(CB): My Lords, I speak as a proud former Rolls-Royce
engineer and, as a result of my employment, a Rolls-Royce
shareholder. Given the news that the EU is now excluding the UK
from new collaboration, the growing evidence of the challenge of
financing major nuclear power station development and the
importance of low-carbon energy technologies to global
decarbonisation, does the Minister agree that our exit from the
EU provides an excellent opportunity to support UK technology and
jobs—including in the steel industry, which we will be talking
about tomorrow—and to address a major global export market
through government support for the Rolls-Royce-led small modular
reactor programme? I suggest that that would be a great feelgood
message for after the election.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department
for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Prior of
Brampton) (Con): As the noble Baroness knows,
Rolls-Royce is one of the 32 companies which has submitted a
proposal. There is no doubt that if we could build SMRs on a
modular basis, much of the work could be done in the UK. We may
have lost out in the race to build big nuclear plants, but
companies such as Rolls-Royce and others in the UK could compete
effectively on SMRs and we could then export them around the
world. But there is no point embarking on that new technology
until we are sure that it can deliver low-carbon energy at an
economic cost.
To read all the exchanges, CLICK
HERE
