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Fears over plans to dump nuclear waste in Scotland

By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor

RADIOACTIVE waste could end up being dumped at 30 nuclear sites in the UK, under plans to be unveiled by government advisers this week.
In Scotland this would mean burying large volumes of low-level waste at six places: Hunterston in Ayrshire, Faslane near Helensburgh, Torness in East Lothian, Rosyth in Fife, Dounreay in Caithness and Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway.

The plans would see more dangerous waste being disposed of in holes deep underground at one or more geologically suitable sites in the UK. Before that, it could be put in "interim storage" above or just below the ground.

The recommendations are to be published tomorrow by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), set up by the government in 2003 to try and find a way to deal with the huge variety of waste created by the nuclear power and weapons industries over the last 50 years.

According to CoRWM's estimates, there will be a total of 470,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste to get rid of, including plutonium, uranium and high-level fission products. Some of these wastes remain radioactive for just a few years, others for hundreds of thousands of years.

This total doesn't include the 18 million cubic metres of soil and concrete thought to be contaminated with low-level radioactivity from leaks and spills at nuclear sites. There are an estimated 81,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil at the Hunterston A reactor site in Ayrshire.

CoRWM's proposal is for some of the short-lived waste to be buried in shallow pits on the nuclear sites where it was created. This would avoid the need to transport the waste around the country.

"It would mean that some radioactive waste would stay put," CoRW's chairman, Gordon MacKerron said. "But only if we were sure that the risks to future generations were negligible."

For longer-lived waste, CoRWM thinks the best solution is some kind of "deep disposal". One option is to put the waste permanently in an underground chamber between 300 metres and two kilometres deep where the surrounding rocks would reduce the risk of leakage.

A second option is to put the waste down deep holes from which it could be retrieved if something went wrong. Before either of these options are implemented, waste could also carry on being stored in tanks near the ground's surface for some years.

CoRWM is not making any suggestions as to where these deep disposal sites might be. An official shortlist from the 1990s of about a dozen sites – many of which are suspected of being in Scotland – has been kept secret by the government.

In a consultation document to be released tomorrow, CoRWM will for the first time be ruling out 11 ways that have been seriously suggested for disposing of radioactive waste. These include blasting it into space, injecting it into rock, freezing it in polar ice and dumping it at sea.

"Everyone has played their part in helping us draw up our final shortlist. Now we can start to focus on the best options and see which will work and which won't," said MacKerron.

CoRWM has had difficulties drawing up its recommendations because two of its members are suspended pending an investigation being carried out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The committee has also been attacked by some experts for wasting time trying to establish the obvious.

But its role has been defended by UK environment minister, Elliot Morley. "The CoRWM programme will ensure that there is a complete decision-making audit trail. We are ultimately talking of solutions that will cost billions of pounds and decades to implement. Taking a little time now to get the decision right represents time and money well spent."

CoRWM is aiming to submit its final report to ministers in July 2006. The newly formed government agency which will oversee the £50 billion job of cleaning up Britain's nuclear plants, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, came into existence on Friday.

03 April 2005

source:Siol nan Gaidheal


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Sabine