Britain Burying Nuclear Waste From Overseas

Britain Burying Nuclear Waste From Overseas

Sep 14 - Irish Times

UK: Nuclear waste from overseas power stations has been sealed in concrete and buried in the UK in several kilometres of trenches in breach of official government policy.

UK ministers have repeatedly promised that nuclear waste from abroad will not be buried in British soil to make good a pledge that Britain will not become a nuclear waste dump for countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

But it has now emerged that more than 10,000 cubic metres of foreign nuclear waste is buried at Drigg in Cumbria near Scotland because it is too expensive to transport it back to the countries that produced it. If the waste was buried side by side the trench would stretch for more than 10 kilometres.

It is part of an ever-increasing mountain of waste stored at more than 20 nuclear sites in Britain. UK government advisers have warned that up to 20,000 million cubic metres of this waste will pile up in the coming years - and there is no way of disposing of nearly all of it. The government is currently spending pound(s)1.3 billion ([euro]1.9 billion) and is planning to increase this to pound(s)2 billion a year for the next 40 years to try to solve the mounting problems.

UK Department of Trade and Industry consultation documents and key advisers indicate the government is to announce a change in its official policy and start charging foreign governments for the service of storing their waste and subsequently disposing of it in concrete bunkers.

Until now, the government has insisted that all the waste would be sent back but it now sees retaining foreign nuclear detritus as a money spinning venture.

Allowing Britain to become a dump for foreign waste would also remove another problem - the threat of terrorists hijacking the nuclear material while it was being transported from Britain to other countries.

For decades, thousands of tonnes of spent fuel, containing plutonium and uranium, have been imported into Britain from nine countries which have contracts with the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) to have it reprocessed.

Two BNFL plants at Sellafield in Cumbria dissolve the fuel in acid and extract the plutonium and uranium so that it can be returned to those countries either for storage or re-use in nuclear stations. In practice not even this has happened and the plutonium and uranium remain at Sellafield under guard.

In addition there is 405 cubic metres of high level waste and 3,383 cubic metres of intermediate level waste belonging to foreign countries stored at Sellafield.

Britain's own waste is in a series of deteriorating buildings at Sellafield and at least 19 other sites around the UK.

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