HUGH RICHARDS

That this House notes with deep regret the recent death of Hugh Richards, the Welsh environmental architect and campaigner for safe, sustainable energy systems and against nuclear power; believes that perhaps his greatest campaign victory was to persuade the Welsh Assembly Government environment minister in August 2009 to support the Welsh Anti-nuclear Alliance's call for a public inquiry into proposed nuclear new build in Wales, on the basis that the case for new plants had not been legally justified; recognises his very important contribution to public knowledge on the nuclear waste repository footprint, spent fuel management and so-called high burn-up nuclear fuel for new reactor designs, drawing attention to the fact that such irradiated nuclear fuel is typically hotter and longer-lived than existing used nuclear fuel, by which research he painstakingly demonstrated that the nuclear industry's plans for long-term management of new build wastes are quite literally unsustainable; further notes his chilling assessment that the use of such nuclear fuel would make the plants more vulnerable to terrorists' attacks, because of the need for extended storage at reactor sites for up to 160 years, and that30 years after start-up of one of the reactor designs, the AP-1000, currently being proposed, the radioactive inventory will be approximately 22 times that released by the Chernobyl accident in 1986; and calls on the Government to heed carefully Hugh Richards' splendid and meticulous analytical legacy of the dangers of new nuclear energy development.