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UK govt promoting new nukes despite waste report

Energy fear over nuclear waste dumps Former senior advisers say ministers ‘cherry-picked’ reports to bolster case for new power plants Guaradian.co.uk Alok Jha 25 Oct 09

Former senior government advisers on nuclear power have accused ministers of being “cavalier” and “cherry-picking” their advice to bolster the case for a new generation of nuclear power stations.

They and other industry experts say the government should not embark on building any new atomic facilities without properly tackling the unsolved problem of how to deal with radioactive waste from existing power plants.

n 2006 the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management published recommendations on how the UK should dispose of nuclear waste. A key idea was that long-term disposal would be best carried out by identifying suitable sites at which the waste could be buried, a process called deep geological disposal.

The conclusions were used by the government to bolster the case for the building of new nuclear power stations. But Gordon MacKerron, chair of the committee until 2007, said the recommendations were meant for legacy waste and were not a “carte blanche” to think that radioactive waste from a new generation of power plants could be dealt with in the same way…….  “it has unjustifiably extended the conclusions which we put forward for legacy waste alone as if they applied equally to any new-build waste.”

Another former committee member, Peter Wilkinson, went further to say that the government had “cherry-picked” ideas from the 2006 report to highlight deep geological disposal. “The government has used that as the fig leaf for radioactive waste management and, on the back of that, have gone ahead with this programme of new build. I don’t think they should even be thinking about a new-build programme until such time as the deep geological repository has been demonstrated as scientifically proven, and that’s a long way off,” he said……………..

Wilkinson said that waste from a new generation of power stations would be “far hotter and more radioactive than anything we’ve hitherto had to deal with”…………………

 nuclear consultant John Large, …. “So far as putting in new nuclear power plants, we are as ill-prepared to handle the radioactive waste as we were in the 1960s.”

Energy fears over nuclear waste dumps | Environment | The Observer

October 26, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, UK, wastes | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, radiation, radioactive