UK attacked over n-waste, while Scotland praised

from Sunday Herald, 19 August 2007

UK ministers have been accused by one of their former advisers of ignoring official advice on the disposal of nuclear waste in order to pave the way for a new programme of nuclear power stations.

Pete Wilkinson, a member of the government's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), has also praised the Scottish Executive for boycotting the latest public consultation on plans to bury the waste deep underground.

CoRWM, which has been advising ministers for the last four years, is being wound up this weekend, to be replaced by another advisory committee. It concluded that disposing of highly radioactive waste in a deep underground repository was "the best available approach".

But CoRWM also urged more research into alternatives, and a "robust programme of interim storage" for 100 years or more in case the search for a repository was delayed or failed.

Wilkinson criticised the Westminster government for "ignoring" CoRWM's integrated package of recommendations on research and interim storage. "Such cherry picking allows the predetermination of a 'solution' to waste management and therefore the removal of a traditional hurdle to new nuclear build," he told the Sunday Herald.

"By concentrating on disposal and the search for a repository site to the exclusion of other recommendations, Westminster is unfairly favouring disposal when a research programme may demonstrate no societal consensus for that management option."

Wilkinson, a Suffolk-based nuclear consultant and former Greenpeace campaigner, is sceptical of deep disposal as a way of disposing on nuclear waste. He is concerned about the risks of leakage over the hundreds of thousands of years for which the waste has to be isolated from the environment.

He backs the SNP-led Scottish Executive's recent decision not to take part in a consultation over deep disposal. "It is a valid and justifiable policy," he said. "It does not, in my view, represent cherry picking since if you remove disposal as the potential end point, the recommendations still stand since disposal is only one possible outcome."

Wilkinson's support was enthusiastically embraced by the Environment Secretary, Richard Lochhead. "Mr Wilkinson’s comments are highly significant given his central involvement in the CoRWM process," said the minister.

"We do not accept that it is right to seek to bury nuclear waste, which will remain active for thousands of years, in a deep geological facility or to expect any community to host such a facility. This 'out of sight out of mind' policy should not extend to Scotland."

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in London accepted that there were those with doubts about deep disposal. "We shall address such concerns in an open and transparent way, on the basis of sound scientific and technical evidence," said a DEFRA spokeswoman.

"Although the Scottish Government has decided not to sponsor this consultation, organisations or individuals in Scotland who wish to respond may do so and UK Government will discuss these responses with the Scottish Government through the appropriate devolution mechanisms."

Further support for deep disposal of waste came from the government's chief nuclear security adviser, Roger Brunt, the director of the Office for Civil Nuclear Security in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

"For the record, I believe that the best place for radioactive waste is in a long term repository," he said in his latest annual report posted online last week. "Until that aspiration can be realised, there is no option but to store radioactive waste on licensed nuclear sites."

He also pointed out that a nuclear waste repository would have to be guarded by the nuclear industry's own armed police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Since March, armed detachments from the force have been permanently deployed at all the UK's nine nuclear generating sites, including Torness in East Lothian and Hunterston in North Ayrshire.

Comments

[J Brown]

Of course putting highly radioactive waste underground is not safe; not is any other method. New build would deliver 3 times existing waste, of higher level radioactivity. Underground methods leak radioactivity. Russian spent fuel stores are already at risk of imminent collapse with risks of explosion delivering another Chernobyl of radiation all over Europe. Sixteen million people are affected by Chernobyl; soon no Europeans will be free of radiation exposure throughout their lifetimes with consequent permanent, heritable DNA damage. Let's not make it even worse with new nuclear build.