Mr Fred Barker, Mr Clive Bates, Dr Joe McHugh and Dr Clive Williams

19 FEBRUARY 2007

  Q186  Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen. We are grateful to you for coming to help us in our inquiry. We have apologies from our Chairman, Lord Broers, who I am standing in on behalf of today. This meeting is being webcast on the Internet, so it is possibly wise to remember that as we continue our discussion. The other thing I have to say is the acoustics in all these rooms are really rather bad so it is helpful if you can project your voice. Would you like to introduce yourselves briefly before we start with the questions we propose to ask?

  Dr McHugh: Thank you, my Lord Chairman. My name is Joe McHugh. I am head of Radioactive Substances Regulation in the Environment Agency.

  Dr Williams: My name is Clive Williams. I am Policy Development Manager for Radioactive Substances Regulation in the Environment Agency.

  Mr Bates: My name is Clive Bates. I am Head of Environmental Policy at the Environment Agency.

  Mr Barker: My name is Fred Barker. I work as the Executive Director of NuLeAF, the Nuclear Legacy Advisory Forum. Until July of last year I was also a member of CoRWM.

  Q187  Chairman: Thank you very much. Would any of you like to make an initial statement or are you content to go straight into the questions we would like to ask?

  Dr McHugh: My Lord Chairman, could I briefly explain the Environment Agency's role. We are the environmental regulator for England and Wales and, in the context of this inquiry, we are the regulator for all radioactive waste disposal. We have a substantial degree of competence in this area, and we gave advice to this Committee a number of years ago, so thank you very much for inviting us back again. We have also taken part in the processes which CoRWM have been undertaking the last few years and provided some peer review of their documents.

  Mr Barker: If I could make a few introductory remarks just to explain what NuLeAF is as a relatively new actor on the scene. NuLeAF, the Nuclear Legacy Advisory Forum, is a special interest group of the Local Government Association for England and Wales, formed in late 2003. We have 98 member local authorities and that includes most of those local authorities which have major nuclear sites within their area. One of our primary roles is to represent the interests of those local authorities in discussion with national bodies on matters of policy and strategy to do with nuclear legacy management. As such, we have responded positively to the Government's invitation to local authorities to contribute to thinking about the development of the implementation framework which will be consulted on by the end of this year. We have already submitted work on how to make the concepts of willingness to participate and partnerships work in practice in the process which is going to be set up and we have got further work in train on benefit packages and planning issues. We very much welcome the Government's invitation to players, such as NuLeAF, to contribute to preparatory work for consultation. We think this approach is a good indication of the nature of the partnership working which is going to have to characterise this process as we move forward.

  Chairman: Thank you for the policy statements which you sent citing some detailed verse which we have read a lot about.

  Q188  Lord Flowers: Can I ask whether you are concerned only with the legacy or if there is a future new build would you be concerned with that as well?

  Mr Barker: Our primary concern is with the nuclear legacy. Where waste that arose from new build programme impacted on the way in which the legacy was managed, I expect our member authorities would want us to say things as well. We do not have a brief to engage in a debate about whether or not new nuclear power stations should be built.

  Q189  Lord Tombs: You would not contemplate a separate facility necessarily for new build?

  Mr Barker: Not necessarily, but we do support CoRWM's recommendation that a host community needs to know what the inventory of radioactive waste would be that it is dealing with. If at a later date there were to be any substantive increase to that inventory, there would need to be an additional process of negotiation with that host community about whether or not to accept that increase in the inventory.

  Q190  Chairman: Because of the nature of things, some of the questions being rather broad-based, you may not all feel you wish to respond to each of the questions, we quite understand that. In order to get through in the time I think it is highly essential that you do not all answer all of the questions. If I could start by asking you, the Government has put the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in charge of planning and implementing the geological disposal programme. Do you see a potential conflict in the NDA's dual role in implementing both accelerated decommissioning and the long-term geological disposal programme?

  Dr Williams: For the Environment Agency, I would say first of all we are content with the Government's decision that the NDA will be responsible for implementing a repository programme and that within that responsibility an implementation contractor will be appointed as soon as practicable. We have held some initial discussions with the NDA and we believe their implementation approach can be made to work in a satisfactory manner for us. We can also see some potential benefits organisationally in more fully integrating the programme for legacy waste management with repository development in the future, and the NDA will want to get on with the job. We see that there is always a possibility that corners could be cut and we will want to make sure that does not happen. We think the regulators will have a key role in the repository programme in managing any potential conflict that there may be. That would be through scrutiny of technical proposals made by the NDA and its contractors, so that would be our role. Also, as a matter of principle, we feel that the financial arrangements, both for decommissioning and for the development of a repository in the future, need to be absolutely transparent and auditable so that it is clear where the costs and risks lie. Finally, my Lord Chairman, on this question, we would say that the environment, health and safety regulators are all of one mind, that we want the legacy of mobile radioactive waste cleared up and made into a passively safe form. We will aim to prompt this through our own joint regulatory processes which we have developed with our regulatory partners over the past few years.

  Q191  Chairman: Perhaps I could address a supplementary to Mr Barker. Do you think the NDA's dual role might have a negative impact on the process of involving local communities in a partnership?

  Mr Barker: Not in principle. We do see some potential conflicts but we think those conflicts can be managed. One of the things I think it is critical to remember is that the siting process is going to have to be run at a pace which enables local community concerns and questions to be fully addressed. If the NDA, which is under a requirement to look at ways of increasing the efficiency of nuclear legacy management, and that might lead to some accelerated programmes, creates a situation where there is undue pressure on the timing of the siting process, it is possible to conceive of circumstances where community concerns will not be fully and properly addressed. This could undermine community confidence in the programme and, ultimately, potentially, jeopardise the programme. That tension between accelerated clean-up and siting for a repository programme I think needs to be explicitly acknowledged and then managed.

  Q192  Lord Haskel: Dr Williams spoke about a contractor being appointed and the financial arrangements being open. We live in an age of company ownership from hedge funds, from private equity through very closed ownership arrangements, how do you intend then to see that these financial arrangements will remain open?

  Dr Williams: My Lord, a point here is these are largely public liabilities which are involved. There is also a role for the Government departmental arrangements that the Government are going to put in place to oversee these provisions. And the National Audit Office, which already has a role in auditing the NDA, will have a strong role in this in the future.

  Q193  Lord Haskel: There will be special arrangements regarding the contracting companies?

  Dr Williams: Yes, indeed.

  Lord Flowers: Those arrangements had better be approved by Parliament in that case.

  Q194  Chairman: If I can go back to conflicts of interest with the NDA. They are, of course, the commercial operator responsible for Sellafield, will this give rise to a conflict of interest if they are to take on planning and implementing the geological disposal programme?

  Dr McHugh: A point we have made over the NDA's funding is that the NDA is funded through grant in aid from government and commercial income. Potentially that can give rise to some cash flow problems, so it goes back to the point about transparency and accountability of funds. When, for example, Thorp is closed down, as it is at present, the NDA does not have as much income to fund its liabilities work and needs to go back to government to seek further funds. That was always the downside of the arrangements which were put in place. We would prefer to have better funding arrangements than that.

  Q195  Lord Jenkin of Roding: Of course the two operations are connected in this sense, that the more reprocessing that is done the more uranium and plutonium, for instance, can be turned into mixed oxide fuel and then sold. Then there is less material which has to go as high level waste through a repository so that, in a sense, there will be two sides to that argument. There will be those who will be pressing that this reprocessing should continue, that they should get a plant working properly, like the French one which I saw last week, in order to reduce the amount of waste, whereas there may be the considerable expense of continuing reprocessing, particularly the expense of getting the MOX plant working properly, at the moment it is producing only about a tonne a year. The French produce 50 or 60 tonnes and are aiming at 100 tonnes.

  Dr Williams: I think there are decisions obviously which are for government to make and they will be informed by studies which are in progress at the moment. For example, the NDA has commissioned studies on spent fuel management and on management of nuclear materials, uranium and plutonium. We have had a role in reviewing those. We are aware that the progress of those studies will be reported on within the next couple of months, so I think those will be an important input to future government decisions in this area.

  Q196  Lord Taverne: As the Government proposals for implementation stand, do you think the lines of responsibility are sufficiently clear?

  Dr Bates: Broad lines of responsibility are quite clear. We, the Environment Agency, know what our responsibility is, it is to essentially license or not license a facility and allow it to operate and work with the other participants in the system to ensure that the environmental and human health requirements are understood. The other main actors, the NDA and so on, are all quite clear. There is some ambiguity in what role CoRWM would play, and you have taken evidence on this in previous sessions about its role as a scrutiniser versus an adviser, that is not clear at the moment but could be cleared up. If it is going to have a scrutiny role, the question would be scrutinising what on behalf of whom? That is quite unclear at the moment. The main thing which needs to happen next is a resolution of a great deal of detail about how the various processes will proceed, who will do what and when, and that is the subject of the Government's consultation which we are hoping to see before the summer recess. That should resolve a lot of the uncertainties which there are at present.

  Q197  Lord Taverne: When it comes to the repository contractor, how many government departments and regulators and so on will they have to deal with because there does seem to be a plethora of them?

  Dr McHugh: In terms of the repository contractor, the repository contractor would be regulated by the Health and Safety Executive because the repository would be a nuclear licensed site under the Nuclear Installations Act. If it were in England or Wales it would be regulated by us as the environmental regulator, so it would need licences and permits from us under the Radioactive Substances Act. Obviously it would be subject to financial regulation as well as it would be presumably a limited company, but in terms of the safety and environmental regulation it would be the HSE and ourselves. As this site will contain presumably quite a lot of fissile material, it would be regulated by the civil nuclear security regulator, the OCNS. We understand the OCNS is shortly to move into the Health and Safety Executive so there will be some rationalisation there.

  Dr Williams: If I may add one further point, of course there is the planning system as well, that is to say the planning consent.

  Q198  Lord Flowers: In the event of disagreement amongst all these various regulators, who is going to resolve the problem?

  Dr McHugh: We do our best to make sure there is not a disagreement between us and we have memoranda of understanding with the other regulatory bodies to make sure that does not happen. Since a few years ago we have been working very closely with HSE in regulating radioactive waste in this area and very collaboratively in putting a degree of regulation over, for example, the Nirex letter of compliance process. We do regulate very closely with HSE and, indeed, the process that we use is based on HSE's powers.

  Q199  Lord Howie of Troon: As you know, new draft terms of reference for CoRWM have been published, what do you think of them?

  Dr Williams: My Lord, if I may respond to that for the Environment Agency. As we have stated in our draft memorandum of evidence, we are content with these draft terms of reference. We feel that the committee should focus on the geological disposal programme. At present its draft terms of reference allow it to investigate other areas, some of which would have been covered previously by the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee, RWMAC. We particularly feel that CoRWM should focus on cross-cutting issues, such as how the technical aspects of site selection should be combined with a partnership approach. Against that background of broad contentment, we would say that we will take a particular interest in the details of the proposed work programme for the committee. We think it is particularly important that both the terms of reference and the work programme are consistent with the regulatory process. We are absolutely comfortable, as the Environment Agency, as guardian of the environment, that there should be further bodies which scrutinise and look closely into our own work in a critical way. What we would ask, as regulators, is that this is done in an efficient and effective manner. It follows that we would not expect CoRWM to scrutinise the details of the developing environmental safety case which the repository contractor would present to ourselves as regulator for a future repository, we feel that is clearly our responsibility. We envisage that CoRWM's activities would be at a higher level so that they would ensure the propriety and quality of the process and the more detailed work which others would undertake. We see it as an important achievement of CoRWM and CoRWM's process so far as being the way the committee has kept a broad range of stakeholders on board with its work up to and including its final report. We feel that CoRWM has established trust and credibility and that is worth keeping.

  Mr Barker: On the part of NuLeAF, we very much welcome the establishment of a new CoRWM committee with its review and advisory role. We do take the view that the terms of reference of the committee should be strengthened in one respect, so that those parties who are the subject of advice from the new CoRWM should respond publicly with well-reasoned arguments. The reason I say this is that in the past there was a feeling that, for example, with the previous RWMAC committee, some of its advice was not responded to publicly and it was not clear what was happening to its advice. With the new CoRWM I think it would be very important for stakeholder confidence that the advice of that independent body is seen to be being taken into account and that organisations are putting on the public record their reasoned response to that independent advice. We believe that would help stakeholder confidence in the process.