for Sunday Herald, 12 June 2005
From the window of his home on Barra, Donald Manford can see the small island of Fuday across the water. On Friday evening, he said, it was looking "peaceful and unperturbed - quite unaware of all the controversy that has been going on about it."
Fuday, just 250 hectares of rough grazing, shot into the headlines last week after it was outed as one of five sites in Scotland shortlisted as a potential dump for all Britain's nuclear waste. Unknown to anyone, the UK radioactive waste agency, Nirex, had planned to dig 26 huge caverns 500 metres under the island, along with a new harbour and causeway.
Unluckily for Barra and its thousand plus inhabitants, Nirex also had similar, secret plans for the island of Sandray just to the south, costing £1.8 billion over 50 years. "People are appalled that such things were considered," said Manford, the local councillor.
"That this organisation could talk about these things, organising, planning and plotting with peoples' lives without telling them - I think it is obscene."