Harsh and cynical and as I'm sure you're aware fission produces significant waste which is difficult to treat. However your first assumption is almost certainly incorrect; the execrable Rees-Mogg wouldn't know a realistic proposal if it beat him roundly about his top-hat and tails. Content free grandstanding and jingoistic misplaced nationalism is his style.

IDS and his yes men IT tarts are totally incapable of understanding the complexities of what they are attempting. The fact that the systems are VME is simply a reflection on the vast amount of logic that went into developing some substantial business systems (probably more from the 90's than the 70's) "The department's legacy systems still run on Fujitsu mainframes using the VME operating system installed in 1974" is a bit inaccurate, it was ICL in 1974 and has certainly been updated many times since then and the machines are pretty modern, just running VME. All that logic can't simply be magicked into some new technology by a bunch of outsourced IT staff who don't know the difference between Universal Credit and Wonga. IDS still obviously believes it's some trivial bit of code that basically just needs to say "No Soup for YOU!" But once the DWP got rid of all the in-house IT bods, who actually understood the technology as well as the benefits, they gave away the keys to the safe. Expect more billions to be extracted by the UC leeches.