Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 26 September 2017.
Well, she’s telling half the story. First of all, she knows full well that licensing is not done by Ministers; it’s done by an outside body—that’s the whole point—so that the politics is taken out of it. What I’ve seen so far is one person has said there may be an issue here. Well, of course, that issue needs to be addressed, but we’ve got be careful here because the waste from Wylfa goes to England, and if it wasn’t for Sellafield’s reprocessing plant it would shut immediately.
She has views on nuclear power that perhaps I wouldn’t share, but it’s too crude simply to say, ‘Well, this is nuclear waste being exported from England to Wales.’ We export a lot more out towards Sellafield. So, I don’t accept that this is an import-export issue. Where we have nuclear power, it’s important that there are adequate disposal facilities, but simply to present it in terms of an England-Wales battle ignores the fact we have our own nuclear power station, and we don’t have our own disposal facilities; we rely on England to deal with the waste that comes from Wylfa.