NUCLEAR WASTE

Nuclear waste from overseas power stations has been sealed in concrete and buried in several miles of trenches in breach of official government policy. 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 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. 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 £1.3bn and is planning to increase this to £2bn a year for the next 40 years to try to solve the mounting problems.

The Guardian has learned from Department of Trade and Industry consultation documents and key advisers that 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 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 reuse 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. The UK has more than 10,000 cubic metres of high level waste of its own and another 250,000 tonnes of intermediate level waste. Once packaged into containers suitable for disposal the waste can be 10 times as bulky.

Britain's own waste is in a series of deteriorating buildings at Sellafield and at least 19 other sites around the UK. Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for the environment, said of the Guardian revelations, "This is a disgrace. We have enough dangerous nuclear waste of our own without scooping in other countries' waste. The Treasury and Depart ment of Trade and Industry do not mind endangering the environment as they attempt to reduce the horrendous amount of taxpayer's money that the nuclear industry generates. This government cannot be trusted to tell the truth, look after the environment or deal with the nuclear industry in any sort of sensible way."

Blake Lee-Harwood, campaigns director of Greenpeace, said, "It is absolutely shocking that the government is reneging on one of its key promises that nuclear waste would all be returned to its country of origin. This bodes ill for the future imports of spent fuel and the planned return of other wastes." The government set up an expert committee of radioactive waste management to advise on what to do about the problem of nuclear waste.

Due to report by 2006, the committee has been first try ing to discover exactly how much waste there is in Britain and will then consider how to get rid of the plutonium and uranium that has been produced from reprocessing. The committee chairman, Gordon MacKerron, admitted, "It has always seemed to me unlikely that all the foreign wastes would be returned." Laurence Williams, the chief health and safety inspector of Britain's nuclear sites, said his task was making sure the existing wastes stored round Britain were kept in a safe state.

"The mind boggles that scientists and technicians who did all these complex tasks like building nine nuclear power stations in 11 years, and ... built hydrogen bombs and reprocessing plants, could at the same time have chucked highly active waste into silos with no thought how to get it out," he said. "This is what we now have to do, and it is no easy task." The Guardian has applied under the "open government" code for details of contracts between the British and Italian governments, but the DTI, which is responsible for BNFL, has refused to release anything. The DTI claims that disclosure of the "sensitive" information would embarrass the Italian government and create diplomatic tension between London and Rome.

Nuclear waste is divided into three categories, high level, intermediate level and low level based on the level and type of radioactivity. Of most concern is the high level waste. It is so radioactive that it produces heat and has been kept in liquid form in tanks for up to 50 years at Sellafield before being turned into glass blocks for storage. The government admits that a quarter of this type of waste belongs to foreign governments.

Intermediate level waste is not heat-producing and can be packaged in concrete for safety. Both these types need to be isolated from human contact for up to 200,000 years. The low level waste is by far the greatest volume and includes everything from gloves and overalls to large pieces of equipment and concrete. The only place to store this in Britain is Drigg, which will be full by 2050. Government advisers estimate that there will be enough low-level waste produced in the next 50 years to fill 15 Drigg dumps. (Source: The Guardian)

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