried to bring before them.
As we pointed out in the concluding section of the report, this attitude could lead to the recognition of dangers when it would then be too late to avoid them. We came to the view that the only way to
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cure this one-sidedness was to extend the area of operation in Government so that these overwhelmingly important issues should receive the continuing examination that they deserve by persons, independent of the Executive agencies, either in the various energy-producing industries themselves or in the Departments.
As the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has indicated, Mr. Benn is reported to be considering rather a different type of body, representing various interests, which would debate the issue of public policy. I suggest that we need both. The first, a standing energy commission, requires people able for a period to give a great deal of their time to the matter and to have a very high level of competence. The amount of work which we, as members of the Royal Commission, had to devote to our own study—which was, after all, in a sense a superficial one and was primarily concerned with principles—convinces me that no coming together of a representative group involved mainly in other fields of interest could possibly undertake the examination in depth which is required if we are to produce and to monitor a satisfactory energy policy. The representative group could function properly only after the examination in depth had been accomplished and results made available.
We refer in paragraph 514 to the possible widening of the responsibilities of the Atomic Energy Authority itself to include responsibility for research and development in renewable energy as well as in the nuclear field. This could be a useful corrective to the excessive partisanship which now prevails and which is probably unavoidable when the sole remit, as at present. is the production of power by nuclear means. We also make proposals for a specific agency to take over the disposal of nuclear waste. I am sure that Members of all parts of the House would agree that we have no right to leave to posterity a hazardous legacy which we have not done our utmost to dispose of safely. Under the present unified responsibility for energy production and waste disposal, it seems quite clear that the latter takes second place. Therefore we felt that a body concerned only with the problems of waste disposal would be more likely to reach satisfactory methods of dealing with it.

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Overshadowing our deliberations was the consciousness that we could not in any way examine the military side of this problem. We felt nevertheless that the fast breeder programme would make it easier to proliferate both materials and skills which could be used for weapons purposes; and not only that, but that if in this country and other parts of the world we relied on this proliferation of nuclear installations, there would be added a further dimension to any possible nuclear war by providing so many nuclear targets. These would obviously be the prime objective of enemy action, with devastating consequences.
We may decide, my Lords, that, in order to sustain or improve our standard of living, it is worth taking these more or less calculated risks. Nevertheless, people have the right to have these risks explained to them so far as one possibly can. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, was content with the way in which we had endeavoured to explain in intelligible language what some of the problems really are. In many cases where we expressed disquiet it was not intended to convey that we lacked faith in the ability of scientists to solve some of these problems ultimately; but you cannot take it for granted. Even if the "Micawberish" attitude, which some of us found so distasteful, proved correct, and a solution to all the technical and scientific problems turned up, there is one problem which no scientist can solve: the problem of human nature. You may find all the answers, but you cannot ensure that they will be applied. You cannot ensure that they will be applied even in the next few decades, let alone for a period of time which our imagination can scarcely encompass.
Since our report appeared, other reports have also appeared to which reference has been made, in particular the Fox Report in Australia. It is entirely coincidental that this came to much the same conclusions as we did. It justifies both the choice by the Royal Commission of this subject for its investigations, and the general tenor of our report. If in our Sixth Report we have made people stop and think, we shall have achieved a worthwhile objective.
1.14 p.m.
Lord HINTON of BANKSIDE: My Lords, the Flowers Report has attracted a great deal of publicity. There is an obvious need to discuss it, and I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for giving us an opportunity of debating it today. It is worth while to remind ourselves of the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. They were:
"To advise on matters, both national and international"—
I should like to underline the word "international"—
"concerning the pollution of the environment; on the adequacy of research in this field; and the future possibilities of danger to the environment".
I should like to suggest that both the Royal Commission, which is now re constituted, and we in this House should he careful that we do not take too narrow a view when we talk about the environment. There are some environmentalists who give the impression that the only environment that they think about is the one which they can judge in visual and ecological terms. But there is another environment, a much more material one, which provides amenities and environmental benefits of a different kind which are at least equally valuable and, indeed, are thought by some people to be more valuable than the visual and ecological amenities.
I have in mind such amenities as roads, the supply of electric power, gas, of reliable piped water supplies and even food. All those amenities are too often taken for granted. It is only when we are denied their use by an act of God or man that we realise how much they mean in our lives. Who is there who would wish to go back to the standard of material amenity which I used to think quite normal when a small boy? At that time in the average household the bedrooms were perhaps heated only in time of illness. They were lit by oil lamps or candles. There was running water only in the scullery and, except in large towns, there was no electricity—indeed, I clearly remember the first time that I ever saw electric light.
The provision of those material amenities has demanded the sacrifice of some visual and ecological amenities; and, moreover, it has demanded the acceptance of risk. In the early days of power plants

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many boilers exploded. I remember this in the early days of my own engineering career. It is interesting to remember that James Watt said that Trevithick should be hanged for building power plants which used steam at above atmospheric pressure. Trevithick was using steam at 30 lb per square inch. It is today used almost universally at pressures over 2,000 lb per square inch.
In the early days—and still even today—many high dams failed, often with heavy loss of life. There were people killed by electrocution or gas explosions. That still happens today. But those risks have been accepted because the public felt that the material amenities that were provided outweighed not only the sacrifice of visual and ecological amenity, but also the risks that have had to be taken. Over many years the balance was too heavily weighted in favour of material amenity. I think that that balance is better adjusted now, but we must be careful that it does not swing too far in the other direction.
Like every other development that seeks to provide higher standards of material amenity, the development of nuclear power involves risks. How slowly and cautiously those risks ought to be faced depends on the urgency of the need, and that urgency depends on the demand for and availability of energy supplies. I suggest that the availability of energy is a problem which cannot be considered on a national basis. We are part of the European Economic Community and we and that Community are part of a world community. A criticism that might possibly be made of the Royal Commission is that it approached the problem a little narrowly. This ought not to be done. The problem of energy supplies is a global one and it must be considered globally. It is perhaps surprising that a problem of such importance should have received so little and such poor consideration in the past. It is now being thought about more carefully. There is an international committee sitting under the chairmanship of Professor Carroll Wilson at MIT. It has already produced its first report and I believe that its final report is to be available in March next year. At the same time, the World Energy Conference which, with its membership of over 60 nations, has extremely good access to information from the developing world. It is doing a similar study which will extend further into the
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future. The Carroll Wilson study extends only to the year 2000, but the World Energy Conference study goes as far as the year 2020.
The Royal Commission report of course considers this question of energy availability, but I feel that it has considered it a little narrowly. The report does very little to quantify the problem. I have already said that the information that would enable quantification to be done is scarce and shaky, but such figures as exist suggest that the world's supply of oil will peak during the 1990s and that, after that decade, the supplies of oil will gradually diminish so that oil supplies will fall seriously short of unconstrained demand. The position in regard to gas is perhaps a little better, though not much better. Oil and gas provide between 60 and 70 per cent. of the world's energy, so, unless our present best guess figures are wildly wrong, the sources of two-thirds of the world's energy supply will be diminishing before the end of this century. That is a prospect which contrasts fairly harshly with what we have been used to over the last two or three decades when world energy consumption has been increasing at the rate of 5 per cent. per year. That is the rate of increase to which the world has become accustomed.
I am bound to say that I find it quite impossible to feel, as some people appear lightheartedly to feel, that the energy gap can be bridged by the use of renewable energy resources. I believe that it is worthwhile to spend a few minutes looking at those renewable resources. Hydropower is expected to supply about 6 per cent. of world needs by the end of this century. Tidal power, which is so often talked about, can only supply a tiny fraction of the world's requirements. There are probably less than a dozen sites in the world where the tidal range is sufficient to make tidal power economic. One of those is in our own Severn estuary, and if that was developed it would give us less than 2½ per cent. of the energy requirements of this country.
If one counts on wind power, we can perhaps get a picture by remembering that, in order to supply the electricity requirements of this country alone, one would need to build windmills with a sweptwing area of 200 square miles and that, in order to be effective, those windmills would have to be built upon open stretches

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of coastline or of uplands which are valuable as open spaces.
Solar energy is of course already used and has been used for many years in order to supply domestic heating. I am quite certain that this use will increase but, when we think about solar energy as a source of electric power, we should remember that before it becomes economic the capital cost must be reduced by at least one order of magnitude. In fact, on the basis of present-day figures,. it would have to be reduced by two orders of magnitude; that is, it would have to come down by a factor of 100.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, surely no one in this country is thinking of solar energy as a source of electrical power. Rather, they are thinking of it as a source of low grade heat for domestic heating, for example.
Lord HINTON of BANKSIDE: My Lords, I am not certain that the noble Lord is right in saying that nobody is thinking of it in that way. I myself would certainly think of it in that way and should do so for one good reason: the incidence of solar power in this country is about 40 per cent. of the incidence of solar power in countries with a clearer atmosphere and more sun. The inference is that electricity generated by solar power would cost at least twice as much in this country as it would in countries with a more favourable climate. Remembering that the prosperity of this country was built largely on cheap power, I very much doubt whether that prosperity can be rebuilt on energy developed from solar cells. I think that, with increasing fuel costs, the use of solar energy for domestic heating will increase but I believe that we should remember that this will only provide a comparatively small percentage of the total energy that is used in this country.
There are of course a few places in the world where geothermal energy can be used. In this country, the prospects are limited. It is true that from hot rocks in Cornwall one could get water at a temperature of 100/200 degrees Centigrade, but I do not know what one could do with water at that temperature except to warm the houses in Newquay, Penzance, Redruth and Camborne.
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I think that at present one ought to regard wave power as being only a sparkle in the eyes of the scientists and engineers. I would guess that, if by chance it proved practical in the future, it would then be as violently opposed by environmentalists as is nuclear power today. It would materially change the characteristics of a number of the most attractive coastlines.
So, within the critical period that we have to consider, I find it impossible to believe that renewable energy resources will give more than marginal relief. In addition, I cannot help feeling—and I say this with some regret—that conservation of energy will not avert the energy gap my fear is that conservation will be taken seriously only when real shortages start to hurt, and that will be too late for effective action to be taken.
I should like once more to emphasise the fact that we must consider the question of energy resources and demands globally. We cannot consider only the position in the industrialised countries of Europe and North America. We ought, I suggest, to remember that while Europe consumes about 3.5 tons of energy per capita per year in terms of oil equivalent—and the consumption in the United States of America is double that figure—the consumption in the developing countries is only about one-tenth of our consumption.
Having made all reasonable allowances, I think the difference between the energy consumption in the industrialised countries and in the Third World represents a difference in standards of living which I do not believe ought to be tolerated indefinitely and which I do not think will he tolerated indefinitely. On top of that, we ought to remember that the population of the Third World is increasing much more quickly than the population of industrialised countries; so, having taken all these things into consideration, I am hound to believe that a global energy gap at about the end of this century is inevitable. That gap can he alleviated—I do not think it can be avoided—by the conservation of fuel and the vigorous development of all new and renewable sources of energy, including nuclear power.
Within our time-scale, the availability of virgin uranium is so limited that in

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order to have nuclear power the world must have both thermal and fast breeder reactors. It is no use persuading our-selves that we can wait for the fusion reactor. That will not be ready to alleviate the gap of which I am speaking, and those environmentalists who persuade themselves that the fusion reactor is going to be free from nuclear risks ought to remember that although, with luck, it will not give rise to long-lived fission products, it may very well give rise to a tritium hazard.
The Royal Commission is right in saying that hazards can arise from nuclear power. Hazards arise from almost every one of those activities which aim to provide material amenities. What we should do is to weigh the risk of accident against the risk of a sudden decline in the standard of economic material amenity. Far be it from me to express any opinion which might be considered to be political, but I should have thought there were political as well as material risks arising from a sudden decline in living standards.
I feel that the report of the Royal Commission has failed to take as broad and global a view as it should have done, and that it has perhaps failed to strike a realistic balance between the risks which the world has to face. The Commission is right in criticising atomic energy organisations for being dilatory in devising safe methods of disposing of fission products. It is right in suggesting that great care is necessary in developing and building nuclear power plants; but it seems to me it is wrong—I feel inclined to say surprisingly wrong—in suggesting that it is the fast reactor which takes us into a plutonium economy. The world is already in a plutonium economy. Per unit of electricity generated, the thermal reactors already in use all over the world produce as much, if not more, plutonium as fast reactors with the same generating capacity would do.
I think that the Commission is wrong in suggesting that fast reactors are inherently more dangerous than thermal reactors. Fast reactors with a mixed plutonium and uranium fuel have an inbuilt nuclear stability; I suggest that the Commission is wrong if it thinks that a district hazard would arise from fire in the inactive sodium circuit. I believe
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the world must have nuclear power and that fast reactors must be a part of the world's nuclear programme because only a wisely integrated programme of thermal and fast reactors will enable us to use the world's supply of uranium economically. We ought not to squander those resources in the same way that the world's resources of fossil fuels have been squandered. Construction of fast and thermal reactors ought to go steadily forward. Only a steady, determined and continuous development of reactors by competent and uncomplicated organisations will ensure that the risks, to which the Commission rightly draws attention, are tolerable.
I found, I am afraid, that the report was not so much cautious—in matters such as this, proper caution is a virtue—but that it was perhaps rather lacking in balance, and that some of its paragraphs seems to he so over-cautious as to be timid and almost contradictory. But, having said all that, I think that the development of fast reactors will go ahead to supply the needs of the world. Other countries are perhaps accepting a different, possibly a better, balance of risks and, undeterred by this report, will go on to make fast reactors a commercial success, because they know that nuclear power is essential to the world.
I can only hope that the report will not be sadly damaging to the British nuclear industry. At one time we led the world in the development of fast reactors, just as at one time we led the world in the development of thermal reactors. In spite of recent setbacks to the prototype fast reactor at Dounreay, I believe that energetic action could again give us a world lead and that this lead would enable us to exercise a useful influence on safe reactor design throughout the world—a useful influence which I think we can claim to have exercised in the past. It would also help British industry. In Britain, where in recent years decision-making in the field of nuclear power has not been notably firm or unhesitating, I can only hope that the hesitancy of the Royal Commission's report will not so delay progress as to rob us of the success which is still within our reach.
1.38 p.m.
The Lord BISHOP of DURHAM: My Lords, it is a fearsome task to speak from these Benches after such a powerful speech

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delivered by someone who has unrivalled authority to speak on these matters. I am sure the whole House would wish me to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, on what he has said and on the way in which he has said it. I should like particularly to thank him for expanding the debate beyond the limits of the particular context of environmental pollution, with which inevitably the Royal Commission has to concern itself and about which I feel it is a little unhappy because it has to concern itself with that.
As I see it, the debate in which we are engaged this afternoon is of fundamental importance concerning the kind of society which we hope for in the future.
One passage in the report which has been indirectly referred to more than once, recognises a danger that the debate will he distorted. If I may, I will quote from it briefly, because Sir Brian Flowers, in his address to the Nuclear Energy Society, picked out this passage and then said that those who quoted him usually omitted the punch line, which is the last sentence. The report says in paragraph 499:
"It is important that the discussion should be well-informed and as far as possible dispassionate…. Nuclear power provides a dramatic focus for opposition in some countries to technological development and we have no doubt that some who attack it are primarily motivated by antipathy to the basic nature of industrial society, and see in nuclear power an opportunity to attack that society where it seems likely to be most vulnerable, in energy supply…. The environmentalist tends to see those in the industry as being so committed to furtherance of their technology as to be wilfully blind to its dangers to the world. Those within the industry … tend to see environmentalists as people opposed to all technology who are prepared to denigrate their work on the basis of drummed-up and nebulous fears of future catastrophes."
Then comes the punch line:
"The arguments of both deserve to he heard with greater mutual understanding."
And I would add that the general public also needs to be made aware that this is not just a technical debate about the balance of energy needs and environmental risks. Unless it is acknowledged to have ramifications for the whole of our social and political life, the temptation might be to hand it over to those with technical expertise to evaluate what are still, in many spheres, uncertain quantities.
I suspect that any evaluation of risks in this field is bound to be inconclusive. It is always possible, as has already been
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done, to play down the element of risk in nuclear technology by claiming that future advances in handling them will keep pace with nuclear expansion. Fifteen years is a long time in nuclear technology, as Windscale has recently reminded us. On the other side, it is equally possible to claim that it is always yesterday's hazards which have been mastered, never today's or tomorrow's. If the argument about future advances is pressed, I would urge those who press it to remember that it may apply just as forcibly to those alternative forms of energy which the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, has dismisssed so eloquently.
The blunt fact is that the resources have simply not been put into the investigation of those alternative forms that have already been put into the investigation of nuclear energy, and all that may be needed is a massive enough investment to enable those alternative forms to be looked at on a level with what the nuclear lobby advocates. The answer in this field, it seems to me, is that we simply do not know. But I believe that the people who are worried about nuclear risks have grounds for being more worried than those who watch steam engines exploding, simply because of the long-term nature of these risks. An explosion in a steam engine may he fearful and may be destructive, but its effects do not last for thousands of years. I would commend to your Lordships a safe working rule on the subject of accidents resulting from human fallibility. The rule states:
"Whatever is not impossible is, in the end, inevitable."
The wider debate, both on environmental risks and on long-term social implications, has already been taken up by the Churches, notably by the World Council of Churches, and I thought it might be of interest to your Lordships to say a brief word on what has been happening. The World Council of Churches commissioned a major study on nuclear energy in 1974, and sponsored an international hearing in Sweden in June 1975. This brought together nuclear and other scientists of many nationalities, together with politicians, theologians and Church leaders, and produced a balanced survey of the whole subject which has been widely commended, and which I am sorry not to see referred to in the Royal Commission's report. A selection of the

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preliminary papers and of the discussion has just been republished in Scotland under the title Facing up to Nuclear Power.
The general conclusions of this hearing in Sweden were very cautious:
"Our group cannot put forward categorical recommendations. It would not feel justified in either entirely rejecting, nor in wholeheartedly recommending, large-scale use of nuclear energy."
If that does not seem very helpful, at least it reflects the fact, as the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, has reminded us, that this is a world problem and that on a world scale there is not likely to be a consensus. The problems in this respect of Sweden, as compared with, say, Latin America, are totally different. Indeed, it is notable in this World Council report how strongly the representatives of Latin American countries emphasise their need for nuclear independence. The key word there, I believe, is "independence". They want to develop their own, even at the cost of making mistakes. It is also worth reminding ourselves that India began its nuclear programme as early as 1948, as one of its first gestures of scientific freedom.
The Churches in a number of individual countries have followed the lead given by the World Council of Churches. At the beginning of this year, the National Council of Churches in the United States suggested a moratorium on the develop-ment of the fast breeder reactor, but they then subsequently modified their position, saying that they were putting this forward as a stimulus for discussion rather than as a firm recommendation. The Church of Scotland has adopted broadly the same view. An influential group of theologians and scientists in West Germany has produced a nine-point programme, in which they set out the terms of a suggested moratorium on the development of the fast breeder reactor. Churches have been responsible for initiating public debates in New Zealand, in Denmark and in Argentina, and last week the British Council of Churches arranged a two-day public hearing in London. I mention this to illustrate my point that public debate on the broad social and ethical issues is both possible and desirable, and, at least in the Churches, there is a growing awareness that the whole subject ought not to be left to the professionals.
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I think we can see part of the reason for this in the words of an Indian scientist:
"Scratch any piece of technology and you will find the values and aims of a society it was designed to serve. For technology is like genetic material. It carries with it the code of the society which conceived it."
This is why the choice of technology is such a crucial decision in the developing countries today. The kind of society and the kind of environment which they will create, depend to a large extent on what technology they choose for the job of development. What is true of technology as a whole is surely even more true of nuclear technology, because ultimately it concerns not a fringe benefit but the resource on which the whole of an industrial society depends. The point is that if this resource in turn depends upon a highly advanced technology, then the implications for this are felt right down the technological ladder.
A society which is dependent upon nuclear energy—I am not speaking now simply of Britain but of the developing countries which are looking for their way forward into the kind of life which we enjoy—must inevitably be an advanced technological society, with all that that entails in terms of social organisation, the use of other resources, besides those of energy, and the whole gamut of pollution problems: not just those directly resulting from the use of nuclear energy. When this is viewed on a world scale, the implications, certainly to some, are (I think rightly) alarming. Admittedly, the economic implications of not pressing ahead with nuclear development are also alarming, and our difficulties are compounded by the fact that whatever is decided in the next few years is going to have immensely long-term consequences.
My own belief is that despite all the risks, we ought to delay and make quite sure that we know what the alternatives are before committing ourselves further to an expanded nuclear programme. Once we enter upon that programme, the logic of events is that it will gradually accumulate uncontrollable momentum. I must admit that, influencing this belief that we ought to delay, is a general feeling that the developed nations must begin to think in terms of technological restraint. This is not a question of going back to the Dark Ages or throwing away all the things which we possess. It is a question of

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taking our foot off the accelerator, in that we simply cannot go on with our present accelerating technological expansion.
I take the point made by the Royal Commission, that opposition to nuclear energy can provide a dramatic focus for opposition to technological development, but I have in mind something much less extreme than have some of the environmental lobbyists. I am not what the Americans now rather nicely call a "tawny pipiteer", but there is a time to say, No. Christian concern, as expressed through the Churches in many nations, seems to he pointing to the hope of the possibility—I put it no more firmly than that—that the "No" can be taken seriously. If it were taken seriously on this particular issue, it could set in motion a process of thinking about the style and basis of our society which could in the long run lead to a saner kind of World.

WINDSCALE
1.53 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, if your Lordships will forgive me for interrupting the debate for a moment, I am sure the House would like to know that a Statement is being made in another place this after-noon on Windscale. My noble friend Lady Birk will, with the leave of the House, repeat this Statement at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m.

NUCLEAR POWER AND THE ENVIRONMENT
1.54 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Lord ALDINGTON: My Lords, I rise to continue the debate. I should like to assure the right reverend Prelate that I will do my best to follow his injunction, and the injunction in the report, that we should seek better to understand each other and that we should do so in a dispassionate way. If I appear to err, it might be because I spent last night in an aeroplane flying from New York and I am a little short of sleep.
The noble Baroness, Lady White, said that a galaxy of scientists and engineers
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was to speak to your Lordships in this debate. I am not one of those; but I have an interest to declare, in that I am honoured to be the Chairman of the National Nuclear Corporation. That is the instrument of this Government and their predecessor, with shares held jointly by Government and industry, which has been chosen to be responsible for the design and construction of nuclear power stations. Although I am that chairman, I shall be speaking personally and I do not bind any of my colleagues, or the Corporation, or its subsidiary, the Nuclear Power Company. I can speak personally because I have had a long span of interest in nuclear power, starting in the days when I was Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Supply from 1951 to 1954. For me, at any rate, it is interesting to remember that it was in 1953 that we announced in the other place the start of the Dounreay project.
I suppose that those of us who are concerned with nuclear power may be said to have some prejudice in favour of nuclear power and some prejudice against the environmentalists. I hope that your Lordships will accept from me that I try not to have that prejudice. I am every hit as much a human being as any of your Lordships or, indeed, as any of the right reverend Prelates. I have a strong prejudice in favour of life and of good health and a good environment, not only for ourselves but also for future generations. Knowing them as I do, I am certain that is true also of my noble friend, if I may call him so, Lord Sherfield, who started this debate with such an excellent speech, and of the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, who has such massive authority and who spoke to us in such a very persuasive and convincing way.
I agree at once that people have a right to have the risks and hazards explained to them in the way in which that is done in this very lucid and comprehensive report. I do not think I am so critical about the report as was the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, in his speech. I found the report balanced and clear. I found also that it set out with as much force the risks and hazards of not having nuclear power as it did the risks and hazards attached to having nuclear power. However, I should like to stress to your Lordships what my

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noble friend Lord Sherfield said, that because it is a balanced report it is very important that sentences and paragraphs should not be taken out of their context and used for a case which the Com-missioners did not make. I think that that has been done outside this House but not, happily, here today.
The importance of avoiding emotion and passion is as great, I think, as the importance of avoiding unbalanced presentations while the debate, which I fear will last longer in our country than the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, would like, proceeds. I very much hope that the media, particularly the British Broadcasting Corporation, will not repeat unbalanced presentations like a recent one in "Panorama".
I should like to direct my remarks, and I hope they will be quite short, first to the plutonium argument, secondly to the policy on nuclear fission power, with particular reference to Recommandation 45, and, last, to the fast breeder, but before I come to those three points there are some general considerations which I will mention, although they have been stressed in several speeches. We cannot under-stand the problems attaching to nuclear power, whether they be development, waste, environmental or whatever, or the hazards of not having the nuclear option, unless we look at the whole matter in its full international as well as national context. The noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, made the point, as also did the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, both of them powerfully.
The second general consideration is that the progress in nuclear power, not only in this country but outside, in these last 25 years has been remarkable by any standards, and despite what the right reverend Prelate said there is no reason to suppose that the advances towards perfection will not continue at as fast a pace in the next quarter century. The report necessarily stresses points where more work is needed to provide proper conditions for a larger programme, in waste, in safeguards and in other matters.
For those who cast doubt upon the ability of the industry and technology and the scientists to make further progress, I think it is as well to remember that they, too, are human beings and they are
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more closely concerned than any of us, not only with the success of what they are trying to do but with the safety of every-thing they design and help to produce. This most valuable corps d'é lite of scientists and engineers and others that has been created during the last 20 years by people like the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and others of your Lordships who are not here today, shares with the rest of us the absolute need to provide safety; and, as I have said, they have an even greater urgency and personal concern because they are—or may be—closely connected in their daily life with nuclear power. They also know more about the facts which affect the risks and hazards, but it is unhappily true that neither in the United States of America nor here have their voices been able to reach the public as easily or as forcefully as have the voices of others.
I now come, shortly, to some of the plutonium arguments. I should first like to ask the question: Is not the phrase "the plutonium economy" rather an emotive phrase that might prevent discussion being quite as dispassionate as the report intends it to be? Of course plutonium is nasty and potentially lethal to communities as well as to individuals, but so, as the report reminds us, is chlorine, and so—as others of your Lordships will know—are a lot of other elements and poisons. The arguments in Chapter VII of the report are all important arguments but they seem to me to be heavily influenced by the programme that is set out in Table 14. It is a programme for the construction of nuclear power stations in this country put before the Commission, I think, by the Atomic Energy Authority in relation to a question about how much waste products they would have to deal with. The programme in that table includes 30,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 1990 and 104,000 by the end of the century, of which it is thought 33,000 would be from fast reactors.
I cannot believe that such a programme is either possible or probable, either in the requirement or in the achievement. For my own part, I would not expect there to be more than one or two fast reactors operating in this country in this century. Nevertheless, the arguments in the report must be taken seriously, even though it is right to make the point that if they are

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wrong about the programme, they are wrong about the time-scale in which the problems that exist can—and I am sure will—be solved.
Though I say that the argument should be taken seriously, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has said I hope that we shall not be too much put out by the fear of sabotage and terrorism as being things which would happen only with—or the better with—a large nuclear power programme. A saboteur has easier targets (and as damaging) than a nuclear power plant or even a reprocessing plant. As I heard the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, describe how a terrorist might take a piece of explosive and blow up a nuclear power station I wondered whether he really knows how thick the concrete is round these nuclear power stations and how impossible it was during the last World War by the very biggest bombs to break through what was, I believe, less strong concrete covering the submarine bases. So I think we can make too much of some of that argument. I also have to point out that terrorists can find more immediately effective poisons than plutonium, if they want to, and if they really want to get bomb material they would not be deprived of the chance of so doing by our not having a nuclear power programme, or even having a smaller one. Nevertheless, of course, security is important and security of plutonium in transit is obviously important, but I am told by experts that at least in that instance the terrorist can be dissuaded from stealing the plutonium, or if he does steal it he can be effectively prevented from making use of it it the plutonium is only sent in transit in fuel form and is slightly radioactivised. Indeed, the report itself makes that point.
I now come to recommendation No.45 about the nuclear power plant policy. As has been said, the report does not advocate a non-nuclear strategy. Indeed, in a speech on the 2nd December to which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, referred, Sir Brian Flowers advocated the keeping in being of the nuclear industry—and I quote—"at the lowest level that is viable", and the noble Baroness, Lady White, in what I thought was a very fair and interesting and pleasant speech, made the same point. Sir Brian Flowers went on to define this lowest level as ordering one
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thermal station every two to three years. I look at the problem a little differently and I think rather more positively but I agree that there has to be a minimum ordering programme. Although there is no present need for any more power stations in England and Wales and no need for orders for any large nuclear programme until, say, 1984 at the earliest, there may be a need for a large programme then. The simple fact is that we have no proven ability to produce up-to-date, proven types of reactor in series. There is no proven nuclear industry suitable yet for a large programme. It would take time for both of these things to be secured. Indeed, we still have to reach a decision about the system to be adopted as the best system for the 1990s—which is what it is all about: not the best system for the 1970s.
Here I must refer again to the international point and take up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, about the outside world and the Third World. I would think that certainly British industry shares this view with me. We should be able to play our part in building nuclear power stations overseas. We cannot do that at present, and certainly cannot do that if we do not have a programme at home. It may interest your Lordships to be reminded that the CPRS in their recent report on the power plant industry have noted that one of the main reasons for low exports by that industry is the failure of the industry to have a capability for taking turnkey nuclear power contracts. Therefore, a number of things need to be done to ensure that we have a viable nuclear industry, and to ensure that the nuclear power option really is there. I join with the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, in calling for an unequivocal commitment to nuclear power, at least as far as that. Time is important because, first, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, said, in all energy production there is a long lead time, and particularly is that true of nuclear power. Now is the time to seek to prepare for the 'nineties, but now is not the time to seek to postpone action out of fear of having too many nuclear power stations in 50 years' time.
My Lords, finally I come to the fast breeder. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, saying to your Lord-ships that the fast reactor is not inherently

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more dangerous than the thermal reactor. I know that to be his view. I think there are few who are entitled to express such a view with more authority. The importance of having the fast reactor in the system is well set out in the report, and I need not refer to it again. However, I do wish to refer to the fear expressed by the Royal Commission at paragraph 502, that because of the importance of the fast reactor we may be tempted to accept a quantitatively different increment in risk. Of course, that must mean not only ourselves, but the whole international world where the fast reactors are being developed. I must express my view to your Lordships that nothing is less likely with the men I know who design and operate nuclear reactors. They will not downgrade the element of risk just because of the importance of a particular type of reactor. The report, and also one or two of your Lordships, have expressed the view that there would be advantages in delaying the development of the commercial fast reactor, that is, the large one to follow the PFR now in operation at Dounreay. But such delay brings risks with it also.
I must say to your Lordships that to delay development of the CFR here will endanger the maintenance of the expert teams built up over the last 10 to 15 years. It would do something more; it would prevent us from recruiting new young men who will be needed very much in the 'nineties. Many of the men now at the head of design and construction and of research and development in the whole nuclear industry are men of an age who will have retired by the 'nineties when this work will be of such importance. But to delay will also endanger the chance of international collaboration, particularly collaboration with our European partners. It is by international collaboration that we shall be able to husband resources, which noble Lords have rightly asked us to do, in order that other options can be examined, and in order that conservation can be pushed ahead. So I hope that there will be no such delay.
Nevertheless I have already said that I do not expect the CFR to be built in this country in the near future. I do not expect more than one, or possibly two, to be operating before the end of the century. Such a programme combined with international collaboration would
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keep the team in being and would keep the nuclear operation viable. Those are the remarks I wished to make. I felt that I had a duty to put those points in front of your Lordships. My Lords, in closing, may I say again that, in my view, the report gives a backcloth for a national debate which I think will last for a number of years. However, I hope the Government will ensure that during that time of debate a nuclear power capability for the 'nineties and beyond is created and encouraged.
2.16 p.m.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, five years before I was born, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium. At that time it was looked upon, and indeed continued to be looked upon, as a scientific curiosity, as a bit of a toy, as a means of painting the hands of watches so as to make them visible at night, and for all sorts of purposes like that. At that time, the number of chemical elements known was something like 75. Today, I am wearing a tie which has upon it 103 of the known chemical elements. Of those, 11 are the transuranic elements, the ones which are artificially made by man. None of them existed in this world before—at any rate, not since the early days, and plutonium is one of those. I am speaking now not of myself but of scientists, who took very great risks.
A friend of mine works in the Curie Institute in Paris. When some alterations were being done, they found that under the floor of my friend's laboratory was some radium left from the time when the Curies had been working there. He got immensely scared. They investigated and found that the radium had obviously been there for a long time. My friend's desk had been right over where this material was, and he had been subjected to radiation for many years. But he survived all right. He is still alive, and this was 15 or 20 years ago.
I am not saying that in order to show how courageous scientists were. I am trying to point out that risks have been taken all the time; risks have been taken throughout the whole of our existence. In fact, man really is a very precarious animal. He lives all the time only because the forces of nature do not happen to explode devastatingly in his own particular region. When there is an

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earthquake in Turkey it does far more damage than any known effect by man, with the exception of the deliberate dropping of an atomic bomb. The accidents that have taken place have always been trivial compared with the forces of nature. A hurricane can do far more damage than anything we can think of doing. That does not, of course, mean that we neglect to pay attention to all those problems that arise from the activities of man, but I do think it is important for us to remember how trivial man is in comparison with the forces of nature. Even when he thinks he has domination over the forces of nature he still is very much subject to the forces of nature.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, gave us today one of the most remarkable analyses of the whole situation. In fact I suppose I really ought not to speak now, because Lord Hinton said everything that there was to be said; so anything I say is merely a frill, merely an elaboration of what he said, because he said it perfectly. He showed that when we are talking about nuclear energy in this country, or indeed in the whole of the developed world, we are being extraordinarily arrogant, because we are neglecting the far greater part of the world which is undeveloped. if we imagine that they are going to say "Of course, we are not going to have any growth at all, we shall continue to remain on an almost subhuman standard in order that you should be safe from any possible nuclear effects", I am afraid that we are deceiving ourselves. If one says that they do not know already, both India and Pakistan have already got facilities; they have been presented with these. Does one imagine that they are going to refuse to carry out development? Then, as Lord Hinton rightly pointed out, the ordinary thermal reactor is at least as dangerous as the fast breeder reactor, but with one enormous disadvantage, and that is that it is using up uranium at such a rate that there are not going to he the resources by the end of this century to fuel all the generators which will he put up. In other words, it is nonsense to say that we can continue with the present programme. It is just absurd. It makes no sense at all. Therefore, we have to think of going on further. What we do obviously has to be considered. I have a feeling that perhaps
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Lord Hinton, if he was still chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, would probably, when the demise of the steam generating heavy water reactor was announced in The Times, have put in a little notice "No flowers by request". I think that he would probably feel that it was not wise for us to say much more about that.
But, my Lords, when we are discussing what we do with regard to the next step forward it is no use saying that we are going to jump forward to fusion. We hope we will go forward to fusion, but we have not yet got even a bench model fusion reactor working. All we have got is a reasonable indication that the fusion process will work; but the temperature we require is of the order of 50 to 100 million degrees and we have not yet had temperatures above 10 million degrees. So all we have is an indication that it may work. We are back with the fusion reactor in the position that Lord Rutherford was in in the Cavendish Laboratory when he first discovered that the atom could be split. We are nowhere near the point where we can even say that we know we can make it work. We have a good idea that it is possible. if we solve the problems within 30 or 40 years we shall be extraordinarily lucky. There-fore, we have to say that it is ruled out for this century. So far as this century is concerned, we will not have a working fusion reactor actually supplying energy for our main electricity supplies. I am prepared to make that bet, and I will stay alive in order to prove it.
With regard to the fast breeder reactor, the position is quite different. We know it will work. What we do not know yet are all the problems concerned with it. I have been rather fortunate, because I was over in America last month and I was speaking to Mr. Charles Rose, the Congressman, who happened to be vice-chairman of the Committee of which I was chairman. I asked him if he had any information he could give me. After I left America this Report was presented to Congress. It is dated 29th November. It is from the Comptroller-General of the United States, entitled, Considerations for Commercialising the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor This is the latest American report.
In this report they start by outlining the problems, and the problems are just

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the same for them as for us, except for one point. The problems as they put them down are as follows. One, what will be the principal characteristics of a com-mercial breeder reactor industry? Two, what supporting facilities and industry would be required to bring it into being and thereafter to support it? Three, when is a demonstration needed of the required technologies on a scale sufficient to warrant the commitments of those institutions whose support is essential to breeder reactor commercialisation? Four, what factors are likely to influence the timing and rate of commercial breeder reactor introduction and proliferation? The whole of the report deals with these points.
I sent the Report to Professor Bain-bridge at the University of Newcastle, who happens to be the adviser to Sub-Committee F of your Lordships' Scrutiny Committee. and he has sent me a number of comments on it. These are extremely interesting and very important for us. He says to begin with that the questions set out are equally pertinent for Britain, but he makes the point that the Americans are under no pressure to produce a fast breeder reactor, for two reasons: one, their nuclear industry is already over-committed on making the present type of reactor, and they have run into considerable technical difficulties; consequently they are rather behind schedule on producing them. Therefore, they are not in the least anxious at the moment to produce a fast breeder reactor.
Secondly, they are confident that they have got all the oil and coal that they want, even if they have to buy it, over the whole of this century, and they are still today, as anyone can see by going to America, very wasteful of their energy resources. So they are not at the moment worried about it. But, despite that, in this report there is this statement:
"The liquid metal fast breeder reactor has been accorded highest priority among energy supply technologies that hold long-term promise. This ranking is accompanied by the highest Federal outlay to date for any single energy research development system".
Although the Americans do not think that they have to produce a fast breeder reactor at once, they are pumping more money into it than they are into any other field of energy research, so that one can
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see that the Americans are not ignoring this field. What is their programme? Their programme essentially is that they propose that there should be a commitment to start a commercial fast breeder reactor in the early to mid 1980s. They reckon that it takes a long time to build one. In fact, their estimates are very interesting. They say that it would take 13 years to build a reactor; that it would take 10 years to build a fuel fabrication facility; it would take 12 years for a plutonium reprocessing facility, and 11 years for a radioactive waste disposal facility.
Professor Bainbridge tells me that the Americans in this field of fast breeder work are probably technically at least five years behind us, and that there is every probability, if we were to set out to do the same thing, that we would have a clear five years' advantage in building anything of this sort. We are faced with the position that we have no natural resources of uranium; all our uranium is imported. So far as America is concerned, they have natural resources; we have none. Consequently, every single ordinary thermal reactor we are using is using up uranium which has to be imported. The plutonium part of it can at the moment be used only for atom bombs. If, of course, some people would say,."We would much rather have atom bombs than fast breeder reactors", I can only retort, chacun a son goat It seems to me an extraordinary choice for us to have.
I was rather surprised that from the Liberal Benches we were told that we could do without this sort of thing. We cannot do without plutonium, as the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, said. It really is extraordinary to talk about a plutonium economy. We are in a plutonium economy. Plutonium is being produced all the time. The fast breeder reactor is a means of using that plutonium. It is a means of doing the job more efficiently; of making certain that we are able, with our limited amount of uranium, to go ahead. No one imagines that this is the end. One would hope that the fast breeder reactor would see us out through the end of this century into the beginning of the next century; that by then we may hope that fusion will come along. We may hope that all the other methods that are talked about may play their part; but, as

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the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, said, one cannot imagine that, however much all these other methods contribute, they will solve our energy problems.
I would say that obviously we have to pay the most careful attention, as the Royal Commission's report rightly asks us to do, to all the dangers; to look at everything with the greatest care. This is absolutely essential. But are we going to say that, because we do not yet know everything, therefore we condemn posterity to a lower standard of living, to less energy? If we do we are quite entitled to do it; but let us not, for heaven's sake, say how virtuous we are. Let us not say that in order to save them from one evil we condemn them to another, the one being uncertain, the other being dead certain.
It seems to me that the report of the Royal Commission is invaluable as a warning to us, as a guide, as advice; but that if, because of it, we say we do not build fast breeder reactors, then I would say that we are really suffering from the most extraordinary delusion. May I, in concluding, ask your Lordships' forgiveness if I do not stay to the end. I have a commitment which arises from the fact that the daughter of my niece is being christened this afternoon.
2.35 p.m.
Lord TEDDER: My Lords, I must begin on the opposite note to the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones. I must ask your Lordships to accept my apologies and ask for your indulgence because I am afraid that, owing to transportation difficulties, I was not here at the beginning of the debate. I apologise particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield. I should like to express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for initiating this debate, and also to Sir Brian Flowers and his colleagues for what to me is an almost racy document. It is one of the rare occasions on which I have picked up a Command Paper and found it so easy and interesting to read.
There has been much discussion recently about replacing your Lordships' House by some alternative Second Chamber. There have been suggestions that the Second Chamber was to consist of political Peers in the same proportion as Members
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of the House of Commons. There were, in addition, to be Life Peers. I sincerely hope that if a new Chamber is created, Life Peers will be chosen for their distinction and experience in public affairs, the world of commerce, the trade unions and the scientific community. I also hope that, unlike the all-Party proposals, those Life Peers will have the right to vote, and that the Second Chamber will retain the power to delay but not permanently frustrate measures from the other place. The reason that I mention this is that we are now debating a highly technical and complex subject, and although there are more scientists in your Lordships' House than there are in the other place, none the less there are barely enough to make sure that all aspects of this extremely complex subject are going to be discussed.
Today we are discussing problems which involve physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, engineers, to name but a few, and although many noble Lords with scientific experience have spoken and are going to speak, I think I am one of the very few Members of your Lordships' House who daily spend a large part of their time in a laboratory. But I must add at once that, like the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones, I am a chemist and not a physicist. In so far as I can speak with authority at all, it must be on the chemical aspects of pollution and energy.
Since what I want to say is almost wholly critical of plans for further development of nuclear power, either by fission or by fusion, let me make it clear at once that I am not opposed to big science. I sincerely believe that we should continue to support high energy physics with a view to elucidating the structure of the atomic nucleus, just as we should continue to explore space. Man has always felt the irresistible urge to explore the longest rivers, to climb the highest mountains, to reach the Poles, and so man has continued to explore the planets and to investigate the fine details of the structure of matter. But what we are concerned with today is not science developed simply for curiosity, important though that is, but customer contract science, or project orientated science, which will lead mankind to permanent sources of energy. I am absolutely convinced that our primary source of energy must be what it has always been, the sun. Although I accept that the wind and waves, which come

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from the sun anyway, may in certain circumstances he important sources of power, the really important source will be, as it always has been, the conversion of solar electromagnetic radiation into fuels by photochemical processes.
All the fossil fuels we have and use—from wood to peat, to coal, to oil—were formed by photochemical processes utilising sunlight to convert the carbon dioxide in the air and water into complex carbon substances. The total energy we release by the combustion of fossil fuels is infinitesimally small compared with the amount of electro-magnetic radiation which reaches the surface of the globe from the sun. There are two main ways in which solar energy can be utilised. The first is the direct conversion of solar radiation into either heat or electricity and the second is to use electro-magnetic radiation to produce chemical transformations leading to fuels, which can subsequently he burnt releasing the energy stored by chemical syntheses. It is the second use of solar energy that I wish to bring to your Lordships' attention.
There are two feasible processes. The simplest is the direct decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen and the subsequent use of the hydrogen as a fuel. A more sophisticated process would involve the photochemical transformation of carbon dioxide and water into formaldehyde or methanol and oxygen. Methanol would in this case be the fuel and clearly it would be more convenient than hydrogen. The important point about either of these processes is that they would have virtually no effect whatever on the environment. Sunlight would be used to convert water or water and carbon dioxide into a fuel which would then be burnt to give back water or water and carbon dioxide. This is not some farflung remote idea but is the very process which has been going on ever since life became well established on this planet.
The simplest process would be to grow green algae and extract them from water, dry them and burn the resulting powder. This would not be a very efficient process, and I gather there are numerous technical difficulties, and although green plants have always converted water and carbon dioxide from the air into potential sources of fuel, the very complexity of life means
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that much of the solar energy would have to he used in the preparation of highly complex chemical systems which would be unnecessary in any system devised simply for the photochemical synthesis of fuel.
I will give some figures to show that this is not a wild pipe-dream but a really practical proposition. If we assume that our solar factory is no better than 10 per cent. efficient, we should need only 360 miles square—that is perhaps cheating and I should put it the correct way round —or 125,000 square miles of the Sahara Desert to collect enough energy to supply the world needs of energy at the present time. The great natural deserts of the world, where the cloud cover is minimal, are also places where there is unlikely to he any great demand for development of the land, and as the needs of the solar factory would be so minute in space compared to the total desert space avail-able, there is no need to worry about possible environmental effects; I have emphasised that there is really no environ-mental effect except the factory.
To summarise, as the report before us shows, nuclear power brings with it many dangers to the environment and to the political stability of the world. I can think of nothing more shameful than the way in which this country, the United States and France have vied with each other in trying to sell nuclear technology and power plants, and by so doing have proliferated the capability to manufacture atomic weapons. I have been told that North Sea oil will have to flow for more than seven years before the cost of developing the oil will have been met. It seems to me that the cost of developing nuclear power has already reached the stage, rather like Concorde, when the development costs will rise more rapidly than the value of the energy produced.
According to the report, the annual expenditure by the Atomic Energy Authority on nuclear fission research and development amounts to about £80 million a year, compared with less than £500,000 currently spent on other sources, of which solar energy is simply one. I am not suggesting that there should be an immediate abandonment of all research and development on nuclear power, but I am suggesting that a transfer of sums even

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on a very small scale from nuclear fission research to photochemical research should be contemplated.
In paragraph 515, the Commission support the suggestion that there is need for a high level independent body to provide advice on energy strategy taking account of economic, social, technical and environmental considerations. The Commission go on to add that the study of nuclear power has made them aware of the need for an authoritative exposition of the implications of the different policies that might be adopted on energy supply. I am convinced that the Commission is right and that such a body should be set up, but I am also convinced that they will find that there are viable alternatives to nuclear power which are cheaper and which totally avoid the serious environmental problems associated with nuclear power. I am suggesting that perhaps Mother Nature was right all along. We must seek to use sunlight to promote photochemical reactions which lead to fuels. These fuels can be burnt at our leisure and yet their combustion will return to the atmosphere only the very chemicals we have taken from it in our photosynthesis.
2.47 p.m.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, in his contribution today, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said, if I understood him correctly, that he thought the debate about the exploitation of nuclear energy should now enter the democratic process. What-ever the constitution of your Lordships' House may be, I suggest that this debate shows that it has already done so. The correspondence in The Times and other newspapers and weekly scientific journals indicates the same thing. We therefore have to thank not only the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for having initiated the debate but the Royal Commission for having produced a Report which has sparked off so much controversy. and indeed the Commission in its Report indicated that it was likely to stimulate controversy.
The noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, in a brilliant speech, suggested that the terms of reference of the Royal Commission, which he read out, had been interpreted a little too narrowly. On the other hand, the Royal Commission
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wondered whether it had strayed beyond the strict terms laid down for it. I know those terms of reference because—I can say this because Sir Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister of the day, records it in his book—I was one of those responsible for suggesting that there should be such a Commission. He also gives me credit for something I did not do, which was the background work for the Department of the Environment, which was not the Department of the Environment as we know it today.
I am certain that the Royal Commission has exceeded its terms of reference. A good chairman and a good committee will often do that and it is a good practice. But there should be a condition—it should do so with competence. Lord Hinton criticised many aspects of the Report, and I suggest that one should not mince one's words here. The Press has described it as a report which means all things to all men. That is perfectly true; one can take any quotation one likes from the report. But the overwhelming impression that has remained—an impression which. I fear, the noble Baroness, Lady White, did not dispel from my mind in her address, and an impression to which Lord Avebury added in his speech—is that nuclear power is too dangerous in itself and in the long term hardly acceptable as an option—an option which we need to keep open, as Lord Hinton indicated—because of its environmental, social and political consequences. May I say straight away that on this point I side absolutely with the noble Lords, Lord Hinton and Lord Wynne-Jones? I believe that we can rely on the competence and experience of the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, in this field as much as—dare I say it and with great respect?—upon that of any member of the Royal Commission.
The report is also inconsistent in itself. It is not fair to itself. On page 191, paragraph 498, we read that the report is a complete account of the problem. When it comes to reactor safety, however, we are told on page 113, paragraph 282. that the Commission has not investigated the matter deeply. On page 4, paragraph 10, we are informed that inquiry would involve itself in matters beyond the competence of the Commission. On page 5, paragraph 14—and the noble Baroness, Lady White, referred to this point—we are told that the Commission

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had to educate itself on the matters concerned. I feel that we have a right to ask whether it succeeded in its task. If I may quote, as did the noble Baroness, Lady White, from the report, it also tells us that the Commission,
"has the duty to be the guardians of the future environment".
So have all of us, my Lords. The Commission has no monopoly of noble sentiment. We are concerned with this problem. We in your Lordships' House and the Members of Parliament in another place are also concerned with this matter. We all recognise that the exploitation of nuclear power is hazardous and that it demands the greatest care. This is no new discovery. The record of the industry is, so far, not short of miraculous. I want to emphasise those words.
But it is not true that we have always recognised the hazards. Those of your Lordships who may have read the memoirs of the late Lord Attlee may recall the passage in which he says that, when he had to endorse the suggestion put at the Potsdam Conference that nuclear weapons should be used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he did so in total ignorance of the fact they were dealing with anything other than bigger bangs. He says that it was not only he who was ignorant. President Truman and the previous Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Sir John Anderson, who was in charge of the project, were ignorant, he says, and he goes on to add:
"So, I believe, were the scientists, unless they deliberately did not tell us."
I happen to know that the scientists were then not concerned with these hazards. Those few scientists who were in the know and who did not want to see nuclear power exploited in that particular way, were concerned with the vistas of destruction which would be opened up, not with any of the dangers about which we are now talking. We therefore have to ask ourselves whether, in the realisation that we have to use the option of nuclear power as the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, indicated, we can at the same time guard against the hazards. Also, we must see the problem in global terms, not just in terms that apply to this country. I do not know who it was who emphasised in the course of the debate that we should
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be failing in our duty if we did not pay attention to the energy needs of the world as a whole. No figures that I have ever seen suggest that we can dispense with nuclear power. We must also look at the problem in terms of those resources of energy other than nuclear power that can he used and of such new research as the noble Lord, Lord Tedder, has just referred to and also in terms of the social, economic and political factors involved.
Clearly, accidents can happen. The human factor cannot be guarded against, as the noble Baroness, Lady White, said. We are told on page 113, paragraph 284, of the report that—and this is an interesting quotation—
"it is a common experience … that incredible things do happen no matter how surprising [they may seem]".
I read that sentence more than once and asked myself how it was to be construed. I put it round this way:
"If it is common experience then the things that happen are surely credible".
Or are we to construe the sentence to mean that it is an uncommon experience for credible things to happen? There is magic in that sentence. It is a marvellous piece of logic.
I am neither a nuclear scientist nor a nuclear engineer, nor have I the privilege, like the noble Lord, Lord Tedder, of still working in a laboratory. But I am a scientist and I read the report closely as a scientist. I have also had the opportunity of discussing these matters in the United States, from which I returned only yesterday, with members of two major committees which are looking into the matter and which will shortly be reporting. One launched by the Ford Foundation is carrying out a much more extensive study than has ever been attempted before. The second is being carried out by the National Academy of Sciences. The worksheets are as voluminous as the report we are considering today.
This report goes to great length and in great detail into the theoretical principles of safety analysis, but nowhere, when discussing reactor safety, does it refer to the fact that we already have 200 years of reactor experience upon which to base ourselves. Nowhere, although there is a reference to the fact that the Commission had not been able to consider military

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matters, is there any reference—and there is no secret information in this—to the fact that over the past 20 years, there has been a minimum of 250 vessels at sea powered by nuclear reactors. The men in those ships are exposed to 100 per cent. risk, not a tailing-off risk, and there has been no accident.
If ever a field of engineering had been provided with prototype experience, I would say that it was this one of nuclear engineering. So far, nuclear engineers have definitely proved themselves competent for the task that they set themselves. If only the noble Lord, Lord Hilton, had been able to tell us about some of the magnificent work done by our own Atomic Energy Authority in its early years, your Lordships would be surprised at how much was achieved by so few.
Some peripheral parts of the report which go beyond the terms of reference are somewhat naive. Here I am speaking about a field where I have had to exercise myself in my previous official capacities. I find the references to sabotage and the making of nuclear bombs very odd. I should like to know whether any members of the Royal Commission would be able to steal a little plutonium—say 2 kilograms—and go and make a little nuclear weapon. Another piece of military science fiction is the suggestion that nuclear power plants would be prime targets in a third world war. The noble Baroness, Lady White, reminded us of the phrase, in the report. My Lords, if nuclear power stations were ever to be prime targets in a new war, we should have no need to worry: nobody would be able either to write and print the next edition of Hansard. It is a totally idle argument, brought in as the sort of thing that is discussed by people who do not know or have never been through a proper scenario of a Third World War.
I should have liked to see different questions put in the report which we are discussing. The kind of question I should think would be worth putting and answering is: Can high pressure tubing be made to withstand these temperatures at these pressures? We know—the American newspapers were full of the fact last week—that there have been leaks from the welds in the pipeline from the North-West part of the American conti
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nent. But I also happen to know that in the past three years a new pipe, a new alloy, has been devised which is not brittle at any of the temperatures which had to be dealt with up in Alaska. It is a great pity that that pipe was not available at the start. I was also told on the best authority that other Governments are already very interested in this pipe. But technology moves fast. I should have liked the Commission to ask where the better valves could be made, and for pressure vessel arguments to be settled by the Royal Commission as it is claimed it had made a complete inquiry. I should have liked it to go properly into the vitrification process for the disposal of waste and to have told us where those people who are working on the subject are being —I was about to say defective in their operations; that is to say, not as urgent, to use the word used by the noble Baroness, Lady White, in her speech. Those are the kind of questions that I should have liked answered—
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, why does the noble Lord think that the Royal Commission should have gone into pressure vessel safety when the subject has just been dealt with exhaustively by some other authority?
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord. I did not quite hear his question.
Lord AVEBURY: Why does the noble Lord think that the Royal Commission should have gone into the subject of pressure vessel safety when the subject has just been dealt with exhaustively by another authority?
Lord ZUCKERMAN: For the reason that I was taught as an adviser in Government not to criticise unless I can put forward better suggestions than the points which I am criticising.
Despite all I have said, I hope that the recommendations of the report will be fully studied by Government. But there are some general comments that I should like to make arising from the point put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. The first is that it is far easier to generate fear in people's minds and hearts than it is to spread confidence. The word "nuclear" now spells disaster in the same

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way as the term "genetic engineering" is likely to do. There have been others like them before. It is easier—and here I regret very much one or two of the things said by the noble Baroness, Lady White—to deprecate than to praise official advisers. I do not remember all of the noble Baroness's remarks, but the Commission's official witnesses were accused of having rigid, closed minds, and so on. It is only too easy to criticise advisers in technical fields. Official advisers very rarely get blamed for policy mistakes, but when it comes to drugs, or agrochemicals, or nuclear matters, one turns immediately on an adviser if something goes wrong, and he gets no thanks when things go right. It is easier to ask for independent and authoritative supervisory bodies of experts than it is to find them. I do not know where they are. And if they were appointed I would put to your Lordships the proposition that it is likely that they would very soon become a bigger vested interest than those bodies whose work they would be supervising.
I found it shattering to read implied criticism of the Medical Research Council, on which the Government have to rely for so much, because of the veiled suggestion that it was in a sense prejudiced. I read in The Times the letter by Dr. Mole to which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, referred in his opening address; I also read the reply. I then discovered in a copy of Nature that there was a letter, signed by two independent advisers consulted by the Royal Commission, together with two members of the Commission itself, dealing with the toxicity of plutonium. The Royal Commission found it necessary to seek the advice of independent authorities, but I read:
"We wish to make it clear that the two other signatories of this letter, who are members of the Commission, take full responsibility for Chapter II on radioactivity and radiobiology in the report. This was not seen by the consultants at any time prior to publication. In fact they disagreed with several of the statements made in the chapter".
If it was necessary to seek the advice of independent consultants only to reject that advice, why was it necessary to consult them in the first place? Why did the two members of the Commission not act on their own authority in the first instance?
Let me go on. I asked a question about the Windscale breakout. I understand a
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Statement—I saw a copy only this morning —has been put out giving the facts of the case. I am not interested in that. What I am interested in is the knowledge given me personally by one of the two or three technical members of the Royal Commission, and he has given me permission to quote his name—Sir Frederick Warner—that, in signing the report and in associating his name with paragraphs 422 to 424, he was doing so on the assumption that these would not be used in order to delay a decision about going ahead on Windscale. That is a remarkable thing. He went out of his way to send this letter to me, and I believe that another Member of your Lordships' House also has a copy—
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord for a moment? I am sure that he wants to be fair on this matter. I too have a letter from Sir Frederick Warner. But there was nothing in the paragraphs to which he referred which would necessarily cause any delay in making the decision.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, I would agree with the noble Baroness that a close reading of those paragraphs does not necessarily give any reason to delay, but Sir Frederick Warner saw in what happened that these paragraphs were being used to justify delay. As we now know, the application has been called in.
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, I am quite sure the noble Lord would agree that he could not possibly blame the Royal Commission for that.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, I would agree with the noble Baroness. I do not blame the Royal Commission for the use that was made of its text; but, as I said earlier on, its text does seem to be susceptible to different interpretations. As I have said, I have no views as a nuclear technologist—I am not a nuclear technologist or a nuclear expert in any way; I am not a resources wizard, and I accept all the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Hinton. But I can claim to have had some useful experience as an adviser on scientific matters, and to have some knowledge of certain disastrous decisions in which I, too, have been involved, and less experience, if I may say, about really wise decisions. The late Mr. Crossman, in the second volume of his memoirs, says at

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one point, when talking about a certain missile we were then developing and which has since more or less disappeared:
"How can Cabinet come to a sensible decision when no one of us has the vaguest idea what these things really are?
That was a very honest and true remark. I know it is a very difficult task for Cabinet Ministers to come to decisions on matters which they do not understand technically.
I am not surprised that the report we are discussing was well received by the Friends of the Earth. I hope, as I said, that it will be equally well studied by the Government from the point of view of seeing whether any of the recommendations can be put to use. I regret, as I have said, the things which have been said about official advisers; and I would suggest to the Government Front Bench that before the Government decide entirely about these matters they should wait until the appearance of the two American reports to which I have referred, one of which, I am assured, is due to come out in the relatively near future. These are highly professional studies. They compare nuclear hazards with those hazards of extensive coalmining—environmental and health hazards—and discuss how a possible nuclear catastrophe is to be measured against the cumulative disasters in the coalmining industry.
In conclusion, may I say that I had the privilege of giving the Romanes Address in Oxford two years ago. I did not read it again until I started getting ready for this debate on the plane coming back from the States two days ago. What I said there is relevant, I think:
"No one claims … that the body of government scientists necessarily includes the best scientists or the wisest men in the land … From the point of view of the scientist's responsibility to those whom he advises, it is essential that there should be total frankness, not only about the known, but also about the unknown issues which might affect major government policies".
I went on to say:
"There is … no advantage to the official scientist if he takes too exaggerated or sanguine a view about the successful outcome of some major project which depends on the technical solution of critical issues, whether we are dealing with solar energy"—
to which reference has been made—
"nuclear power stations, or some new aircraft";
and I went on to say that it would be a good thing if Government Departments
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which are concerned with technical matters had available, not only ordinary Press officers but bureaux of scientific information which could be consulted by journalists and others in confidence, so that knowledge could be shared and issues about which there were differences of opinion could be properly discussed.
My Lords, I hope that that last suggestion, which I put out a couple of years ago, and which got nowhere, is considered. I have spoken at length. But I think the report deserves a long speech. I have indicated why I think it should be studied by the Government. I have also indicated my views about certain of its shortcomings and some of its more naï ve statements. May I here, unfortunately, make the same apologies which Lord Wynne-Jones had to make at the end of his contribution; namely, that I may not be able to hear the end of this debate.
3.14 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, and delighted that we have had the opportunity of this debate through the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and that we have had this report. I find this to be one of the most important documents we have had in my experience in the postwar world; because it is, whatever the critics may say, bringing us face to face with issues which, if they were not discussed in the terms and in the depth of the report, would be ignored or would be treated merely as the aborations of people like myself.
Your Lordships will find on page 82 of the report Alvin Weinberg's proposals for a "nuclear priesthood". Alvin Weinberg, I should remind your Lordships, was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the key scientists in the production of the atom bomb and is still one of the greatest authorities in the nuclear field. His nuclear priesthood would be a dedicated, self-perpetuating body of people forming a technological elite which would be entrusted, through the generations to come, with the task of safeguarding them from the hazards of nuclear power.
The suggestion conjured up in my mind a bizarre picture of the monks of the Order of Pluto assembling 24,000 years (a thousand generations) from now, for the

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rituals celebrating the first half-life of man-made plutonium. That is the time-scale we are talking about: as far into the future as CroMagnon man is in our past. That is the extent by which we have taken into our hands or manifested in our generation the potentials of man's capacity to determine and risk future generations.
I am intrigued by his idea of a priest craft, for I have maintained for the last 30 years that we are wrestling with nuclear superstition; and understandably so. In 1958, I was a member of the World Health Organisation Study Group on the mental aspects of the peaceful uses of atomic energy. We considered reports, from inquries not only among scientists and people working in the atom industries and not only from the advance countries but in primitive societies and we concluded that our vaunted civilisation was only eggshell thick. We were cowering in the dark caves of our own emotions like our eldest ancestors cowering from the wrath of the elemental gods. But our elemental gods were radioactive, unseen, untasted, unheard, unsmelt and unfelt and all-pervasive. Nuclear energy had exploded as a cataclysmic bomb contrived behind the sky-high fences of military security.
The noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, has cited the case that I was going to cite where the horrifying truth emerged from Clement Attlee. I will quote it in deference to the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman. Clement Attlee said after the decision, long after the decision, to agree to drop the bomb on Hiroshima:
"We knew nothing whatever at that time about the genetic effects of an atomic explosion. We knew nothing at all about fallout and all the rest of what emerged after Hiroshima. As far as I know, President Truman and Winston Churchill knew nothing of those things either: nor did Sir John Anderson who co-ordinated research on our side. Whether the scientists directly concerned knew or guessed I do not know, but if they did then, as far as I am aware, they said nothing to those who took the decisions."
That is incredible. The more so, because in 1927 Herman Muller had already demonstrated the effects of radiation on genes, the factors of heredity for which he was later to receive a Nobel Prize. Radioactive mutation was already text-book stuff but none of those associated with the bomb regarded it as anything but "just a bigger bomb", in Attlee's phrase. It was a physicist's bomb and biologists were, by security, excluded from it.
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The only way to rebut nuclear superstition and irrational fears is by reason and by rational argument. But what happens when the repositories of reason, the scientists and the official experts are not believed or when they prevaricate or when they temper facts to suit official policies and with all deference to—I was going to say my noble friend—my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, it is true and absolutely manifestly true that we have been systematically misled by official advisers over the years. This is demonstrable. It has been true unfortunately that during the past 30 years—and the Windscale incident has recently emphasised what I am saying—official spokesmen, including famous and reputable scientists, have gone on record to reassure the public by minimising hazards and have been proved wrong.
In this House, the late Lord Cherwell, defending atmospheric bomb testing, compared the radiation from bomb fallout with the natural cosmic rays and said that the comparative amounts were no greater than walking 200 feet up a hill into cosmic rays. Then radio-strontium came tumbling out of the sky, into babies' milk and children's bones to the measureable concern of the Medical Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, and elsewhere. Any why? Because not only the late Lord Cherwell but one of the world's greatest radio isotope experts, Willard J. Libby, had fooled us. I mean fooled me as well because I was present at the Press conference. Libby, who gave us carbondating (which has proved that Winchester's round table is not King Arthur's Round Table after all) was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission when it started testing the H-bomb. He was the only scientific member of that Commission. He gave a categorical assurance that the only fallout would be from the fission-bomb detonator of the H-bomb and would be confined in a test area. The theory was that the massive explosion from the hydrogen fusion reaction would punch a hole in the stratosphere where radio active gases would dissipate and carry away the radiostrontium of the bomb denotator. It also left out the fact that one of the gases would quickly decay into radiostrontium which is a particulate. It also left out of the account the fact that the troposphere which separates the

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stratosphere from our atmosphere is not continuous, as we were told, and that the radiostrontium came in through a fan-light to get back into our climatic jet stream and was spread all over the world. I found it difficult not to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, when he was invoking Teller as part of his justification, and using much the same analogy; that is, that what we are talking about is no different from being hit by a meteorite. This is something I will not stand for—or for which I will not stand.
I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, and others in saying something which is categorically true. The nuclear industry has been the safest of all industries. It has the best accident record of any industry. But why? Because of nuclear superstition; because we had a public opinion, view, dread or misgiving which insisted all these years ago in building into the terms of the hazards the safeguards which I am prepared to admit are probably excessive now, but I would not give up one of them except by a fight. What we have done is simply because we have this sense of the unseen, the untasted and the unsmelt, and we have provided in the nuclear industry the kind of safeguards about which we are now boasting.
Sometimes, the experts are less than candid. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, in saying that we often criticise them without reason, or with good reason; that is to say, the famous story of Senator Muskie in the U.S. Senate Commission. He had one scientist after another coming in saying, "On the one hand, so and so; on the other hand, so and so". Senator Muskie said, "For God's sake send us a one-armed scientist".
In that sense, there has to be a balance. On the other hand, I accuse them of being less than candid. They have been often constrained—I will say it again—to be dishonest in the sense that what they are withholding is something which would affect the policies they have been called upon to defend. I would condone nuclear superstition on the very ground I am citing now, because you cannot rebut superstition except by producing rational answers. You cannot complain that people are stupid, silly or fearful
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if they are ignorant. You cannot get their support unless you inform them; and trouble has arisen throughout the whole history of siting reactors, and so on, because of the fact that people who may be affected by the building of a new reactor are entitled to be reassured. Very many times in the experience of many of us, the experts have failed to articulate what might have been a perfectly good case. People must be properly informed. They must not be just blandly reassured—because they will not accept that reassurance.
Your Lordships will notice in the report a very proper concern and suggestions about the disposal of radioactive waste, with a preference for deep burial in granitic formations. Now, the authorities are looking for possible sites, apparently in Galloway and the Western Isles. In the small hours of yesterday morning in another place that issue was raised under the Consolidated Fund Bill. It was raised by perfectly reasonable people. Is that nuclear superstition? No. It represents a proper demand for the what, the why and the wherefore of what is going on. You cannot expect people to accept something they do not understand; and no matter whether they live in Galloway or anywhere else, they have to know the facts. That is where the communications have broken down over all these years.
The Royal Commission was right, in spite of what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, to involve itself in questions of nuclear sabotage, guerrilla risks and nuclear blackmail. All of them are appallingly feasible. The only reticence one should exercise is when one starts putting ideas into people's heads—and I could put plenty! With all due deference to the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, it is not science fiction. It has been demonstrated in America how casual has been the approach to the handling and the accessibility of fissile material. In one installation, exposed in Science Magazine, no more than rabbit wire was used—you needed only a pair of clippers and you could go and help yourself. The bomb is no longer that top secret for which, for exposing it, the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair. It is not a kitchen-table-in-Clapham device. Determined people can and often do get the

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knowledge, but short of making a bomb—you do not even have to make one—the evidence of having the capacity and the materials would be blackmail enough to hijack a community.
That is one of the reasons why the proliferation of plutonium has properly exercised the Royal Commission. In a way, I am committed to the fast breeder reactor. In the early 'sixties, I called it "the pixilated pile" and compared it to the pixies filling the coal-scuttle every time you stoked the fire. That is what it is—a process of producing more fuel than you consume. I still think that, until you have fusion energy, this is the neatest form—or, as the scientist would say, it is a beautiful form—of fission reaction. But, none the less, in spite of my precedent, I go along with the report in its reservations about the fast breeder and the whole question of the plutonium economy.
I want to say this, because I seem to remember, when I was writing about this all those years ago, that we were talking about using thorium as the blank for the breeder, and in this case we would be converting thorium into Uranium 233. Uranium 233 is degradable, recoverable or treatable in a way that plutonium, with its half-life, certainly is not. I am just wondering why we have lost sight of that. All I know is that when we are talking about plutonium, we are talking about the most deadly poison known to man.
That brings me to the projected nuclear development, with which the report deals so effectively on pages 72 and 73. We are told that the amount of plutonium involved in the AEA programme would increase from a little over 10 tonnes in 1975 to about 250 tonnes by the year 2000, and to perhaps 10 times that figure by the year 2030. This would be accompanied by the movements of plutonium between facilities, which would number several hundreds per year by the year 2000, and several thousands by the year 2030. In the next 25 years, the amount of radioactive wastes stored in liquid form, but intensively radioactive and continuing so for centuries—radioactive in the sense that it has to be kept practically refrigerated or chilled, to prevent it from boiling and so on—will occupy a volume of 6,000 cubic metres.
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But radiation hazard is not a parochial question. It can affect peoples remote from the epicentres of nuclear power. It has been projected that by the year 2020 in the United States there could be the equivalent of 2,000 large reactors, most of them breeder reactors, and that would involve something like 60 fuel processing and fabrication plants, handling something like 30,000 tonnes of plutonium. This could involve about 100,000 shipments of plutonium annually, from one place to another, and that is a great many curies to have loose on the move.
The Royal Commission disavows all knowledge of the military dispositions of nuclear energy. This is discreet but, I respectfully suggest, disingenuous. The military dispositions are very much a question of the environment—and, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, totally so. A long way short of a nuclear holocaust, all the concern expressed about industrial uses applies manifold to the military. There is now stockpiled in the arsenals of the nuclear Powers, in terms of fissile materials, an estimated 100 tons of TNT equivalent for every man, woman and child on earth, which is capable of reducing the entire planet to a radioactive desert. To produce that military potential has meant radioactive wastes of the scale which we are projecting into the future. Fifteen years ago, in my book Living with the Atom. I pointed out that already, then, in the burial grounds at Hanford in the State of Washington, where millions of gallons of liquid wastes were boiling in stainless steel tanks, it had cost as much to bury the live atoms as it cost to bury all the dead Pyramid Kings of Egypt. The transport of fissile materials about which we are agitating takes place, in military terms, all the time and in fabricated forms.
The United States has 30,000 nuclear weapons, 8,000 of which are strategical and 22,000 tactical. Of the tactical, 7,000 are in Europe. These latter represent 20 times the total ordnance employed in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam war. The Soviet Union's tactical nuclear weapons in Europe are estimated conservatively at 3,500. So there are 10,500 tactical nuclear weapons—a nuclear minefield—and the smallest have an explosive power equivalent to 1,000 tons of chemical explosive while the largest

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have an explosive power of more than 1 million tons equivalent.
One of the points I wish to stress is that it is estimated that nearly 120,000 persons have access to United States' nuclear weapons and weapons-grade fissionable materials. A Congressional inquiry has recently shown that 3,647 persons with access to nuclear weapons were removed from their jobs during a single year—that is, 1974—because of mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse or breach of discipline. I hate to make your Lordships' flesh creep, but we are speaking here about a potential of access, in terms of the distribution of weapons, which makes minute whatever we are speaking about regarding safeguards at Windscale. But we are forewarned. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, who said, with justification, that what we did in terms of application of foresight in the nuclear industry can apply also to security. But we have to know about it; it is no good running away. I am grateful to the Royal Commission for drawing attention to this point in their report and for making us aware of it, even if it makes us jump out of our seats and not sleep very well at night.

WINDSCALE: NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT INQUIRY
3.38 p.m.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, with the leave of the House, T will now repeat a Statement which is being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment. I am sure that noble Lords will be pleased that I am able to repeat the Statement during our debate this afternoon and that through the usual channels it was arranged that it should be made today in the other place in order to enable noble Lords to hear it before the Recess. The Statement is as follows:
"On 3rd November I undertook to report further to the House on the planning application from British Nuclear Fuels Limited for further development at Windscale, which the Planning Committee of the Cumbrian County Council had referred to me.
"The application falls effectively into 3 parts:
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first, improved arrangements for handling and reprocessing irradiated Magnox fuel; second, development of a pilot demonstration plant for vitrifying long-lived radioactive waste, and, third, new facilities for reprocessing oxide fuel from the current generation of United Kingdom Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors and from overseas.
"I have received many representations that the proposals in the application should be allowed to go ahead at once and I have received many other representations that the matters involved are of such national importance that the application ought not to be decided without full public scrutiny.
"I have now made a thorough examination of all the issues involved. If proposals relating to the handling of Magnox fuel and the development of the vitrification plant on the lines I have already seen were all that were before me, I would be unlikely to see any justification for calling these in for my own decision. That part relating to the reprocessing of Magnox fuel is designed to improve the treatment of the fuel already at Windscale with a consequent improvement of the discharges. The vitrification plant is part of the research programme into the disposal of a long-lived highly radioactive waste on which the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in their 6th Report urged the Government to press ahead. Any discharges of radioactive material arising as a result of these proposals will be closely controlled under the Radioactive Substances Act 1960, and I intend to be personally assured that high standards of control are maintained at all times. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Energy has also indicated similar intentions in respect of his responsibilities under the Nuclear Installations Act 1965.
"The third proposal on the other hand which is concerned with the reprocessing of oxide fuel raises different issues of major importance. Since I have no power to call in this one part of a single application, and since I wish to avoid delay to the other proposals I have decided, to invite BNFL to bring their proposals for-ward in separate parts. If and when a

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separate application is submitted for the oxide fuel reprocessing plant I would propose to call it in to deal with myself and order a public inquiry under Section 282 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1971. This will enable all the relevant safety environmental and planning considerations fully to be examined. It is my hope that the inquiry should proceed as speedily as it can.
"The wide-ranging environmental implications relating to the development of nuclear power generally, which were the subject of the 6th Report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, are under urgent examination and the Government will be making their views on these matters known in due course".
3.41 p.m.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness most particularly for having made it possible for this House to have this Statement at this juncture. I am not getting at her personally, but of course it would have been better if we could have had it yesterday before we wasted a certain amount of time—if I may put it that way—on noble Lords such as Lord Avebury raising the issue here today. However, I know that she personally has had a hand in seeing that we have now had the statement. The Statement may well say that these matters are under urgent review: they are under review to a certain extent here, now, and I hope the Government will take note of what is being said here.
It seems to be a sensible approach to have separated the various aspects of the Windscale expansion because it is indeed true that there is only the one contentious issue; that is, the proposal to process fuel virtually as an export operation, which clearly this country does not have to do, whether it wishes to do it or not. Most of the other issues are an improvement over what we are doing already, if I understand it correctly. I am bound to say that I cannot really see how the Government could have avoided calling in that particular part of the planning application.
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In passing, may I say that it seems a pity that we could not have separated out these proposals long since. I think a good deal of the controversy which has arisen out of all of this would have been lessened if these things had been packaged in this way right from the outset, but maybe that is being wise after the event. Secondly, I should like to ask a question which I am sure is very much in the minds of some of those who wish to protest against this. Would it be in order at that inquiry to raise the question of the need for these processes at all?—because this is an issue which continually arises both in regard to highway planning and this type of planning application. So I ask this quite specific question without asking the noble Baroness to give us a major policy statement. Otherwise I am sure this is an approach which is worthy of our support.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, is the Minister aware that we too very much welcome the statement that has been made. We agree that it is a good idea to separate out the application on the reprocessing of magnox fuels and the vitrification process from that relating to the reprocessing of oxide fuels: Can the noble Baroness give us an assurance that as a result of the approval of the first two parts of the application there will be no increase in the authorised limit in regard to discharges, both into the atmosphere and into the sea? Can she also say whether, in considering the application, the Secretary of State will take into account the recent developments in the United States of America regarding the interpretation of the non-proliferation treaty which I mentioned earlier? Will the noble Baroness also consider whether Sections 47 to 50 of the Town and Country Planning Act would not have been a more appropriate procedure than Section 282? I will not go into that in detail, because I have already dealt with it in my speech.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, for his comments. This was a very difficult problem which needed a great deal of consideration since, in the first place, it was all part of the Development Plan of the Cumbria County Council. It was not really possible to separate it in the way the noble Lord suggested

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before. I think he is quite right when he says it is easy to be wise after the event over these particular things.
Both noble Lords, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, and Lord Avebury, raised the question of what it would be in order to raise at the inquiry. As noble Lords will appreciate, it will be an inquiry into a specific planning application. Obviously, the inquiry would take account of all matters relevant to that but, as in other similar inquiries such as highway inquiries, as the noble Lord pointed out, it would be up to the inspector as to what is and is not relevant. I cannot anticipate what issues will come before him, but I imagine the inquiry will range as widely as the inspector will allow. I should also point out that, in order to expedite matters, both myself and my right honourable friend think it would be a good idea for objectors to start preparing their case now, in the event of BFNL putting in an application.
On the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, from my understanding there would be no increase in discharges so far as the two parts of the application are concerned, if they come in separately. That is as far as I understand the matter. If I am wrong, I will let the noble Lord know. This does take us into a rather scientific area. So taking into account what is published in the United States, again this would depend on what was put in, and the way it was put in to the inspector by the objectors or by the applicants. It would have to come to the inquiry. There would not be an inquiry whose terms of reference set out that the inquiry should take into account any particular thing happening in the United States.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, surely the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, would agree that the non-proliferation treaty and the interpretation of it are beyond the competence of any inspector?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I think the noble Lord has answered his own question. I have explained that this is a planning inquiry, and that what will come out of it will probably range rather beyond that. I am certainly not going to undertake that this inquiry will be dealing with non-proliferation. It would be quite wrong if
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I gave any undertaking to that effect. That is not what the inquiry is about.
On the other point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, as to why the inquiry was not held under Sections 47 to 50, the Planning Inquiry Commission, the main reason is that the Government are concerned that the inquiry should proceed as quickly as possible. The other form of Commission is an untried procedure. It really does not seem likely that it would secure an early report, because it has to be done in two stages, which would prolong the whole inquiry. The Government are trying to find a way of dealing with the grave problem that has arisen and the representations made, and at the same time the Government are trying not to force too much delay in the interests of all sides.

NUCLEAR POWER AND THE ENVIRONMENT
3.49 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Lord McNAIR: My Lords, like other speakers, I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, on having initiated a fascinating debate. Although I think that probably I disagree with his conclusions, I would pay tribute to the extremely balanced way in which he stated the problem. I was particularly fascinated by his use of the word "robust" to describe the action of the voters in California in deciding to discount the dangers and to go "full speed ahead"."Robust" is just about the last word I would have chosen to describe their behaviour, and I was still intermittently musing over this word when up stood the noble Baroness, Lady White, and made a speech which epitomised exactly what I regard as a robust attitude towards this problem.
We are very fortunate in having so many noble Lords who can understand and explain the technicalities of this problem. My chief regret on that score is the absence from the speaker's list of the name of the noble Lord, Lord Roths-child, because it was his arresting article in The Times of 27th September which first persuaded me that I owed it to my grandchildren, if not to myself, to read

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the Flowers Report. I envy the noble Lord, Lord Tedder, who found it racy. I found it extremely heavy going, but I read every single word of it, though large chunks, particularly near the beginning, for all they meant to me might just have well have been written in Sanskrit. It would, I am sure, have been impeccable Sanskrit because the report is, if I may say so, outstandingly well-written.
I am acutely aware that against the galactic blaze of scientific and academic talent which we have I represent something of a black hole. Knowing just enough physics to enable me occasionally to boil an egg, I will keep, of necessity, to the broader political and human aspects of this problem. I should like to remind the House, though I am sure it is quite unnecessary, that the problem which faces the Government or some future Government of this country is only a small part, a very small part, of a global problem which confronts the whole of the endangered species to which we happen to belong. In its implications it is not a short-term problem of 50 or 100 years. The time-scale is geological rather than historical. To say that we have not very much experience of facing, let alone solving, problems of this order of magnitude is something of an understatement. We are not often asked, as it were, to construct a graph of which one axis represents time stretching for practical purposes into eternity, while the other has to embrace and allow for all the needs and greeds and hopes and fears of humanity.
Perhaps I should at this point assure the House that I shall soon be changing to a slightly more sanguine key. To make matters worse, mankind has to set out on this expedition into the unknown, untrodden territory of a possibly plutonium-based world economy from a highly insecure base and in a state of sorry disorganisation. We live, do we not, in a Balkanised world, with 150 separate sovereign States, each with its own Government, most of them tryannical and unconstrained by the brake of public opinion, and every single one of them ultimately prepared to take any action, no matter how insane, in what it conceives to be its national interest. In parenthesis, I wish someone could tell me the half-life of this inherently unstable element which
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we call "national sovereignty". It is a fairly recent phenomenom. It certainly will not last for ever. To use one of the thought provoking terms which I have learnt from the Flowers Report, I should dearly like to know what some of its decayed daughters are going to look like.
After that I hope not wholly irrelevant digression let us cluster round our parish pump and examine our own small fraction of the sum of this puzzle. We in these islands amount to just under 1½ per cent. of the human race. In that figure you may find fuel both for pride and for humility. There was a remarkable time when we were able, despite our numerical insignificance, to act as the world's policeman. From that role we have been decisively pensioned off by history. Perhaps sacked would be a better word since history does not award many pensions.
Either way our fairly honourable discharge from that role has obliged us to look for another. We are often told—and I am not qualified to dispute it even if I wished to—that in the field of technology and inventiveness we still have much to contribute. I hope that this is true. I hope that we shall make that contribution, but I do not think that it is enough. I do not think that it is enough, because it seems to me to ignore and possibly to aggravate what I suspect is one of the major defects in our human nature; namely, that our cleverness is very apt to outrun our wisdom. Like precocious children we give ourselves expensive toys which we are not really ready for. We start them up without having first carefully read the instructions, and then we are surprised when they go wrong, and very lucky if they do not blow up in our faces.
So should we not, therefore, in addition to any contributions we can make to the pool of the world's technology and invention, hope also to make a balancing contribution—I will not say to the world's conscience; that would be I think an insufferably pretentious way of putting it—to its overstrained reserves of judgment, foresight, and imagination. To put that in more concrete terms, it seems that we need to pit the skills and aspirations of the Department of Energy against the necessarily broader views of the Department of the Environment, and then to sum up the argument not as politicians, but as statesmen.

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One difficulty in speaking about this subject is that whatever one wants to say Sir Brian Flowers has said it better already. I therefore quote from Paragraph 524:
"The ultimate aim is clear; it is to enable decisions on major questions of nuclear development to take place by explicit political process."
How can we make sure that we do make these decisions by explicit political process? I ask this question because I have, for a long time, been haunted—in fact I suspect I shall go to my grave still haunted—by the belief that at least on one occasion of supreme importance we may have failed our fellow men by missing a great and non-recurring opportunity.
Between 20 and 30 years ago there was a short period of years during which we alone in the world, apart from the United States and the USSR, had what the jargonauts called "nuclear capacity". What might the response have been if at that time we had said to the rest of the world, "We are prepared to divest our-selves of this capacity. We will throw all our stuff away—you can come and look to make sure we have—if you will bind yourselves with us in a solemn treaty never to make or acquire nuclear weapons. Let us leave them to the two super-Powers which we cannot influence." I have, of course, somewhat simplified the proposition, but what would the response have been? I believe—no man can prove me wrong, or right—that it might have been in the affirmative. We stood a little higher then in world esteem; they had not quite lost the habit of listening to what we said.
If we had met with such a response to that offer, will anyone dispute that we might today be living in a safer world, instead of having to make do with a non-proliferation treaty which half the relevant States have neither signed nor ratified and from which any one can quit by giving three months' notice? If the offer had been turned down we should have lost nothing, yet it was never made. Was it even considered? I have no idea. It was all shrouded—that could be a very appropriate word—in security and secrecy; in other words, there was no explicit, political process.
I introduce the topic of that last opportunity, now alas! purely hypothetical, because it is just possible that when this debate is over—I do not mean your Lordships' debate, but the wider one for
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which the Minister has so encouragingly called—we may find ourselves with a similar opportunity, a chance to invite mankind to stop and look ahead and think before plumping for plutonium.
It may not seem like it to your Lord-ships, but I have left out much of what I should have liked to say. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Avebury is right to challenge the whole concept of the energy gap. After all, it is based on long-range forecasts; and surely we need no reminding of our fallibility in that respect. I am sometimes reminded by our touching faith in the clairvoyance of economists of the ancient Greeks, consulting their Oracle at Delphi, except that in some ways they were more sensible because they usually waited for events to develop before endeavouring to interpret the Oracle which had foretold them.
My noble friend also questioned the desirability of growth for growth's sake, and I support him. This idea of indefinitely sustained economic growth seems most unlikely to be attainable, even if it is desirable, because we will run out of all sorts of things other than energy. This has often been said, and recently by the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, in The Times on 14th December. But is it even desirable? It must, I suggest, lead to a future state of affairs in this country which I would call hyper-industrialisation, and let us consider this for a moment.
If those with long memories will compare the Britain of 50 years ago with Britain today, remembering all the urbanisation, rural depopulation, spoliation of so much of the country and the manifest lowering of the average level of contentment—not of affluence but of contentment—and will then project forward another 50 years of the exponential growth of these tendencies, they will have a glimpse of what I mean by hyper-industrialisation. I ask whether that is what we want, but it does not really matter, or it ought not to matter, what we want because we shall not be around to enjoy or endure it. These are long term trends and "in the long run we are all dead". But, when Maynard Keynes said that, he would not have forgotten, because he was a very humane man, that though we should all be dead, a lot of other people would be trying to live in whatever world we had left them. It is what they will want that matters.

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Perhaps the best we can do is to consult our children and grandchildren. We should ask the young. I believe that there is already a lot of evidence that this is not the way they want things to go. Throughout this discussion, I cannot forget that we are preparing to make decisions not for ourselves but for posterity. Poor old posterity! It has no votes. It belongs to no union. It has no lobby. It lies utterly defenceless, at our mercies. I can think of no nobler role for this noble House to fill than to feel itself in part the guardian of posterity.
To conclude, I have admitted and no doubt demonstrated that I am a scientific illiterate. I would therefore not presume to tell the Department of Energy what to do. It occurs to me that the Energy Minister may well have the most unenviable job any British Minister has ever been landed with. He deserves our sympathy and, certainly, he has mine. However, even from abysmal ignorance, I hope that I am entitled to make three brief pleas. I plead first for the maximum delay to give research time, if it can, to solve the problem of radioactive waste disposal, and I plead for absolutely no commitment to fast breeder reactors until that problem has been solved, if indeed then. Secondly, I plead for the closest possible attention to the cautionary conclusions of the Flowers Report. Finally, I plead that we should remember that it is not we who will pay the bill if we get this wrong. Therefore, when by that explicit political process we finally have to make up our mind, for pity's sake! let us give posterity the benefit of any doubt there is.
4.10 p.m.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, in common with all other speakers in the debate, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for giving us the opportunity to discuss the subject matter and to say that we are grateful to Sir Brian Flowers and the noble Baroness, Lady White, and their colleagues on the Royal Commission for a most interesting exposition. I thought it an excellent report, and such criticism as I have either read or heard seems only to embody the self-interest or hopes or fears of the critics. So far I have not listened to anybody saying what I would not suppose that he would say, anyway. My
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main anxiety when I read it is that it is such a wide ranging report. It covers so wide a field that by selective quotation from it one can substantiate almost any point of view at all. I think that this is what the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, meant when he quoted some of the Press comment as saying that it meant all things to all men.
Because I approached it in a sympathetic spirit it seemed to me that it was avoiding the complacency that would occur by selective quotation. There are two types. One is the type which says: "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? The Commission's report says that we are not going to need these power stations for a long time to come. We don't need to bother about the collapse of our fuel economy." It is going to collapse any-way, unless something is done about it. Just because we have a little more time that does not mean that time is on our side. It only means that the rate of running out would be slower.
The other type of complacency is to say "Oh, we will solve these problems as we go along. We do not need to have a solution to the disposal of high level wastes right here and now." Reading the report as a whole, it seems to avoid both of those forms of complacency, and to strike a realistic note. Fusion power if—I emphasise the "if"—it can be developed is clearly less dangerous than fission power, even if one accepts the tritium hazard. But can it be done? No one knows. Therefore it must be given a proper level of research priority. It must take its place in the queue, but it is not the only member of that queue.
If the European project finally collapses through the chauvinism of one member or another, the question of whether we could go it alone would of course be open. Culham is an international centre of excellence, respected everywhere. But the minimal Tokamak—I am quoting now from this week's or last week's New Scientist —has a thermal power level of 3,000 megawatts. So it is not going to cost less than a major nuclear power station. But whether we can go it alone I do not know—certainly not as long as we are living over our income on borrowed money. But if it fails, and it may, then the fast breeder is the fall-back, and there is nothing in the report which puts an

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embargo on the fast breeder. I really think that I must read this—recommendation 49:
"We do not oppose development of CFR 1 on environmental grounds … However, our views should be taken into account by the Government in reaching a decision."
Then they refer to their views in paragraph 520 which contains (i) and (ii) which I do not need to read, and then (iii) which states:
"If CFR 1 development proceeds, it should be seen as being in the nature of an insurance policy, albeit an expensive one, justified by the importance of risks relating to the security of the nation's future energy supplies."
It then goes on to refer to a type of public examination into these matters that it recommends.
So what are the priorities for the fast breeder reactor? We have priorities for the Tokamak and the fusion reactor, and we have priorities for the high level waste disposal. I do not think that one can assign these priorities in perpetuity. They change; knowledge advances; new difficulties are encountered. Priorities are always changing. They should be kept under a kind of running review. But I am perfectly certain that uprating the importance attached to fusion power and to high level waste disposal is quite correct as of today.
Here I must digress, if I may, to tell your Lordships a story of the late Sir Henry Tizard at a time when he was shattered by learning that the Russians had exploded a nuclear bomb years earlier than anybody had thought it possible. "I know", he said, "the cost in scientific effort of the joint AngloAmerican venture, and the enormous resources—100 Nobel Prize winners, and so on—that they had behind them. How can the Russians equal it?" Of course, the answer, we now know, was espionage on one side and treachery on the other. Dr. Perrin (later Sir Michael Perrin of the Wellcome Foundation), who was Tizard's assistant at the time, said, "Really? Do you think any local council in Russia can tell Joe Stalin, ' You cannot put that purification plant here, there or somewhere else'?" During the last war there was a song which said:
"You can't put that there 'ere.
Anywhere else you can put that there,
But you can't put that there 'ere".
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If that is to be allowed to be a reason for not having a purification plant anywhere, then anybody will say it; and sooner or later you have to have a mechanism for overruling bad reasons for not putting down purification plants, and so on.
It is said that the safest place for plutonium is inside a fast breeder reactor, where nobody can get at it. Plutonium on site is always either in the reactor or it is in pond, or it is in the purification plant or it is part of the stockpile, reprocessed and ready to be fed back into the reactor. Most of the plutonium in a fast breeder reactor is inside the reactor, and it can be balanced so that you do not accumulate a large stockpile. Some of the hazards can be overcome by a willingness to spend money. The first CFR could be built below ground—it is only a matter of money—and you could run it much closer to the danger point underground, knowing that the thing could be contained, to gain experience on it. Then, if all went well and whatever happened was contained, you would know that it would be safe to run it at ground level at lower levels of activity.
Here I want to pause to make sure that I have correctly understood something said by the noble Lord, Lord Hinton. If I am misquoting him, of course I will withdraw, but as I understood it he said that a fast breeder reactor had an inherent stability about it. I am the last person in the world to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, in a matter where he knows so much more than I do, but that is not what I have read elsewhere. It is not what I have read, I think, in the report, though I could not turn it up at short notice. It could have been in some textbooks that I have been reading lately. The statement in the report, I think, is that thermal reactors are intrinsically safe because under their working conditions they are at their most reactive, but a breeder reactor has the difficulty that it is not at its most reactive under its working conditions, and can run away. The report and the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, cannot both be right, and there must be some means of resolving it. Does the noble Lord wish to intervene?
Lord HINTON of BANKSIDE: Indeed, my Lords, if the noble Earl wishes me to. It is in fact wrong to say that most thermal reactors have inherent stability. The fast reactor with a mixed

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plutonium-uranium fuel has inherent stability because as the temperature rises the neutron cross-section increases and there is more neutron absorption. This gives it inherent stability if it has a plutonium-uranium fuel.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, I am greatly obliged to the noble Lord for telling me something that I have been trying to find out ever since I visited the Dounreay reactor and was told that the designers were in great difficulties in trying to build a negative temperature coefficient into it. Ever since, whenever I have come across fast breeder reactor people I have said, "Have you got a negative temperature coefficient yet?"—and at last I have got a straight answer from the noble Lord. They have, and I think they are to be congratulated on doing so.
I deal next with the transport. The word "pig" has many connotations. It can be a source of delicious roast pork; it can be an ingot of foundry-iron; it can be a male chauvinist. But the pig which I wish to introduce to your Lordships this afternoon is a device used in petroleum engineering and gasworks engineering. It is simply an egg-shaped object that you blow down a pipeline either to clear it or to separate two brands of petroleum fuel and it ends up in a "pig trap" where it can be launched on another journey if necessary. There is no reason why we should not have a submarine pipeline and blow the reactor elements through the pipeline to the processing plant. They go down into the earth—thence "sub-marine"—at one point and they come up at another. If a saboteur tried to cut the line, you could make a fall in the pressure at the downstream end and operate a relay cutting off the source of pressure and the "pigs" will stop.
It is not the responsibility of the Royal Commission on the Environment to find solutions to these problems but, being an enthusiastic technologist, whenever I come across these difficulties I always want to postulate a solution. If you are really afraid of plutonium being hijacked, then you must pay for the solution. Although a pipeline from, say, Bradwell to Windscale might be expensive, the contents could not be hijacked.
We come now to waste disposal. I do not mean long-term storage. I am talking
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about the words of "Tosti's Farewell": "Farewell forever; good-bye, good-bye! It must disappear from the human environment altogether. Before reading the report I had already disposed in my own mind of a number of suggestions which it took into consideration for the reasons that it had rejected them, but I did come up with an idea of my own which on investigation turned out to be a combination of two other ideas which had been tried separately but not in combination. It occurred to me that if an almost total stranger to this subject like myself could cook up something on the spur of the moment, something that was not in the report and has not been considered, apparently, by anyone, then the subject itself has not been fully explored in depth. Until we are agreed on how to get rid of this stuff finally, we must face the problem of storage; and vitrification is better than solution in a liquid. It must be so. Anybody would prefer storing solids rather than liquids. This brings me to the expansion at Windscale in a spirit of facing real dangers and not running away from imaginary ones.
During the 25 years while plutonium has been processed at Windscale, let us look at what has happened to the nation in terms of the accident rate quoted in the report: 625,000 people have died through accidents of all kinds; 62,500 from natural leukaemia, 40,000 in industrial accidents (that is part of the 625,000) and as many by drowning, usually through bathing in places where they are warned not to bathe; 625 have been struck by lightning. During the same period no certain death of any radiation worker from radiation can be agreed. Whether there is a small statistically significant increase in leukaemia by people who worked at Windscale is not known because the Commission criticises the methodology used. Until the records have been revamped we cannot know that for certain; but no certain death from radiation of any radiation worker has occurred during the period when all these thousands of other accidents happened. It can be made safe, evidently.
With regard to the famous leakage, I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, or the noble Baroness, Lady White, got a circular from British Nuclear Fuels Limited to all Members of

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Parliament headed, "Radioactive Contamination, Windscale". If they did, did they read it or did it go into the WPB, or did they not realise that it was a part of their essential homework or what? It gives a full account of the whole matter which really ends up in a not unprecedented bit of self-advertisement by the Minister. But it is difficult for your Lordships to take in a leakage of 1,000 curies, which is what has happened. I have made a calculation so that you may know just how much natural radioactivity that represents. It is the natural radioactivity, give or take a factor of two, depending upon the origins of the soil, distributed over 8,000 acres of farmland three feet deep. It is not a leakage that is large on the scale on which normal radioactivity is distributed over the earth if you wanted to dispose of it. Too much has been made of this.
I am told that the total storage of high level waste at Windscale—the volume of it—is about that of a suburban detached house, considerably smaller than the Jewel House at the Tower of London. There is no great difficulty in keeping it under watch and guard and monitoring what is going on. Obviously, Windscale is the proper place to process fuel. You have the knowledge, technique and people there. There are young people who are the children of those who were early workers at Windscale. They are joining the organisation now and there are a whole lot of natural skills in handling dangerous materials safely which arc building up exactly as the skills required to make lace at Nottingham and cutlery and alloy steels in Sheffield were built up. If they have this technique, I cannot see any reason why they should not export it.
The only way to get something done is to make it someone's whole-time responsibility to do it. The problem of fitting a waste disposal unit into the command structure of the national organisation is solved in the report by proposing that it should be given independent statutory responsibility. I see no reason not to accept this recommendation. The report would be unintelligible without the explanatory chapters on radioactivity, fission, fusion, reactor design, waste purification and so on. They constitute one of the best written expositions of the subject
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since the celebrated Smyth Report in 1945, which was the American Government's introduction to the American public on the whole subject of nuclear fission, the bomb and so on.
From the standpoint of the Royal Commission, it was a mere means to an end. It was only to make the rest of it intelligible to the lay reader. For this reason, it is not complete. There are many matters not contained in it because they were not necessary: for example, the control of criticality in processing plants. I hope that the noble Baroness will in her reply be sympathetic towards the suggestion that the Government should commission a work written by a first-class scientific journalist with access to all the sources of information in the Atomic Energy Authority as a vade-mecum for everybody in this field. Much more information could be released than is being released. Our enemies seem to have most of it by one means or another. It should be intelligent to the layman and also interesting to the unspecialist scientist like myself, who is not an expert in these matters.
I should like to reinforce what the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, said, possibly because, like him, I have a commercial interest in building nuclear power stations. The programme for nuclear power, which was shot down by Sir Brian Flowers and his colleagues, would have been a perfectly impossible programme for British industry to have achieved. It was totally unrealistic. My Lords, I think the noble Baroness, Lady White, said something.
Baroness WHITE: I beg your pardon; I was merely murmering to myself. Why was it then ever put forward?
The Earl of HALSBURY: I do not know, my Lords. I must ask the noble Baroness to be responsible for her source material. As to explosions, explosions have taken place inside concrete containers and have been contained. An explosion inside a vessel is very much worse than an explosion outside. If they can contain explosions inside themselves, surely they ought to be able to control explosions outside themselves. I have forgotten who made that point, but I would entirely agree with it. We must not get too oppressed with the idea of toxicity on very small scales. One of the most dangerous

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substances is one that you carry about in your petrol tanks every day, lead tetraethyl. It is oil soluble: one drop on your skin and it gets into the myelin sheath and into your principal nerves: it migrates up them into the brain and you can die of lead encephalitis—and that is from one drop on the skin. Botulinum toxin is lethal in doses of one microgramme per kilo of body weight, and so on.
I have one last point to add. We must legislate for the possible collapse of our civilisation. Civilisations have collapsed before. I have no very great optimism about the stability of ours. Egypt had three dark ages from the pyramids to the time when it was overwhelmed by the Persian Empire. Greece had a Dark Age between the end of the Mycenean and the beginning of the Classical civilisation —a couple of hundred years of anarchy. when Justinian shut down the Law Schools and the Academy in Athens, we had 500 years of barbarism in Western Europe to follow before the renascence of Western civilisation. I do not know how many Dark Ages they have had in China and I shall not try to enumerate them. But, my Lords, we must not leave rubbish around for posterity. because people will not know how to cope with it. If there is a leak of something stored at Windscale now we know how to cope with it, but once our civilisation has collapsed, all kinds of dangerous things could happen. Somebody might break open a pile, get at the fuel elements and start putting them into drinking water. We must get rid of it, and so I should like to say one final thing.
I believe that we are descended remotely from a migratory wandering species that just wandered about the face of the earth. It left its droppings and its food refuse, if one might mention this, lying about on its camp site and then moved on; and then nature took charge under aerobic conditions. The dung beetles, the ants and bacteria got together and cleaned up the mess. The result is that we, as a species, have evolved with no natural instinct for tidyness and cleanliness. But what we have not got by instinct we can induce as a matter of intellectual or aesthetic conviction. The old tendency to untidyness and dirt still continues: it continues within the sacrosanct periphery of the Atomic Energy Authority by the fact that waste disposal has not had as high a
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priority as more exciting things. If I may borrow a leaf from the electronic industry, when you are making something very complicated you have to have an equally complicated piece of test apparatus. In practice it has been found that if you have the same contractor doing both jobs, the apparatus for testing (which ought to be engineered to a higher standard than the apparatus which is going to he tested) never gets engineered to so good a standard, because the best draughtsmen want to go on to the more exciting projects and you are left with a pedestrian piece of work. So the answer is for one contractor to make the main device and another to make the testing device. For that reason, we have to set up this independent authority and make it responsible for clearing up the rubbish as we go along.
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, as he expressed himself as much reassured by the information given by the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, might I ask whether he is in agreement that paragraph 302 of our report puts a somewhat different slant on the matter of the safety of the fast breeder reactors? Of course, what the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, had to say was absolutely correct, needless to say, but did not give perhaps the complete picture.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, that was broadly my understanding of the situation, before the reassurance of the noble Lord, Lord Hinton. I do not want to get into an argument with the noble Lord, because I know that I shall get the worst of it. But all I am saying is that this matter must be resolvable. There must be some authority to whom we can turn.
Lord HINTON of BANKSIDE: My Lords, perhaps I tried to be so brief that I was not completely clear. There are many modes of failure on all reactors. One of them—the one referred to in paragraph 302—is a loss of coolant failure. What I was talking about, and what I referred to in my speech, was the nuclear stability. In the fast reactor, with a mixed plutonium/uranium fuel you have nuclear stability, so that as the temperature rises you tend to slow down your reaction. This gives you a better opportunity of control. But still, with every type of reactor, there is a possibility

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of a loss of coolant failure. This generally can, and should, be dealt with by good engineering.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, I think I should leave the matter there and regard my speech as concluded.
4.36 p.m.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, I am not in any way an atomic engineer, but I have been much concerned with this question since 1953 when I was Ambassador in Sweden, and we had a great deal of technical co-operation between Great Britain and Sweden. A number of brilliant and most illuminating scientists and engineers, like my noble friend Lord Hinton, visited that country on a number of occasions and everybody found them very instructive. I was also much concerned with nuclear questions through the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, when I was at the OECD, and I have visited Dounreay three times and also Calder Hall in the early days.
Like others, I think that my noble friend Lord Sherfield started off this debate in a brilliant and most restrained and convincing way, and we are certainly very grateful to him. I wish that I could share the enthusiasm for the latter parts of the report which many Members of your Lordships' House have shown. I think that the explanatory parts are very valuable indeed; I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Halsbury. But I think it is quite wrong to beat about the bush to the extent that the Royal Commission do in all the latter parts. They put in everything that everybody said on both sides, and I think that a report of this kind is liable to raise the maximum fears among people who cannot understand atomic energy, and who do not follow the very balanced and sensible statements on the other side of the ledger; notably, those in which the Royal Commission, quite rightly in my view, underline the tremendous attention which our authorities and scientists and engineers pay to safety.
I should like to say that from my visits to nuclear establishments in the United Kingdom I have been very greatly struck by the same thing. They are extremely careful. They have very good fail-safe
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mechanisms, and I think that they take tremendous care both for the public and for the environment.
Here we have worked for 18 years on the fast breeder reactor. I believe that I first went to see it in 1959. There remain only a few engineering points to remedy, notably the design of the heat exchangers, which certainly present special problems at the high temperatures and radiation levels—problems which have never been met before, because nobody has used irradiated liquid sodium in that quantity or at that temperature. But I am convinced that these problems are not insoluble. The scientists and the engineers all say that they will find a solution; and I believe that the Department of Energy have recently given a large amount of money so that the necessary research should be carried forward.
Clearly, the problem of nuclear waste disposal ought also to be studied and solved soon. It is quite right that attention should be drawn to it. But it is not confined to the waste from fast breeder reactors. There is waste from the thermal reactors, from Windscale, and, for that matter, from the military installations. There is no reason why the fast breeder reactor programme should be held up for that disposal problem. Certainly it is not insoluble; the problem has to be solved and we shall certainly solve it.
I am not at all impressed by the talk about terrorists. Of course, there are some terrorists in a society or a set of nations in the Western World so freely, or should I say so laxly organised as ours. However, 32 countries all over the world already have nuclear power reactors. The list grows longer every year. Many other countries also have research reactors, and they all produce some plutonium. It is clear from the report that we are extremely careful with our own plutonium. If there is any real danger, it is that terrorists will get plutonium elsewhere. I do not believe that that danger is affected at all by our going ahead and using our own plutonium in our fast breeder reactor programme—and incidentally producing more for our own use. We must provide better safeguards against terrorists generally. I do not believe that providing plutonium for terrorists is the major danger. There are many other

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products, mostly chemical ones, which present much greater dangers, although I do not want to expand on this point for fear of giving the terrorists ideas.
There are other dangers, too. If we do not have the fast breeder reactor programme, then we have to use more of our oil—or else, like the Americans, we have to import more. The result is that we shall be more vulnerable. We have tankers travelling about the world in ever increasing numbers. Today we have seen what a disaster there has been on the East coast of America. We shall become more and more dependent on the North Sea installations which I believe are a major risk so far as terrorists are concerned. One has only to think of the Flixborough disaster and of what might happen at huge refineries like Fawley. In my opinion, the plutonium danger is a minor one by comparison with those.
The fact is that the plutonium economy is with us already. Several noble Lords have already made this point, and it sticks out a mile. All the argument in the report about the danger of the plutonium economy, as if it depended on our fast breeder reactor programme, is totally out of date. It shows that the Commission had not fully appreciated what is going on in the rest of the world, although they gave the necessary statistics. So the plutonium economy is with us now.
I am not at all impressed by the Royal Commission's alternative proposals, although I agree with them—and here they have rendered a valuable service—that we ought to try much harder than we do to use our existing energy resources more economically. As one drives up the motorways one sees enormous cooling towers wasting vast quantities of heat, and it is incredible that this should happen. If you travel up and down Germany, Sweden and France you see some cooling towers, of course, but you do not see a large quantity because the heat is piped into the towns. I do not know why Sheffield is not heated by those enormous cooling towers. Every time a building estate goes up I should have thought that provision ought to be made for a central heating plant. The report is very good on this subject. However, if we were to use coal and oil on an increased scale, as the report
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suggests, then we should be producing much more carbon dioxide and much more sulphur dioxide. For the conservationists to press us to go without nuclear power which does not give off these gases which are a potential danger to the environment, is something which I cannot quite understand. It seems to me that they have been guided by their emotions more than by a proper scientific approach in that connection. Thank God nuclear power avoids that danger to the environment!
I am in considerable doubt whether fusion can possibly come about at any early period to be an effective aid to the economy unless there is some very great breakthrough—perhaps with the enormous toroid at Culham. I personally find it difficult to understand how one can contain or make use of 50 million degrees Centigrade in a toroid without melting all the magnets necessary to concentrate the plasma. There is talk of a laser system but I believe that is miles away. I do not believe it will be with us this century and I shall certainly never see it in my lifetime, so I doubt if we should talk any more about that.
I cannot imagine that wind power would not arouse enormous objections from people when all our South Downs and North Downs and the hills round the country were covered with windmills. I should think there would be over-whelming objections—much more than to the power network necessary, about which so much is said in the report.
With regard to solar power I did not quite understand the point made by my noble friend Lord Tedder. There would certainly be a great many complications about removing algae from the sea in the quantity which he mentioned because a lot of living creatures feed on it and I think the fishing industry would have several things to say. Also I do not see how, if we had enormous power installations in the Sahara, we could get the power into this country. It would be a very expensive process.
The fact is that we must have more power. There is no possible doubt about that, even if one does not agree with the extrapolations in the report which, speaking as an economist, I did not personally find very convincing. Not only do we have

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to have more power but we have to use relatively more power in this country. If we take the OECD statistics issued in 1975 this country was ninth in the amount of per capita energy consumption and if we take the figures for 1976 (which were based on what happened in 1974) we are twelfth. So in this field, as in so many others, this country is sinking slowly. As soon as our economy recovers—and it will recover—we must get the better of this. It is a reflection of our very poor rate of investment and there has to be more power as the result.
I was very sorry to hear the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham suggest that advanced technology and technological industries are in some way damaging or even unchristian. The most damaging thing that could happen to this country would be to allow it to go on sinking into a state where it would be one big slum; and we are at present going that way. We have to look at the statistics, not just as they are today but over the years, and we have to look at them in a dynamic way. It is necessary to look forward and to see what is going to happen in 10 or 20 years' time. If we do not pull our socks up—and a lot of people are beginning to agree with this—that is where we and our children are going.
So here we have offered to us the fast breeding reactor which is a remarkable way of using up the uranium 238 which is the principal by-product from our first and second generations of reactors. That will increase the usefulness of our limited supplies of natural uranium sixty-fold. I do not see how else we can get the power. I agree with everything that noble Lords have said on this subject and as an economist I believe it is overwhelmingly important. I think that the fast breeder reactor programme—and I hope there will be more than two before this century is out—will alter the whole economic aspect of nuclear power production, and of the power available to our workers. At present they are under-paid because they are under-powered. It is interesting that America and Canada use two and a half times as much power per head as we do. For 20 years or more we have worked on this reactor. We still lead the world, and surely this is not the time to lose heart.
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What do the Royal Commission really want us to do? They specifically deny that they want us to scrap the fast breeder reactor programme. After all their pages and pages of beating round the bush, they want more talk, more public controversy and more reports. I really think it is quite ridiculous. In my opinion, the Government should go ahead as soon as possible to solve the outstanding difficulties. They should then order at once the first commercial fast breeder reactor to be built. The further reactor programme should be based on a standard design so far as possible, and not altered all the time, as happened with the Magnox and advanced gas-cooled reactors. It is essential that production engineers be included in the design teams to avoid our being landed with designs too costly or impractical to execute, and simultaneously —and I underline that word—we must settle the atomic waste problem, financing the necessary research as soon as possible. My Lords, this is a field where we now need firm leadership. I believe the Ministers for Energy and the Environment are eminently capable of giving this firm leadership. I hope the debate today will give them further support and encouragement.
4.53 p.m.
Lord HALE: My Lords, knowing nothing about the subject, I intervene simply to try to talk on something about which I know, and on which I have some experience. I spent 50 years of my life in the study of industrial diseases and accidents, sometimes participating in them. There are one or two things I want to say at once, even about the admirable report of the Royal Commission, where Sir Brian Flowers has given all the information that can be made available on the mathematics of the matter, although everyone knows that accidents are unpredictable, and there are no mathematics of the unpredictable. It is no doubt useful to say that this looks like one accident in 300 years, but it might be tomorrow.
My Lords, the causes of accidents are even less easy to evaluate or state. One of the real causes of accidents is the self-confident expert. The noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, was rather bemoaning the fate of the scientists of today, and saying,

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"We never get thanked for what we do. We take all the chances and nobody pats us on the back". I should have thought by now he was slightly wounded by pats on the back. The noble Lord is recognised as a man of outstanding genius; he is recognised for his services during the war; he is recognised as a perfectly de-lightful personality, and he is recognised as a very happy and able controversialist. But when one gets all the scientists al-together, it is an intellectual treat but often a moral dilemma. There are always the mathematics of the unpredictable.
The noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, spoke about prototype experience. Let us for a moment consider why in this area of advancing science, in this area of great expertise, in this world in which everyone knows more than the next man and a lot more, we are having more accidents than we have ever had. Graver accidents than we have ever before had are occurring; more serious accidents are occurring than when we chucked men down the pit with no rescue apparatus, no services, no way of getting them out, no way of sending anyone to see them if a flame broke out and there was a gas explosion. These are the sort of things we ought perhaps to have foreseen. Those were the days—and I assure your Lordships I have not even tried to make a list of them—when the biggest ever air disaster occurred. Certainly 300 people were killed because of the way the door was fastened. Is that unforeseeable? It cannot be unforeseeable because it happened before. The Douglas people had had a precisely similar type of accident in America. Have not Douglas got prototype experience, the thing to which Lord Zuckerman referred?
What about Aberfan. Was it really true that you could go on piling up muck near a housing estate until it was visibly shifting slightly and yet it did not occur to people that it might fall? What about the tube disaster? Have not the London Underground got prototype experience? Is there anyone who in his heart can say that this was not an outrage? Is there anyone who does not know that the question of whether the driver was ill or was drunk, or was not feeling very well, has nothing to do with it? The question is, where was the necessary secondary safety precaution that all experience
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requires in enterprises of that kind and that all of us thought existed?
The question of safety precautions is, of course, a matter of some importance in this matter. On the great journey across Canada there are long stretches of railway line where trains come up, interlock one with another, and pass. If a train stops, which it does not do very often, some signal has to be given to the train behind. There are not signals every hundred yards on lines which stretch over several thousand miles. So they have a rule—they explained it to me when I was there—that the man at the back of the train, an attendant who has a special name, but I forget what it is—
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: The brake-man.
Lord HALE: "Brakeman" will do; it is as good as the one I wanted. He gets out at the back the moment the train stops, and he walks 100 yards up the line and lights a fire. Once the fire is going the driver of the train coming behind can see it and he slows up. Trying not to sound patronising, I said: "It is a bit primitive, is it not?" They said, "Well, we have been working that system since the railway started, and we have never had a complaint. We have never had an accident, and our safety record is the best in the world". It was just my luck that next morning was not one of their best, and I was on the train. I woke up at half past eight on that next morning to see the engine poking straight up into the air, rather like a prancing horse, and (one of those sights you only go to see in the Royal Academy now) a wagonload of salmon lying spread about in the snow, and, unfortunately, the brakeman was no more. One or two other men went. But, fortunately, the restaurant car, which was smashed to smithereens, was completely empty although it had been full a few minutes before. This, of course, is experience. This of course is preparation and care.
The first accident I recall in my young life was the sinking of the "Titanic". There was an expert in England who happened to be on that ship. This was the unsinkable ship. The reason they did not have boat drill was because it was silly on a ship that could not sink. Why should you

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go through all the trouble of boat drill? Indeed, why should you carry too many boats, because no possible emergency could arise? It sailed from London with the blessing of all the shipwrights, the navigators and so on, and three days later it was sunk with about 1,500 passengers.
That was not the first disaster because 60 years before the outstanding ship in Her Majesty's Navy was the one that was built to go under sail or steam, HMS "Captain". It was on its first full exercises off Finisterre one day, and congratulatory messages were going out on its performance all over England. It got dark, and when the Admiral woke up next morning, he could not find it. Nobody ever did find it. It lasted one day. He had to wire to the Admiralty, "Regret to say HMS ' Captain' appears to have foundered with all its complement." In point of fact, one small boatload did arrive on the French coast in the end. They were all on deck at the time and they were chucked off by the boat capsizing. Of course, the court of inquiry said that no one was really to blame, just as they did about Albert and the lion. But everybody knew that they had got the centre of gravity wrong, and that is rather a serious mistake when you are under sail.
There is the third one, in which I was professionally engaged. I had the good fortune not only to have the services of my right honourable and learned friend the Member for Northampton in the conduct of the inquiry, but even the rarer fortune of seeing him here on the day before the Christmas holidays and persuaded him to stay for a moment. So far as anybody knew, there were no obvious faults with the submarine "Thetis". It left Liverpool under dual control, and was sailing somewhere off Llandudno. In an operation it tilted up so that half the submarine was out of the water—an over-loaded submarine at that; it had a complement of about 100—and half under water.
At this stage the Admiralty communication was by telegram. The news of the disaster was handed to a telegraph boy down on the South Coast, who stopped to have his tea before cycling uphill to deliver the message. It was that kind of thing. The deep-sea divers in Britain were at Scapa Flow. Immediately a
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message was sent to say that they were entirely at the disposal of the rescue team. They got a message back, "No need to come; nobody worry". When the inquiry came on, after 95 per cent. of the lives had been sacrificed and the sub-marine had gone, my right honourable friend asked one question of the diver who had been turned back—"What was the equipment you would have needed to save the lives of these men, " and his answer was, "One oxyacetylene blowpipe". Speaking from recollection, about 90 lives were lost.
It is, therefore, a question of looking very carefully at what action is required and, in these circumstances, recalling the accident at Windscale—I am anxious to be fair about this—I come down strongly to the view that we must provide fair working conditions and full insurance against every risk, having taken every precaution with every rescue facility. It must be open-ended insurance for anybody who can be damaged in this sort of operation. And I apply that very particularly to the increasing use of toxic poisons, of which we have been hearing, in industry.
There is a touch of cynicism in every politician, despite the admonition by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. When I read of the comparatively minor but threatening disaster I refreshed my memory from the invaluable Keatings and I found the sequence of events something like this: 11 th October, rumour of a slight leak: 12th October, slight accident confirmed—no flames but glow; 12th October also, I think, milk found to be poisoned ail round and being poured down the drain as unfit for consumption; 13th October, special Cabinet meeting held. Perhaps I should withdraw the use of the word "special" because it may have been an ordinary Cabinet meeting. At any rate, the Cabinet considered the matter and almost immediately, certainly in the same week, there was an announcement that there would be a full inquiry but that it would never be published.
I can understand their desire to keep their secrets from the CIA; I would not trust the CIA with any secrets. However, that was rather unbelievably special treatment, and what I now read is that in fact what happened was that the wind changed and blew the poison over to

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Copenhagen, London and Cornwall—and blew it quite extensively—and fortunately diverted it from nearby Wind-scale, which might have suffered very greatly. That is the story. If one then has a secret inquiry, one must ask people to speculate and enquire.
I made reference in a Question the other day to the explosion at Seveso, but I will not go into that. In this charming place, eight days passed before an accident was announced or publicised at all. Seveso is in that lovely angle which Manjoni described so beautifully in I Promessi Sposi, but it is now very close to the large industrial city of Milan. It was a disaster pregnant with possibilities. We have not yet been told what they are, but there followed the programme on television in which we were told that this was the sixth country in which there had been this type of accident. Bolsina we knew of. The Bolsina accident was thought sufficiently serious to destroy the whole plant and say that they would never use it again. In another country, no news was given for 10 years. In another, they knew that every rescue worker was tainted with cancer. We are waiting now for information.
I shall conclude by telling as briefly as I can a story that I think particularly relevant to the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. I speak of what has been happening in Michigan. One factory there makes a product called Firemaster, which I think is polybrominated biphenyl. It is not made anywhere else in the world, so far as we know. PBB is really not known. PCB—polychlorinated byphenyl —is known and it is known to be a poison which lodges in the tissues, which is extremely dangerous and which does not respond to the ordinary bodily process of metabolism. It is one of the most dangerous of all poisons and is much stronger than thalidomide. The same firm also produces a product that it calls Neutromaster, which is a magnesium salt mixture which is used to strengthen animal feed. It is quite harmless and possibly helpful and it is supplied mainly to the Michigan Farm Bureau. They mix it with all the grain they are sending out as an additive for health.
This went very well. Nobody knew whether Firemaster stopped fire. Quite possibly it does not. I would not know, but a lot of people thought that it might
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and they bought it. The firm sold about 12 million lb. of Firemaster. Then the firm ran out of bags. This is what is called the unforeseeable and unpreventable accident. For the time being, therefore, instead of using different coloured bags, they used brown paper bags with the name stencilled on. Then they sent out a lorry driver with instructions to deliver a load of Neutromaster to the Farm Bureau. As the driver could not read or write, he delivered a load of Firemaster which was duly mixed up with the grain by the Farm Bureau and was sent to nearly every farm in Michigan. It killed animals to the tune of 30 million dollars-worth of compensation which has now been paid.
The hens ceased to lay, as they did when armour was refused to Joan of Arc, and then there was on the face of it a major disaster. It went on for months. Cattle had to be destroyed on the scale of a cattle disease. The slaughtered animals were chopped up and served as food to the other animals, so that all the healthy animals in Michigan had got it, and the hens were still not laying and men began to find themselves showing symptoms. Years have gone by; the matter has been investigated, postponed and thought over. But according to the figures we have seen 1,040 human beings, almost certain to be infected, have been examined. The report is in the hands of the medical officers who are looking at it. I do not quote this —it may be sensational—but I think it is the Observer which says that 9 million lives are in danger. This is a matter of wide concern. I am grateful to your Lordships for your indulgence. I am grateful to you for listening with such care, and I hope that you have a happy Christmas. I do not think that I ought in your interests to withhold the information that the diseased hens were disposed of by being sold to an international soup manufacturer, presumably for the best chicken soup.
5.16 p.m.
Lord KINGS NORTON: My Lords, to my very great regret I was prevented by circumstances beyond my control from attending the middle part of this debate, but I had the pleasure of listening to the opening speech by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, which seemed to be a most admirable introduction to a report

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for which I had already developed considerable admiration. I thought that it was a splendid report and one which we can study in detail with profit for a long time to come. I was also delighted to hear many of the speeches just following that of the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, particularly the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, who I think was able to comfort us about the safety of ourselves but was doubtful about the safety of our barbarian posterity, and we should all be indebted to him for the splendid but somewhat claustrophobic vision of standstill pigs in a submarine pipeline.
One of the most interesting diagrams in the report of the Royal Commission is Figure 25, which helps to quantify the sources of our energy, and among other things it illustrates what qualitatively is indeed known to us, that we have large reserves of coal and oil and that we could, by exploiting these hydrocarbon fuels, continue for many years without the need of nuclear energy. If all the nations of the world were in the same fortunate position, it would perhaps be possible to postpone the development of nuclear energy for some years to come, or else to develop other sources of power so effectively as to make unnecessary recourse to nuclear energy, with what are still to me, despite the statistics of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, its terrifying safety problems. Unfortunately, this is not the situation, and while we could on our own pursue a purely coal-plus-oil policy for some years, we cannot afford to drop out of the highly competitive nuclear development field, and I certainly recommend that we should push ahead as determinedly as ever, not only looking for export opportunities, but applying to the waste problem the great skills which we undoubtedly have in the development of the highest safety standards. But, my Lords, it seems to me evident that nuclear energy policy cannot be allowed to continue ad lib, here or anywhere else, on the basis of unlimited and unrestricted proliferation. In other words, while for some time to come current developments, which are so much more important to the satisfying of the future middle-term needs of other countries than they are to the satisfying of our own, must be allowed to proceed, we must, if the world of our great-grandchildren is to be safe to live in, develop an alternative.
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My Lords, there is one inexhaustible source of energy which we must use—the sun. I fear that, having missed some of the earlier speeches in this debate, I may have been anticipated in what I have to say, and, indeed, from what the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, said, I rather think the noble Lord, Lord Tedder, must have been dealing with this theme; but if your Lordships will allow me, I should like to mention it again because I believe that we—and, here, I do not mean just the United Kingdom, but the leading nations of the world—have time to develop its use in such a way that nuclear power can, if we wish, be run down and, if we wish, abandoned. Some would say that that is a consummation devoutly to be desired. I am not sure; but, at least, it would be well if we were in a position to decide how much we wanted.
The energy of the sun is available to us in a number of ways. I think I can mention six. First, from the wind; second, from the waves—not the tide, my Lords; I do not suppose your Lordships thought it was, but that, indeed, is the moon—third, from direct absorption of the sun's heat by flat plate collectors; fourth, by photo-voltaic cells; fifth, by photo-biological means; and, sixth, by photo-chemical means. Forty years ago the nuclear power station was at the "gleam in the eye" stage. In 40 years, from a position of theory and laboratory experiment we have reached the highly sophisticated, immensely practical and economic nuclear power station of today —and, sadly, the horribly dangerous nuclear weapon. My Lords, can we not in the next 40 years develop the conversion of the sun's energy, bestowed so generously on this miserable world, to a similar or even greater stage of progress? This, in my view, should be the policy of all the nations of the world, and we should be prepared to show the way ourselves.
I do not think this is the time or the place to go into details. I do not think, any more than did the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, that the wind will ever be a great source of power. Too much wind-mill is needed for too little output. But it should be developed to the utmost, and could undoubtedly help less advanced countries than our own. The waves, while not much good to, say, Switzerland or Liechtenstein, could possibly make

1421
quite an appreciable contribution here. I am glad to know that work is proceeding on what I would believe to be a satisfactory scale. Optimists tell us that the whole current energy demand of this country could be met by about 300 miles of coast-located apparatus. Pessimists, and Dr. Musgrove in particular, tell us it would be 16 years before the energy output equalled the energy expended in making the apparatus. These are two different points of view; but, of course, by the time the apparatus had paid for itself it might well be worn out or covered in barnacles, and clearly the situation is one which must be investigated very carefully because it might have considerable possibilities.
But when we come to flat plate collectors we come to a different order of magnitude. For space heating and domestic purposes these have a tremendous future. Indeed, in some countries—and Israel is one of them—they are widely used already. I think that in Israel about one house in five depends for its domestic purposes on this kind of equipment. But the photo-voltaic cell, which we think of today as the silicone cell, is the most thrilling possibility with, I believe, a higher probability of success than nuclear fusion. It is at something about the stage at which nuclear energy was 40 years ago with the same sort of potential. Here is something to which I believe we should apply our maximum intellectual effort with all the necessary finance. The possibilities are tremendous.
In a speech that I made in November 1973, I told your Lordships that it had been estimated that the probable global energy demand in the year 2000 could be produced by taking up about 400 miles square of the earth's surface—0· 1 per cent. of the earth's surface, solid or liquid—by the appropriate installations. It is a gigantic concept but surely not daunting to a world which has brought nuclear energy so far and so fast.
Then, my Lords, there are the photo-biological routes—which I again gather from the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, were mentioned by Lord Tedder—such as growing plants and fermenting the crops to methane. Finally, and most remote of the possibilities that I have mentioned there are photochemical means in which the basis would be the CO2 of the atmosphere and water, both plentiful and
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recyclable, to get our hydrogen or methane or methanol by processes which have not yet been developed.
My Lords, none of the methods of producing energy that I have mentioned have dangerous side effects. Unfortunately, even if we pursued them successfully, we have still got the wretched nuclear weapons with us. I only hope that if nuclear power were restricted we should at the same time be hampering weapon development. I feel strongly that we should put a great effort into cultivation of the sun. I think that is the way of salvation and that we shall be wise to follow it.
5.27 p.m.
Lord TODD: My Lords, I must first crave the indulgence of the House for the fact that I was unable to be present at the opening of this debate. I should have been but, alas! I had to assist today at the funeral of a friend, Sir David Martin, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, who has done almost more than anyone else I know to promote international scientific progress and to maintain the reputation of this country in that field. I am quite sure that in some of the earlier speeches, and certainly in some that I have heard this afternoon, many of the points that I might have made have been covered; so that I think that I shall confine myself to some general remarks in this field in order that, at any rate, my general views shall be known.
My Lords, I think that the report that we are discussing today is a very interesting one. It gives a very full review of the possible impact of nuclear power development on the environment. It also discusses the mechanism for control, construction, and setting of safety standards. For these reasons 1, like all other noble Lords, would certainly welcome the report. Unfortunately, I think the impression gained by general readers, although this is certainly not the intention of the Commission, is that it concentrates really on the fast breeder reactor and on whether or not we should carry on the pioneering work done at Dounreay on this type of reactor a stage further by setting up the design and construction of one commercial reactor, the so-called CFR 1.

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It is perhaps even more unfortunate that the report in that connection does not advise either to proceed or not to proceed. What it does is to postpone a decision, in my opinion unnecessarily. We have not much time to spare. There has been a lot of argument about likely demands for energy, and the ways in which we are going to meet them. Certainly from what I have read on the subject, it would appear that although there is some variation in the matter of dates, it would be not unreasonable to say on the basis of our present power sources, coal, oil, gas, water power and the current level of nuclear power supplies, that we are going to be hard put to it to meet our needs beyond about the year 2000. We simply cannot afford to neglect any new or improved sources.
There has been a lot of speculation about new or hitherto untapped sources of energy. Such speculation is, in the present context, very largely irrelevant. With great respect to my noble friend Lord Tedder, none of these speculative sources, including solar energy, has yet been taken to a stage which would justify any real reliance on them for closing an energy gap which will develop in the next 25 years or so. Remember, too, that we ought to be reserving our oil and coal resources for other purposes: for use as our main sources of carbon compounds on which depend most of our chemical industry and the satisfaction of almost the whole of our material needs. This is something that most people seem to forget. Oil and coal are not just fossil fuels; they are the only practical sources that we have of the hydrocarbons on which the organic chemical industry depends to produce the dyes, explosives, drugs, fibres, plastics, detergents, insulating materials, and so on, that are required. Without these, our daily lives would be very different and much less pleasant than they are today. More of these things are going to be needed in the future.
To me at least trying to close an energy gap by burning more and more of these fossil fuels is a kind of lunacy. We produce energy from these fuels by oxidising—that is burning—the hydro-carbons in them, producing at the same time masses of carbon dioxide which we usually liberate into the atmosphere. The
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long term effects of liberating more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could well be just as serious for the environment and for the human race as anything which could happen through the use of nuclear reactors, yet nobody seems to worry very much about this. Of course, we could argue that one does not need the hydrocarbons, that given unlimited energy, it would be possible to reduce carbon dioxide back to the hydrocarbon level and so make raw materials for industry in that way. This is true because it is what the vegetable kingdom is doing every day, using energy provided by the sun.
From our point of view the only conceivable source of energy on this kind of scale is nuclear fusion; that is to say, the controlled operation of the reaction used in the so-called hydrogen bomb and, if you like, the reaction by which the sun itself generates its heat and light. Research is going on in many places into the control of thermonuclear fusion. It should be pressed on with even more vigour than it is being pressed just now. Even an optimist like myself would consider that under the most favourable circumstances we are not likely to see a full-scale thermo-nuclear power station for 50 years or more—that is to say, until long after we are in trouble.
The need for us to conserve oil and coal to meet the needs of future generations for materials makes it all the more urgent that we consider every other potential energy source and, particularly from the standpoint of this country and Europe, nuclear energy is certainly one we ought to consider with a high priority. At present, as you know, our nuclear power stations depend on the fission of uranium 235. They depend therefore on the availability of uranium, of which rich and easily workable deposits are limited. If we stick to this kind of reactor, it seems to me that the fuel for such reactors must become more scarce and more expensive and, of course, it is here that the fast reactor comes in. Since it produces plutonium as well as burns it, the fast reactor offers us power which could without doubt be on a scale far in excess of that available from all the coal, oil and gas resources so far discovered.
Our own scientists and engineers are in the forefront of work in the fast reactor

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field. They have already demonstrated its potential in the prototype reactor which is now operating at Dounreay. The next logical step is to design and build one reactor on a commercial scale. Remember, my Lords, if we do that we are not committed to building more and more power plants on that principle, but if in fact the energy gap—which seems to be almost universally predicted—occurs before we can fill it with thermonuclear energy, we shall at least be ready to go ahead if we have done the pilot work on the fast reactor. What is more, our industry will be well placed to provide the power plants which will then be required in other countries. If we do not do it, we shall have to import the technology and equipment from overseas, with all that that would entail in cost and further industrial decline.
Of course, there are hazards about any new type of power plant, nuclear or otherwise. It seems to me that the report does not make it clear enough that the problems of radioactive waste and of plutonium getting into the wrong hands are not peculiar to the fast reactor. They are there now with present nuclear plants and with the very substantial stocks of plutonium already in military arsenals. But, as my noble friend Lord Zuckerman has already remarked, these dangers seem to have been contained pretty comfortably so far, and surely one prototype plant using a fast reactor is not going to make all that difference.
No advances are ever made in power generation or indeed in anything else, without some risk. What we have to decide is the degree of risk that is acceptable. In my view, the answer is simple: the risk in going ahead to build a CFRE reactor alone or preferably, as is suggested in the report, in concert with our EEC partners, is acceptable. I can see no reason at all for delay but I can see many reasons against it. It seems to me that in the days when Britain was in the van of industrial progress we did not worry or fuss too much about hypothetical dangers. We built very large gasometers in the middle of very densely populated areas, which one could argue was a very dangerous thing to do should there be an accident.
I am accustomed, as many of us must be, to hearing continual talk about
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Britain's ability and about new scientific discoveries and new discoveries in technology; but we are told that this is coupled with an apparent failure to exploit them on a commercial scale, so that our industry keeps on losing out to foreign competition. When I look at the recent agitation about the nuclear programme and the fumbling hesitation we have seen about the reprocessing plant at Windscale, I somehow begin to wonder: Is, perhaps, the so-called "British disease" some of us talk about not just indecision and timidity in the face of things that are new?
5.40 p.m.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, although I am speaking from these Benches, I do not speak for these Benches. I have asked that I may come in in the gap, as it were, to speak in this debate in your Lordships' House, because I come from Thurso and therefore live in the home town of Dounreay. In fact, this debate this day has taken me back over 20 years to when Dounreay first came up into our midst in Caithness, when we had the same kind of apprehensions as have been voiced on various sides of your Lordships' House, and when we sought information on and clarification of the problems that we would face in having this highly advanced scientific, technological neighbour about whom so little was known.
I remember a talk that was given in the town hall in Thurso—I perhaps thought that I could get in quite easily, but, in fact, I had to listen from outside the main door, because the hall was packed—which was given by the then Sir Christopher, now Lord, Hinton to whom we have listened with such interest today. In that one talk—it was a slightly longer talk than his speech in your Lordships' House—he explained in clear terms to the people of Thurso what they would have to face, what the Atomic Energy Authority hoped to do in their midst and how it would affect them, and, I think, 21 years later I am able to say that he did not let us down. My experience is that we were told the truth about Dounreay, what it would be like and how it would affect our lives, and the progress of it has been more or less to schedule, affected only by the whims of government in giving more or less money and encouragement at different stages.

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I have, in fact, stood inside the core—before they were active, of course—of each of the three reactors on the site. I have watched them in construction, I have watched them running and I have a tremendous confidence built from knowing the people who work in the industry, from knowing their sense of responsibility to the human race as well as to their profession and their sciences. It is upon that that I found my confidence in atomic energy as something which we should hang on to in this country, something that is very precious to us, something that is very valuable to us and something which we can usefully and wisely use; and my confidence in our ability to use it wisely, also.
One of the main reasons why the critics of atomic energy criticise the so-called fast reactor programme is that they say they do not see the demand for larger quantities of power spelled out. But during this debate people have spelled out the reasons why we shall need a further supply of power, and the biggest reason, to my mind, is that even if we do not increase our demand man for man in the industrialised world, we shall need this power if we are to give to citizens of the Third World a standard of living equivalent to the one which we enjoy; and, indeed, to the third-rate citizens in our own country. I defy anybody to tell me that we do not need more power and cheaper power, when it is possible for people to die of hypothermia in our midst. Certainly we need supplies of power which are cheap enough and plentiful enough for all our citizens to enjoy. Also we need supplies of power which are cheap enough and plentiful enough for all the citizens of the world to enjoy.
Another point which is made, and which again has been dealt with in the debate in your Lordships' House, concerns terrorists getting hold of plutonium and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. I am not going to take up your Lordships' time, as I promised to be brief. However, on the evidence that is available to me I am satisfied that if countries wish to acquire atomic weapons they can do so without having a fast reactor. Furthermore, the progress of a fast reactor programme in this country would not increase the danger of proliferation but would decrease it
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because, apart from anything else, the type of plutonium within a fast breeder reactor is less readily fissile than the type within other reactors.
Finally, the third point that is made against the fast reactor programme is that it involves a massive increase in the invasion of civil liberties. However, may I assure noble Lords that nobody in Thurso feels that his civil liberties are being invaded by virtue of the fact that he works at Dounreay. People would be horrified if they thought themselves to be more spied on or less free than any other citizen in Britain. I assure noble Lords that that is not how people feel.
The Atomic Energy Authority is accused of being Micawberish in thinking about fast reactors as the only way out of the problems created by the energy gap. I would counter that accusation by saying that I think it is Micawberish to hope that something else will turn up to fill the gap which has been demonstrated by speakers on all sides of the House. In our fast breeder reactor programme already we have not only one of the leading reactors in the world but one of the best, one of the safest and one that has gone the whole hog in experiment and has tried things out at the right scale to prove whether or not they will work.
If we stop that programme and hope that in some way this will save us from some danger, we are deluding ourselves because we shall merely be opening up the field for other fast reactors in other countries. We shall be doing ourselves out of the fast reactor technology know-how. We shall be putting ourselves in a position where it will be extremely difficult to buy into somebody else's fast reactor if, in fact, we need to do so, because we shall probably have dispersed the brains and the trained technicians to other countries where fast reactor programmes are going on. Also we shall have nothing to sell in the way of knowledge about how fast reactor systems can be made to work and about how the technology of harnessing a fast reactor to electricity production can be made to work. Therefore, people will not be very interested in us joining in at a later stage if we have no programme of our own. Therefore I plead with the Government to take this decision as reasonably rapidly as it can be taken, principally so as not to jeopardise the fast reactor system

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which we already have and which we already could use. By all means do not let us rush it; by all means let us examine all the facets of it that need to be examined—the safety precautions, and so on. These are well set out in the report of the Royal Commission. But do not let us delay unnecessarily because delay will only lose us further valuable lead in know-how; it will only lose us further valuable people from the industry and it will only put us in a more difficult position if and when we need to use the system.
I should like to end by saying that it may be a bad thing to do wrong but it is equally a bad thing not to do right when one can. I think it is right that we should take our fast breeder reactor programme to the stage of CFR I. I am not suggesting that we necessarily want to go in for the whole programme of the Atomic Energy Authority, but I think we do want to go to CFR1, so that if the time comes that we need it, we can have it and use it.
5.51 p.m.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, I removed my name from the list because what I wanted to say had been said previously and I thought that particularly on the last day noble Lords would be grateful if one speaker scratched. However, there is one point that I should like to make now and it can be made in about two minutes. The point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, but I should like to emphasise it. It is that we must look at this problem worldwide, because I believe that in the future the developing countries will demand a great deal more energy. As they are at the moment they are on the bottom of an exponential curve. One may reasonably suppose that in 20 years or so they will hit the steeper portion and the worldwide demands for energy at the time when we are hitting that gap will be far larger than we might suppose they would be, looking at our own situation. It may be possible here even to stabilise our demand; it will not be possible to do it for the developing countries.
The conclusion I arrive at is that it is even more important, therefore, and in fact essential, that we should have a nuclear programme to fill the gap. I am not in favour of nuclear fission as a means of providing energy but it is the
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only one which can fulfil the demands, so far as one can see, in the gap before something like the fusion process arrives.
5.52 p.m.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for initiating this debate, and when I say "I", I am speaking not only on behalf of the Government but because I personally have found this a most fascinating intellectual exercise during this rather long debate today. I am also extremely grateful to Sir Brian Flowers and his colleagues on the Royal Commission for providing the occasion by producing a report that is not only interesting and mind stirring but rightly, as we have heard today, creates controversy and poses the uncomfortable questions with which the Government must grapple.
When my right honourable friend gave the Government's initial reaction to certain aspects of the report he emphasised then that far greater consideration was needed before a comprehensive answer could be given. Consideration still continues and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, felt that in tabling his Motion noble Lords would welcome the opportunity to express their views before the Government declare themselves. Certainly the Government will be grateful for this because as was said by the noble Lord opposite, seldom can there be any other place in which a debate of this sort, with the number of distinguished speakers who have taken part today, could take place. Also, the views are valuable not only as individual views but because they reveal a great diversity, and I think this was polarised by the views of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, on the one hand and the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, on the other, and in between we have had points of information.
At this hour I do not intend to attempt to discuss the report in detail, nor to follow the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, into the financial and accounting arrangements on the details of supply and demand of energy. If I may, I will write to the noble Lord about that. Rather, I want to indicate the approach of the Government, and the considerations which have to be balanced. The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, said that he hoped the Government would

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make a commitment which was unequivocally clear. This sounds all to the good, and probably is possible at some stage, but if I can sketch the problems en route, I think the noble Lord will appreciate why-and I am sure he knows already—it is impossible, beyond a certain point, to hurry this along without in fact going a long way.
My Lords, my starting point is the present standards of safety, on which many noble Lords have spoken. Briefly, the Royal Commission consider that the arrangements for the control of radio-active discharges have worked satisfactorily. They consider that the risk of serious accident in any single reactor is small; that existing or planned security measures render the risks from current nuclear development few, and that the disposal, at least of low-level solid waste, is satisfactory. Generally, the Royal Commission believe that at present the nuclear industry has a clean bill of health, with the important provisos contained in their recommendations on organisation and research. So even in this area any feeling of complacency would be misplaced, and quite rightly so.
The real burden of the argument of the Royal Commission is that future risks have to be guarded against by present planning. This was most cogently expressed by my noble friend Lady White who, as a member of the Royal Commission, had a particular contribution to make, because she was able to give voice to the printed word of this report, and to give also the whole flavour of the Commission. Personally, I found hers an invaluable contribution. This means we must find solutions to the problems arising from a vastly increased programme of nuclear power before we commit ourselves to extending the present programme. There have been differing views expressed on this from all sides of the House, and these I will note carefully when I read Hansard. From the differences one thing emerges, namely, that there is nothing easy about these crucial decisions, either for individuals to debate or for the Government to decide.
Listening to some of the distinguished contributions which have been made to this debate, I felt that we really had to learn from some of our history. We should remember that, even today, we
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are feeling the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which "just growed and growed" without any proper planning. Even today, we can see the effects of the unplanned industrial revolution in the country. It is this that any Government must try to avoid when trying to balance the various criteria on which to base their decisions.
My Lords, many people think that nuclear power should be abandoned altogether, since they consider that the risks it presents are quite unacceptable. There are people on that side of the spectrum. However, the Royal Commission did not take this view. The Royal Commission said it would be neither wise nor justified to abandon the option of nuclear fission power. Having taken this stand, their central theme is the extent to which we use nuclear power in the final years of this century and beyond.
This raises two major issues. The first major issue is whether we should adopt the fast reactor which makes full use of uranium reserves and, secondly, the extent to which we can commit ourselves to a major programme—given the awesome problem of disposing safely of high-activity, long-lived waste. This is the crunch. What must be the approach of the Government? The noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, put forward the economic and industrial factors em-phatically, succinctly, and with great conviction. The Government are aware that issues of national wealth creation have to he balanced with the social and environmental factors. This is imperative in our economy. My noble friend Lord Wynne-Jones reminded us that we are determining the standard of living of future generations, and the right reverend Prelate went rather further and said that what we are talking about is the kind of society we hope for in the future. So the problem does not contract but grows as one discusses it and looks at it.
The problems of nuclear energy have also extended the environmental horizons. The nuclear power business can no longer he judge and advocate in its own cause. I was interested, when the noble Lord, Lord McNair, was speaking, I thought in a very sympathetic and interesting way, about the human aspects of this problem, that he referred all the time to the Minister of Energy and the Department of Energy.

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There is no competition in what I have to say about this, because here we must work together, but I would think that today the relative hazards to the public at large, when we are discussing fossil fuel versus nuclear fuel, is as much a matter for the Department of the Environment and the Department of Health and Social Security as for the Department of Energy and the Department of Industry. It is essential that we should this as a trans-Governmental exercise.
In the absence of adequate safeguards nuclear power can present dangers to the generation using it. Discharges of radio-activity to the environment, unless they are controlled very strictly, can result in people most exposed receiving more than the maximum permissible dose of radiation, either as a result of direct contamination or through the food chain. An accidental release of radioactivity might spread the danger more widely. Noble Lords have referred to this, but I think it is important that I put it in the context of governmental thinking, because at the end of the day it is the Government which has to take the responsibility. It is, I think, this aspect which feeds many of our doubts about the use of nuclear power. There may be a risk of irreversible biological consequences for future generations.
I was very interested to listen to the noble Lord. Lord Aldington, who made an extremely vigorous and interesting speech on the need to go ahead with nuclear power; he also referred to our having to take care in this area. The noble Lord, Lord McNair, referred to us as being the guardians of posterity. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, stressed the interesting point about leaving waste around that future generations may not know how to deal with, or they may not even know what they are, so to speak, stumbling on.
In a context of this magnitude international dialogue and co-operation are essential. I think the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona, was absolutely correct when he spoke about the European view. Other noble Lords—I think the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman—spoke about the global view. If we do not get this sort of dialogue and co-operation going, the risks of dissemination of nuclear capacity leading to the proliferation of nuclear weapons can be highly dangerous. There is no guarantee,
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as we all know, even if we do get a maximum of co-operation, but without positive international effort the outlook could be grim.
There is also the danger of radioactive material getting into the hands of terrorists and being used to blackmail society. I am not going to linger on that question because a great deal has been said about it by other noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and my noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder felt very strongly that there was great danger here, whereas the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, and the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, were not impressed by this argument. The fact that there can be these very strongly differing views does again make it imperative that it is some-thing that Government have to look at and take into consideration in their future plans, as well as the implications of the safeguards themselves.
The Commission expressed fears about both the implications for our society, the security measures necessary, and also the efficacy of these measures in an era of nuclear expansion. I think the Commission got a certain amount of battering about this. Nevertheless, whether they are right or wrong—and indeed these things are not incompatible, since conventional security measures are not the only means of preventing illicit acquisition of plutonium, and I do not think I had better go into that any further because I feel that there have been enough seminars for would-be terrorists going on this afternoon—it is absolutely right that these things should be thrown into the debating arena in order that the Government can also take note of them and also see how they can put their own house in order, if necessary, in this field.
This picture cannot be completed without looking at the possibility of doing without a major nuclear programme. There are two options, both of which have been brought out fully this afternoon. Either we cut our demand for energy altogether, or rely on other energy resources. If the other resource is coal, then although automation improves mining conditions, mining will still continue to be more dangerous than many other occupations. Nor can we dismiss the potential effect on the countryside of the opening of new mines, or the possibility of air pollution through increased burning

1435
of coal. The hazards have to be compared whichever we do. So far there has been no serious study of this comparison. As the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, reminded us, we cannot forget the oil situation. Even with the arrival of North Sea oil the dependence of the West on oil is again something where a great many political judgments have to come in.
There were a number of interesting contributions on the renewable sources of energy such as wave and solar power. The noble Lord, Lord Tedder, came out wholly in favour of solar power, as did the noble Lord, Lord Kings Norton. This was also discussed in the report, but at this stage it is neither certain whether we can rely on them—and this again was shown clearly by the differences of opinon expressed this afternoon—nor how far they would themselves carry social and environmental problems in their trail. The Royal Commission also suggested—and this was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona—that we should try to ease the problem by reducing our demand for energy. I am sure we are energy wasting in many areas in this country. But the Commission did not suggest, and I do not believe that the Government would either, that conservation could provide the solution. It might reduce some of our energy demands, but only minimally.
If we go too far along this road, then we have to be prepared for a lower standard of living. With the increased comfort and mobility which a high use of energy makes possible, it is not going to be easy to dismiss people's natural aspirations. When we look on the cosmic level, then we see that a low energy economy precludes a betterment of living standards in the Third and Fourth World. Though we are discussing this in somewhat national terms, we cannot ignore the international implications and must take the discussion into the realms of the underdeveloped countries of the world. The world population has a tremendous need for energy. In the really poor Fourth World, either we have to decide to go nuclear or restrict population.
The Government are in the unfortunate and difficult position of having to balance all these considerations. They have to
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balance them in a democratic society. This means that not only the views of the scientists and experts but the views of everyone else should be taken into account. The Government cannot and should not be wholly environmentalist or wholly materialist, with their eye just on the economy. They have to aim at the total national interest, but within the international context.
In this great debate—I say "great" advisedly in that I am referring not only to the debate of considerable calibre in your Lordships' House today but the debate which started some time ago, long before the report arrived, which is continuing and to which the Royal Commission has made such a substantial and lively contribution—it is difficult for the layman (perhaps I should now say, lay person) to cope with the complexities of scientific technicalities. The time scale within which it requires us to think is so colossal and the interactions we have to comprehend so complicated that it is hard for even the most fertile imagination to grasp. It is hard, as we have heard, to keep the arguments rational, and the emotional content is great. I think that in these areas—I say this speaking among scientists—a dash of emotion is not a bad thing, because we are talking not only about science but about humanity and human behaviour.
The time is, I think, more opportune now than previously in the last 20 years to attempt to strengthen safeguards by utilising international power; and, whether this is based on mutual fear or mutual good will, one hopes that the end result may turn out for the benefit of mankind. Some of the most fruitful suggestions that have come out of this debate have been on the issue of the debate being based on adequate information, as was recommended by the Royal Commission, and that the debate should be widespread, and a number of very helpful and useful suggestions have been made. The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, explained, I thought with great clarity, the reaction of the people of Thurso, and the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, explained exactly what the situation was and what the dangers and advantages were.
My noble friend Lady White rightly said that people had the right to have the

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risks explained to them; the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, rightly said that the myths should he exploded and the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, said it was far easier to generate fear than confidence. Is that not another way of saying that ignorance is a very good breeding ground for fear? It is really sheer ignorance of something which to many of the speakers this after-noon is child's play—at any rate to discuss, because they understand the subject so completely—and this is the problem with which the Government are faced and with which I am sure we shall find a way of coping. It is a question of getting the debate properly off the ground so that it can be discussed in terms which are understandable to the lay person who does not have a specialised scientific basis.
The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, said the Government should commission a work which, as I understood his suggestion, would be a compilation of scientific material which would be intelligible to the layman—a good idea which I will certainly put forward. I think that that is a very good idea and I shall certainly put it forward, as I will the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, for a bureau of scientific information attached to Government Departments.
My noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder thought that Government Departments should do more to equip themselves to give a scientific background to their thinking and policies. That, again, is worth very careful consideration. The Government are well aware of the extent of the problems but they are also very well aware that they are not easy to solve. Indeed, although I share in general terms the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, against encouragement of "delay, linger and wait"—I have been writing "urgent" on all the papers that I have sent out, but I found that it debased the currency so I had to stop—the Royal Commission has set out the issues and its report forms a very good starting point, and I really believe that this debate has taken the matter a good deal further. I believe that we shall all find when we come to read Hansard that there has been a great deal of hard comment and information on the report. I do not mean "hard" in the sense of "critical", though naturally some contributions have been critical: the Commission would
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hardly have done a job worth doing if everybody had agreed with it.
Luckily, for once, time is on our side, not, I know, in the long-term cycles in which it has been discussed by some noble Lords but in the sense that we have time to think about it and to try to get a reaction from people and to get their views. Also, it is essential in a democracy for the Government to carry the people with them. This, again, means information, education and complete understanding of what is involved. A totalitarian State does not have this problem, but this is part of our democratic society and it is something for which we are very grateful but which we have to harness in order to get the under-standing and lessen the very real fears of a great many people. Although. as I said, time is on our side, I also agree that we must not let it slip away before taking what may be one of the most profound and important decisions of our generation.
6.18 p.m.
Lord SHERFIELD: My Lords, I should like to express my thanks to noble Lords for their contributions to this debate, and perhaps especially to the noble Lord, Lord Hinton, for curing himself of laryngitis just in time to make a powerful speech; to the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, who overcame jet lag to come here today, and to other noble Lords who have no doubt conquered similar inconveniences. I should like particularly to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, for her Statement earlier and her very full and interesting reply to this debate. I am sorry to have been the unwitting cause of putting a heavy burden on her in mid-December—a time which, if I remember correctly, is one of heavy pressure on Ministers. I was glad to hear that the noble Baroness had not found the after-noon a waste of time.
It is no surprise to me that a very wide spectrum of opinions has been expressed in this debate. I shall take up only one or two points. In introducing the debate, tried in the interests of brevity to compress my remarks and that may have led to some misunderstanding. I did not say, as the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, suggested, that the Royal Commission was wrong in involving itself in nuclear sabotage and terrorism. I did not question its decision to do so. Nor did I, as

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the noble Lord, Lord Avehury, suggested, dismiss the subject. I merely voiced a little scepticism which has been echoed by a number of subsequent speakers. I was challenged by the noble Lord, Lord McNair, about the use of the word "robust" in relation to the result of the polls in California and six other American States. I used the word because the population had been exposed to heavy propaganda by the anti-nuclear lobby and yet it voted—13½ million people—two to one to brave the dangers with which it was confronted. I would also apply the same adjective to the noble Baroness, Lady White, who shows the same quality under equal, if opposite, pressures.
As regards the great debate, I did not say that it should be brought to an end. As the noble Lord, Lord Aldington, observed, it has a long way to run yet, and of course I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, said at the end of her remarks. But there are problems about this debate in relation to the requirements of the time scale, because the need for discussion can be used almost ad infinitum to delay decisions, although I am sure that that is not the intention of the Government.
Furthermore. such a debate thrives on sensation and tends to create sensation-alism and embattled lobbies, and Sir Brian Flowers himself has referred to the low level at which some of it has been conducted. On the sensational side, the recent small leak at Windscale has been blown up out of all proportion, and it shows how completely different criteria are applied to nuclear operations as opposed to other operations. In a large industrial organisation the managing director does not expect to be informed of every fire in a paint shop, which is a comparable incident.
I rather regret the decision to call in the planning approval of the oxide plant at Windscale. It seems to me rather like putting up a lot of new hoops in a game of croquet when you are approaching the stick. But now that the decision has been taken I hope that the inquiry will be expedited. Contracts worth half a billion pounds and a number of jobs hang on the decision. I should just like to repeat what I said earlier, that in my view reprocessing at home under adequate safeguards can and should be separated
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from the wider problems of international proliferation.
In asking the Government to make a general commitment to nuclear power I was thinking of all those engaged in the nuclear business at home and overseas. But of course such a commitment has to be implemented by a succession of decisions taken, as I said earlier, after what-ever public discussion and debate the Governmeut consider to be necessary. I will not prolong the debate further, and with renewed expression of thanks to all who have taken part in it and to Sir Brian Flowers and his colleagues for producing such a profoundly interesting report, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

CONSOLIDATED FUND BILL
Brought. from the Commons endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read 1a. Then, Standing Order No.43 having been suspended (pursuant to Resolution), Bill read 2a; Committee negatived; Bill read 3a and passed.

FISHERY LIMITS BILL
Returned from the Commons with the Amendment agreed to.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, before moving the adjournment may I, with the leave of the House, on behalf of my noble friends wish noble Lords in all parts of the House a pleasant Christmas and a happy New Year.
Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON: My Lords, at this seasonal time, when all the usual channels are flowing with milk and honey suitably laced", I should like to reciprocate, on behalf of my noble friends on these Benches, the good wishes and Christmas greetings, not only to all Members of the House but to all the staff as well.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do adjourn during pleasure until 6.35.
Moved accordingly and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

ROYAL ASSENT
6.35 p.m.
The LORD CHANCELLOR (Lord Elwyn-Jones): My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Consolidated Fund (No.2) Act 1976,

National Insurance Surcharge Act 1976,

Fishery Limits Act 1976,

Scottish Transport Group (Castle Bay Pier) Order Confirmation Act 1976.