§ 3.9 p.m.
§ The Earl of Halsbury rose to call attention to the need for pressing on with the development of the commercial fast reactor; and to move for Papers.
§ The noble Earl said: My Lords, in opening our debate this afternoon on the Motion which stands in my name, I should like to start by thanking all the very distinguished speakers who have put down their names. I have never before, during the course of what is now very nearly 40 years in your Lordships' House, had the privilege of acting as compère to such a galaxy of talent. May I add that no Chamber in any legislature in the world, save this, could field such a team in any comparable context?
§ I am particularly glad to see my old friend the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside, with us again. He built the world's first nuclear power station, and over 30 years ago it was his vision which launched the fast reactor into the domain of the feasible—1950 was the date. He speaks with quite unrivalled authority on these matters. The noble Lord, Lord Kearton, has been a member of both the Atomic Energy Authority and the Central Electricity Generating Board, while my noble friend Lord Sherfield, though a career diplomat, has been involved in matters nuclear since 1944. He was chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority and until recently of our own Sub-Committee F on power and other affairs in relation to the European Community. In this he was succeeded by my noble friend Lord Kings Norton, who is also to speak. The noble Lord, Lord Flowers, has gone to considerable personal trouble to be here this afternoon, and I am most grateful to him. He was chairman of the inquiry into the interaction of nuclear power and the environment. Anything that he has to say on the all-important question of safety I am sure will be listened to with great attention.
§ I am also obliged to the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, for travelling down from Caithness. He has achieved a remarkable familiarity with nuclear 182 engineering and I always listen to whatever he says with the greatest interest. There is one name that I should have liked to be able to welcome here this afternoon, but circumstances are against it. I am referring to the noble Earl, Lord Ilchester, who is President-elect of the Institution of Nuclear Engineers, and I am sure that your Lordships would have welcomed his contribution.
§ Some noble Lords have expressed to me the hope that, after listening to this debate, they may go home with some type of understanding of what it is all about in words of one syllable. Within the limits of what is possible in the time available, I shall try to grant their wish by dividing what I have to say into two parts. I shall begin by trying to explain to noble Lords in simple terms, without blinding them with science, something of what this is all about.
§ We are going to talk about the boiler of a steam engine. I hope that that is simple, familiar language. The engine will be of the kind we call a turbine and its function will be to drive an electric generator, which will supply power to the national grid. The steam, the turbine, the generator and the grid will all be conventional products, and your Lordships can forget about them in the course of our debate.
§ We are all familiar with boilers. I had a toy boiler when I was a child and I expect that some of your Lordships did too. Your Lordships know that they have to be supplied with fuel and an air-draught and that without the fuel you could not light the fire and without the air-draught you could not keep it going. In the course of the combustion, the fuel is consumed, ash is left behind and heat is generated and transferred to the water in the boiler drum or boiler tubes, which turns into steam and does the rest of the process.
§ All those features have their equivalents in a nuclear boiler. You only have to rename them and identify them with material whose substance is unfamiliar but whose function is analogous to what you already know and understand. What keeps the fire going by burning up the fuel—the counterpart of the air-draught in a boiler—is a cloud of neutrons. Never mind what neutrons are. Your Lordships might not be all that happy about having to answer an examination question as to what air is, but that does not stop you breathing it all your lives and using it to light fires.
§ Your Lordships are accustomed to think of fuel being supplied in bunkers. Imagine then that nature has provided us with three bunkers labelled No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3. The first two contain Fuel 1 and Fuel 2 and are provided by nature. The third bunker is empty and we have to fill it up ourselves. No. 1 contains the primary fuel which is burnt to ash with the evolution of heat. In the course of this it transforms part of the substance of Bunker No. 2 into a new primary fuel which is a substitute for the fuel in Bunker No. 1. So Bunker No. 3 gradually fills up with a Bunker No. 1 substitute.
§ What happens when we have burnt up all the fuel in Bunker No. 1? If we have accumulated as much in Bunker No. 3 as we started with in Bunker No. 1, we can happily go on transforming Bunker No. 2's contents into more fuel until there is nothing but ash left. The fire then goes out, as any fire does when its fuel is exhausted. But if, when Bunker No. 1 is empty, 183 there is not enough in Bunker No. 3 to top it up with, the process cannot go on indefinitely. It is not self-sustaining and it will gradually come to a standstill with what is left in Bunker No. 2 no longer available for any useful purpose. It is important to quantify this. Nature supplies us with, let us say, seven tons in Bunker No. 1 and 1,000 tons in Bunker No. 2, with nothing at all in Bunker No. 3 and we have to fill that up. If under these circumstances we run the process down, we shall be left with a very great deal of useless material in Bunker No. 2 because of the very large quantity with which we started.
§ Whether that is comprehensible or not, whether it helps your Lordships to think of what we are going to talk about in the rest of the debate, I do not know. However, I hope that it is comprehensible. Let me now give Bunkers Nos. 1, 2 and 3 their proper names. Bunker No. 1 is called Uranium-235; Bunker No. 2 is called Uranium-238. Bunker No. 3 is called Plutonium-239.
§ The boiler about which we are talking this afternoon is the first in the world to achieve just what I have described: turning the whole of the natural uranium with which nature provides us into power and not just 1 per cent. or so, which is what we achieve in a conventional thermo-nuclear power station. For this new boiler we need a new name, and many appropriate names are available from which to choose. We could call it a low waste reactor, because it produces less radioactive waste per unit of power generated than any other. We could call it a high conversion reactor since it converts a high proportion of uranium into plutonium. We could call it an incinerator reactor because it can be used to burn up some very inconvenient long-lived by-products of thermal reactors which would otherwise have to be stored under security conditions for an embarrassingly long time. We could call it a breeder reactor if it were used to produce more plutonium than the uranium it burnt up, as indeed it can be used. Historically it has been dubbed a fast reactor because the spectrum of fast and slow neutrons is biased on the fast side—although I ought to explain that all neutrons start their careers as fast neutrons and are gradually degraded to thermal ones—compared to that of a thermal reactor. Indeed its settled name now is "the fast reactor". We can forget the might-have-beens remembering only that "fast" does not mean something that is liable to run away out of control; it is not "fast" in that sense.
§ Its importance is based on the immediate accessibility of its fuel in large quantities. There are thousands of tons of depleted uranium in this country from which the Uranium-235 has been extracted either for the weapons programme to make bombs, or to enrich thermal reactor fuel. There are hundreds of tons of spent fuel elements stored in power stations while their radioactivity dies away, all capable of being reprocessed and separated into uranium, plutonium and waste—the first two being reusable.
§ It has been estimated that there are 400 years of energy requirements for this country locked up in stock now, today: material that was mined, paid for in years long past, extracted, purified and used, but not used up. These stocks, written down to nothing in the books, now await recycling and reusing. So far as 184 power for the grid is concerned—I am not talking about petroleum products for motor-cars or anything like that—not a new mine need be sunk, not a man need go underground and not a well need be drilled. It is all there now at written down values waiting to be used in a fast reactor: the result of 30 years of effort by the cream of our engineering professions under the superb inspiration of the noble Lord, Lord Hinton of Bankside.
§ I am not talking of pie in the sky. The plant is working now, generating power for Scotland from Dounreay in Caithness. Although today it may be shut down for some engineers to carry out some experiments or to replace something, broadly speaking, it is working. What we have to do is to scale it up by a factor of six up to commercial-sized power station, which, in effect, means putting six units—burner units, if you like to call them that—into the same tank.
§ Year after year I have accompanied parties of Cross-Bench Peers up to Dounreay to look at the prototype quietly generating power as they stood on it, walked over it, walked about it, and, metaphorically speaking, almost had their breakfast on it, while making friends with the extremely interesting and impressive staff who have built and run it. So much for what it is.
§
But what are we to do about it? Last week the Government officially confirmed all that I have told you in a Statement, of which I shall read only a short part or I shall be stealing the brief of the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield. They said:
The fast reactor is of major strategic significance for the United Kingdom's and the world's future energy supplies. It is 50 times as efficient a user of uranium as thermal reactors, such as the advanced gas-cooled reactor and pressurised water reactor, and can create out of the spent fuel and depleted uranium which has so far arisen from our thermal programme fuel equivalent to our economically recoverable coal reserves.
§
Those are usually taken as being 400 years' supply though the figure in the case of coal may be wrong, in the case of uranium it would be right. The Statement goes on to say that the Minister has:
asked the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority. Sir Peter Hirsch, in consultation with the generating boards"—
and so on—
to draw up a future development programme which makes the best use of our resources and experience.
The Minister then adds:
In common with most other leading fast reactor nations, we now believe that the series ordering phase"—
that is, when you start ordering duplicates in large numbers—
will begin in the earlier part of the next century, and thus"—
and these are the significant words, and somewhat sinister words they are—
on a longer timescale than we have previously envisaged.
§
What sort of forward planning is this, and what sort of thinking has gone into this Statement? It refers to:
the earlier part of the next century".
§ That is only 17 years away. If I am alive I shall be only 92, which is younger than the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell is now. Why treat the early part of the next century as if it were a date like the Greek kalends that we do not have to bother about? If you started to build a fast reactor today, it would take 10 years to commission, and before the process of serial ordering of copies 185 could start you would need at least 10 years' experience on it to make sure that some small trouble did not emerge at 10 years or thereabouts. Then, when you started your serial ordering, it would still be another five or 10 years before you got the product. So we are projecting our minds forward to the year 2013 or thereabouts, when I shall be 105 and the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, 128.
§ What is this talk of "a longer timescale than we have previously envisaged"? Perhaps the noble Earl the Minister can tell us. I have never heard of any specified timescale. I have pressed for it over and over again; whichever party was sitting on the Government Bench I have pressed them for it. But I have never received an answer as to what it is. I find this sort of complacency somewhat alarming. Series ordering in the early part of the next century means ordering now for the demonstration model, the first one. Have the Government never read Aesop's Fables? Have they never read the parable of the hare and the tortoise? The hare thought he had the whole day in which to beat the tortoise, but in the event he could not afford to go to sleep after lunch or to loll about in the afternoon. The tortoise, on a slow and steady basis, got there first.
§ That Dounreay should be kept going is axiomatic. But what is this request made to Sir Peter Hirsch and others for a forward development programme? Has not Dounreay had an ongoing development programme ever since I first visited it in 1956? What sort of a development, other than the development of a fast reactor, have the Government in mind? Is this really a euphemism for the fact that the work at Dounreay, without mentioning it, is incomplete; that the prototype still has unsolved problems? If it has, then my noble friend Lord Hinton of Bankside will doubtless tell us what they are. I have always told my friends in the context of this projected debate that the wording of my Motion is intended to include continuing work with the prototype. What I emphasise in the wording of my Motion is the word "pressing". I fail to detect any sort of urgency, as opposed to complacency, in the Government's Statement. The ineffective search for a partner could occupy a lazy bureaucracy for years, to the great delight of the Treasury, which would not be seeing any money spent. By all means get a partner, if you can find a good one, with something to contribute, who will put up his money as a matter of course and not just talk around the clock about doing so.
§ Once we were the acknowledged leaders in this field and in many respects, about which no doubt your Lordships will hear, we still are. How, other than by slippage—and what sort of slippage?—has it become necessary to talk of having a partner? The concept of a partnership is meaningless unless you settle on the site where the partnership operation will take place. The obvious place is Dounreay. It is where the know-how and the personnel who understand it, built it and operate it are. If it is to be built elsewhere, then I deliver the Government into the tender mercies of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, who will doubtless have something to say on the point.
§ Next, I want to dispose of a red herring that must not be dragged across our path. The red herring is the immediate economics of the fast reactor equally with its prospective economics 20 years from now. The 186 immediate economics of the fast reactor are totally irrelevant because we do not have one and we could not get one however much we wanted it. So what its economics would be today is of no relevance whatever. We are concerned with the economics in 20 years' time. We are talking of five or six general elections ahead; we are talking of several Ayatollah Khomeinis ahead, several OPEC price rises ahead. Anything in the way of a projection—it is fashionable to call it a scenario—as to what will happen in 25 years, time is just fudging the issue. Forecasting so far ahead is just a waste of time.
§ Another red herring is movements in the world price of uranium. We are told that it may be dropping. However, it does not matter what the world price of uranium is; we have enough uranium stocks to last 400 years, all written down at nil value in the books. We do not have to go into the market and buy it. We may need serial ordering of fast reactors next century as an option among others. We may need it desperately; we may not need it at all. To get a move on now is not a response to fuel and power need. It is an insurance policy against a crisis in the future. You do not—I repeat "not"—grudge your insurance policy year after year merely because this year your house did not happen to burn down.
§ Lastly, I should like to say a few words on morale: the one thing that, alas! no Government are interested in until the balloon goes up, and they cling in desperation to those who have preserved it in spite of them. We need the cream of the cream of our engineering talent on this project. The morale of those at Dounreay must be kept high by the conviction that they are working for a nation that knows its own mind because it has a mind to know, and not just a gaggle of quiz masters on TV. A mere illusion to that effect will soon be unmasked and then your first-class staff will drift away to other employment. The men who built it are ageing now. The next generation must be recruited now and must be of the best.
§ It is not uranium or plutonium that makes power stations; it is men. It is not uranium or plutonium that is uncontrollable so much as the sequentiality, the unpredictable sequentiality, of Governments, their irresolution, their procrastination, their lack of continuous driving will and pressure, no matter which ex-Government I am talking to or would be talking to hypothetically. These are the factors against which I have been, and ever shall be, an unashamed, unrelenting, gadfly, and, in that spirit, my Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
§ 3.31 p.m.
§ The Minister of State, Scottish Office (The Earl of Mansfield)My Lords, the fast reactor is of major and strategic importance for the United Kingdom's and indeed the world's future energy supplies. Therefore, on behalf of the Government, I welcome this opportunity for debate which the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has given the House. I congratulate him on the exceptionally lucid manner with which he explained matters which, at first blush, are extremely complex, technical, and too much for the lay citizen. Coming within just a few days of the fast reactor policy announcement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Energy, his Motion is especially timely and appropriate.
187 On looking down the list of speakers, and in particular being aware of their experience and indeed their expertise, no one can be but aware of the feast which is to come. My noble friend Lord Skelmersdale, who is to reply to the debate, and indeed I myself, will listen with a great deal of interest and attention to what is said. May I, on a personal note, ask the House's indulgence if I do not stay until the dying moments of the debate because of a previous engagement. I hope that that will be understood.
The noble Earl's Motion calls attention to the need to press on with the development of the commercial fast reactor. As he, above all, will have seen from my right honourable friend's announcement, this is precisely the Government's strategy. As my right honourable friend emphasised in his announcement, the fast reactor is some fifty times as efficient a user of uranium as thermal reactors, such as the advanced gas-cooled reactor and pressurised water reactor. It can create out of the spent fuel and depleted uranium which has so far arisen from our thermal programme fuel equivalent to our economically recoverable coal reserves. It is therefore a vital technology for the future.
The United Kingdom is among the world's leaders in the development of this technology. Through the successful programme of research and development undertaken by the Atomic Energy Authority we have demonstrated the feasibility and potential of this technology. It is perhaps fitting that I should say something about the history of this programme. That it started at all is a tribute to the vision of the scientific and engineering communities, and to the Churchill Government which in the 1950s authorised the first steps leading towards establishment of a major research and development programme.
Serious consideration of the engineering of the fast reactor system began in the United Kingdom in the early 1950s. As a practical check on the physics of the system a small zero-power plutonium-fuelled reactor, Zephyr, was built at Harwell and operated between 1954 and 1958. The results were encouraging and work started on the Dounreay fast reactor—known as the DFR. This 15 megawatt reactor was built to demonstrate the engineering feasibility of the system. As its name indicates it was, as we all now know, sited at the Atomic Energy Authority's establishment in Caithness. DFR first operated in 1959. It was the first fast reactor in the world to produce electricity for commercial use. It achieved its full design power in July 1963, at which time it was the most powerful fast reactor in the world.
The successful construction and operating of DFR provided experience of the engineering problems of fast reactor technology: during a life of over 17 years it served as an essential irradiation facility affording experience with fuel and materials as well as producing electricity. In addition to providing a wide range of information on reactor physics, coolant behaviour and performance of the reactor components and of the metallic enriched uranium fuel, steady runs at various power levels showed the stability and ease of control of the system.
The principal use of the reactor during the later 188 years until March 1977 was as a test bed for uranium/plutonium oxide fuels for the prototype and commercial reactors to follow DFR. During the final runs the opportunity was taken of performing some safety-related experiments on fuel under conditions much more severe than those of normal operation. These confirmed the excellent safety characteristics of the system. In parallel with the operation of DFR, plans were made for design of the next step: a reactor much larger than DFR, the 250 megawatt prototype fast reactor, known as PFR.
Construction of PFR began in 1967 on a site at Dounreay adjacent to DFR. The reactor began operation in 1974, nominal power being achieved in February 1977. Between 1974 and March 1982 the plant operated for more than 72 per cent. of the time. Unlike DFR the PFR is fuelled by mixed uranium/plutonium oxide fuel very similar in size and design to that likely to be used in commercial fast reactors. In addition to feeding electricity to the national grid the reactor is used to prove components and to provide data essential for the design of full-size stations to follow in the years to come. In order to achieve this task the reactor is backed up by a range of development and support services based both at Dounreay and throughout the Atomic Energy Authority.
The need to develop and demonstrate the complete fast reactor fuel cycle in parallel with reactor development has always been recognised in the United Kingdom programme. Fuel reprocessing and fabrication plants were built at Dounreay to serve DFR, and a fuel fabrication plant followed to make fuel for PFR. The latter was sited at Sellafield to make use of expertise built up there; it is designed to provide experience relevant to later large-scale production plants.
The DFR reprocessing plant at Dounreay was modified to take PFR fuel and reprocessed its first PFR fuel in 1980. Subsequent reprocessing operations have confirmed the efficiency and suitability of the plant. Over the past year plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel from the PFR has been refined, made into fresh fuel, and returned to operation in the reactor. Britain is the first country to achieve this closure of the fuel cycle in plant dedicated to the purpose, and this represents a major British achievement.
We are not alone in developing this technology. Prototype test reactor power stations are now also operating in France and the USSR. There are smaller test reactors in operation in the USA, France, Germany. Japan and the USSR: and two more are currently being built in Italy and India.
Although France started to develop fast reactors later than the USA, the USSR and ourselves, her heavy reliance upon imported fuel has led to a consistent and determined programme which has currently placed her ahead in the commercialisation of fast reactors in the West. The USA probably has the largest and most comprehensive research programme of any country. Japan, like France, relies almost entirely upon imported fuel and therefore also has a potential need for commercial fast reactors.
In undertaking our development programme it is important to keep closely in touch with developments 189 and trends elsewhere in the world. As was proved so decisively in the oil crisis of the early 1970s, we are an integral part of the world energy economy; and our reserves of fossil fuels, though substantial, are finite. We must, therefore, provide for the period when supplies decline and costs escalate. It is prudent to establish as wide a range of options as possible in order to protect our security of supply. Nuclear power energy released in thermal reactors such as Magnox reactors, and AGRs and PWRs constitutes an economical source of power for electricity generation which will take some of the pressure off world demand for fossil fuels and will thus help to keep prices down.
However, thermal reactors use only about 1 per cent. of the uranium fuel fed to them, so the length of time for which this method of electricity generation will remain secure and economic in the United Kingdom and elsewhere depends on the continued availability of uranium at costs that keep thermal nuclear power competitive. We cannot expect that uranium supplies will last for ever. The enormous increase in a prospectively economic resource base, and the security of electrical power which the fast reactor offers, mean that we and the other developed countries have every incentive to plan for the stage when it becomes the preferred and most economic choice for electricity generation.
When exactly will that happen? No one can be exactly certain. At the moment, fast reactor capital costs are still much higher than those of thermal reactors. The fuel cycle is also relatively expensive because of the cost of reprocessing the spent fuel. The fast reactor is therefore not yet an economic proposition. Moreover, in developed countries, the growth in demand for electricity has eased. Thus, while the strategic argument for developing fast reactor technology remains compellingly strong, present evidence, including exercises undertaken by international bodies such as the OECD and the International Atomic Energy Agency supports the view that series ordering of commercial fast reactors will not now be needed until the earlier part of the next century.
It was against this background that the Government, in consultation with the Atomic Energy Authority and a wide spectrum of the nuclear industry, undertook their recent review of fast reactor policy. This was a thorough and far-reaching exercise, one which the Government recognise may have caused temporary uncertainty to all those involved with the current development programme, especially at Dounreay. It was however absolutely necessary to examine all the options to ensure we were on the correct course, and in view of the sizeable sums that are being spent on the programme and the prospect that further major expenditure will be needed before series ordering can begin.
The outcome of the review, as announced by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State on 29th November will, I believe, be greeted with general satisfaction, since it represents a whole-hearted commitment by the Government to the continuing development of this technology. I can do no better than quote from my right honourable friend's announcement:
The Government have therefore decided to continue with a substantial development programme for the fast reactor based on 190 Dounreay and I have asked the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, Sir Peter Hirsch, in consultation with the generating boards, British Nuclear Fuels Limited and the National Nuclear Corporation to draw up a future development programme which makes the best use of our resources and experience. In common with most other leading fast reactor nations, we now believe that the series ordering phase will begin in the earlier part of the next century and thus on a longer timescale than we have previously envisaged. We shall therefore have more time in which to develop further the technology, and before undertaking the construction of a first full scale reactor in the United Kingdom, and the development programme will be geared to this timescale.On the question of international collaboration, to which my right honourable friend also referred in his announcement, there can be little doubt that, provided the terms are right, such collaboration can offer the opportunity for optimising development of the technology and providing scope for pooling costs. All the leading Western fast reactor nations have expressed their interest in the scope for collaboration, and the existing European "SERENA" partnership (in which the French and Germans are the major parties) is evidence that such arrangements can and do work.It is well known that the Atomic Energy Authority, together with the other organisations involved in the United Kingdom programme, have been having exploratory discussions with potential international partners. Noble Lords will, I hope, understand that it would be inappropriate for me to comment today on the progress made, or which country or countries seem the more attractive partner. I can confirm, however, that it is the Government's wish that such discussions should continue and that the Atomic Energy Authority has been asked to take account of the potential for collaborating with other countries in the further advice which it is to give to the Government about the programme. I can also confirm that we shall ensure that any collaborative arrangement which emerges from these discussions properly recognises our major achievements and our continuing programme.
I have endeavoured to cover a lot of ground in a short time. However, I hope it will be apparent that the Government attach considerable importance to the development of the fast reactor, both now and in the future. We believe that safe and economic fast reactors will be an essential requirement in the earlier part of the next century. The country will be well prepared to face the future.