UK « nuclear-news

Is the UK’s giant new nuclear power station “unbuildable”?

The design of the UK’s latest nuclear power station is “terrifying”,
“phenomenally complex” and “almost unbuildable”, according to Henri
Proglio, a former head of EDF, the French state-owned utility behind the
project.

One month after the final green light for Sizewell C, 1,700
workers are on site in Suffolk, on the UK’s east coast, preparing the
sandy marshland for two enormous reactors that will eventually generate
enough electricity for 6mn homes. The plant will be a replica of the
European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design that is running four to six years
late and 2.5 times over budget at Hinkley Point C in Somerset, which has
had problems wherever it has been built, in France, Finland and China.

But unlike at Hinkley, where EDF was responsible for spiralling costs and took
a hit of nearly €13bn after running late and over budget, the UK
government and bill payers are on the hook for Sizewell. The state will
provide £36.5bn of debt to fund the estimated £38bn price tag and be
responsible if costs go beyond £47bn

“Being able to build an EPR in the
timeframe, with the planned costs? I don’t think so,” Proglio, a critic
of the design, told the Financial Times. “The EPR is a machine that is
phenomenally complex to build, with more rebar than concrete, it is
terrifying . . . it’s almost unbuildable. As long as the design has
not changed, the difficulty of building will not have changed either.”

FT 27th Aug 2025,
https://www.ft.com/content/ee89bce2-a3e9-48ed-82eb-85916eb24777

August 30, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Government allocates £154m for plutonium disposal.

Jason Arunn Murugesu, BBC News, North East and Cumbria, 28 Aug 25, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czjmzdj7l7wo

More than £150m will be spent by the government to investigate how best to dispose of the 140 tonnes of radioactive plutonium it currently stores at a nuclear plant.

Sellafield in Cumbria holds the world’s largest stockpile of the hazardous material.

Earlier this year, the government announced the material would not be reused and instead would be made ready for permanent disposal deep underground and put “beyond reach”.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said the money would be used to “test and prove” two technologies currently being explored to “immobilise” the highly radioactive material.

Plutonium has been kept at Sellafield for decades and successive governments have kept it to leave open the option to recycle it into new nuclear fuel.

Storing it in its current form is expensive and difficult as it frequently needs to be repackaged because radiation damages storage containers.

In January the government said the safest, most economically viable solution was to “immobilise” its entire plutonium stockpile.

DESNZ said it would spend £154m over five years to allow the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to build specialist lab facilities at Sellafield which would be used to test two emerging immobilisation technologies – Disposal Mox and Hot Isostatic Pressing.

Dr Lewis Blackburn from the University of Sheffield said the two methods involved converting the plutonium into a “mechanically and chemically stable ceramic material” which could then be disposed of.

Mid Copeland and South Copeland in Cumbria are the only two sites in the UK currently being considered by the government to host a nuclear waste disposal site.

It follows a possible site in Lincolnshire earmarked by the government body Nuclear Waste Services pulling out in June.

August 30, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK | Leave a comment

OUR NUCLEAR WORLD: PICK YOUR TARGET

Why use your own nuclear weapons (with all the risks of escalation that this entails) when you can just take out your enemy’s nuclear power stations or nuclear waste facilities?

Jonathon Porritt 27th Aug 2025

I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only way the nuclear industry’s hype-machine is going to be stopped in its tracks is a Russian cyber-attack on the nine nuclear reactors still operating here in the UK, causing them all to close down and leading to the grid temporarily collapsing. That should do it.

I jest – sort of. But nothing else has worked. In just the last few weeks:

1 The Treasury’s financial modelling for the new power station at Sizewell C (seen by the Financial Times) gives a range of roughly £80 billion to £100 billion, far higher than the official estimate of £47 billion from the Department of Net Zero and Energy Security – which in itself was already nearly double the original cost of £20 billion!

2 The Treasury recently described the Government’s proposals for a new Geological Disposal Facility to deal with the 700,000 cubic metres of spent nuclear fuel as ‘unachievable’. This is a truly extraordinary development – confirming that the UK still has NO idea what to do about its legacy nuclear waste, let alone the waste that will be produced by any new reactors. Yet this got hardly a mention in the media.

3 The Government confirmed that it will be splurging a further £17 billion of taxpayers’ money between now and 2030 on Sizewell C, Small Modular Reactors and fusion energy – even as it continues to ignore the scourge of chronic poverty here in the UK, with 4.5 million children living in poverty – the highest number ever recorded.

On top of which, the industry’s hype-machine is now being turbocharged by the even more powerful hype-machine of AI. Never forget that the nuclear industry is supremely well-equipped to leap onto any and every boondoggle coming down the track – the Bitcoin/Crypto boom a decade ago (which never quite happened), and then green hydrogen. With every hard-to-abate sector queueing up for its share of vanishingly small volumes of green hydrogen, the Knights of Nuclear were up into their saddles just as fast as enough hobby horses could be corralled together to claim that it is only nuclear power that can provide the electricity required.

And now it’s AI. We’ve all read the growth projections for AI-enabled markets – from billions of dollars today to trillions tomorrow. I won’t weary you with the extrapolated increases in electricity consumption for all the new data centres that this entails – but it’s going to be a lot. On a par with the electricity consumption of small countries. New data centres are being built right now, ever bigger, already gobbling up more and more electricity. Nor will I invite you to ask why this AI boom must not – ever, on any terms – be subjected to much deeper scrutiny as to the balance of costs and benefits that will emerge. AI represents the apogee of latter-day technological determinism: if it can be done, then it must and will be done. So suck it up.

I’m not making light of this. The AI-driven nuclear boom in the USA is for real. Donald Trump is getting rid of most regulatory oversight of the nuclear industry, to speed things up, and stock prices of all the publicly traded nuclear companies are up by huge percentages. And it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of nuclear we’re talking about: 40-year-old decommissioned reactors to be given a new lease of life; plans for new big reactors, even in blue states like New York, being fast-tracked; Big Tech applying for construction permits for Small Modular Reactors that are still on the drawing board; and more than $500 billion apparently raised for new fusion reactors – seriously!

It’s not (yet) quite so insane here in the UK, but the signals are worrying. Strenuous efforts are being made by Ministers to force the Office for Nuclear Regulation to fast track any old nuclear proposal. Sweetheart deals with the private sector are being sorted out – regardless of the costs to taxpayers. Rational, evidence-based decision-making is a long-gone memory.

What exactly lies behind this mania? In the timeless words of Sherlock Holmes: ”once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.

So, let’s try that out for size in the context of nuclear power. It would surely be completely impossible for any responsible government pursuing a Net Zero energy strategy to prioritise nuclear power over all other options, given that:

Large-scale nuclear reactors are now by far the most expensive option (on a Levelised Cost of Energy basis). UK Government figures in July this year showed new nuclear at £109 per MWh, offshore wind at £44MWh, large-scale solar at £41MWh and onshore wind at £38MWh.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) don’t yet exist, but all experts agree their electricity will be even more expensive than that of large reactors – precisely because they can’t achieve the same economies of scale.
The contribution of both big and small new reactors to a Net Zero electricity system in the UK will be literally ZERO before 2035 at the very earliest.
Both big and small reactors will continue to produce significant levels of nuclear waste, adding to a waste crisis to which (as already mentioned) we have no long-term solution.
ALL nuclear facilities pose a significant security risk, both from the point of view of cybersecurity (more later) and the very real possibility of physical attacks through ‘hostile third parties’.

Which brings us to the extraordinarily improbable truth of it: these days, nuclear power has little to do with electricity generation, and a whole lot more to do with the maintenance of the UK’s nuclear weapons capability……………………………………………………………………

It took a while for the UK Government to catch up, but in its latest Nuclear Roadmap it no longer beats around the bush. There are multiple references to the synergies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons: “this Government will proactively look for opportunities to align delivery of the civil and nuclear defence enterprises….it acknowledges the crucial importance of the nuclear industry to our national security, both in terms of energy supply and the defence nuclear enterprise”, and so on.

Big corporations are loving the fact that this is now out in the open. Bechtel, Babcock and Wilcox, AECOM, Rolls Royce – they’ve all spent decades feeding at the trough of either overt or hidden cross-subsidies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Rolls-Royce has been one of the most outspoken advocates for Small Modular Reactors, arguing their importance back in 2017 “to relieve the Ministry of Defence of the burden of retaining the skills and capability”………………………………………………………………….

As nuclear nations double down on nuclear power, it’s blindingly obvious that they are ramping up serious threats to national security. Nowhere is this clearer than with the drive to develop SMRs. Most designs currently on the drawing board (that are not light water reactors) will be using as their fuel high-assay, low-enriched uranium – or HALEU, to use the jargon. When it’s first extracted from the earth, uranium concentrations are usually around 1% of the total volume of the ore. HALEU fuel has to be enriched up to around 19% – just below the 20% threshold for the kind of highly-enriched uranium judged to be viable for the manufacture of nuclear bombs. And almost all HALEU fuel comes from Russia!

Beyond that, every nuclear facility (old and new) becomes a target for hostile third parties. Welcome back to the inconceivably scary world of nuclear cyberwarfare. Despite the highest grade of propaganda promoted by the Ministry of Defence – that all nuclear facilities are ‘bomb-proof’ (I kid you not!) – most cyber-experts grudgingly acknowledge that this is just bullshit when it comes to cyber-defence.

And we have no finer example of that than Sellafield, one of the most hazardous nuclear waste and decommissioning sites in the world, sprawling across 2 square miles on the Cumbrian coast. Back in December 2023, a Guardian exclusive revealed that Sellafield had been hacked into ‘by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China’ since 2015 – despite years of cover-ups by senior staff. “The full extent of any data loss and any continuing risks to systems was made harder to quantify by Sellafield’s failure to alert nuclear regulators for several years”. The denials didn’t last long. The Guardian’s painstaking research over 18 months had got Sellafield bang to rights. In October 2024, it was fined £400,000 by the Office For Nuclear Regulation after it pleaded guilty to criminal charges over years of cyber-security breaches. Astonishingly, the ONR also found that 75% of its computer servers were vulnerable to cyber-attack.

…………………..Why use your own nuclear weapons (with all the risks of escalation that this entails) when you can just take out your enemy’s nuclear power stations or nuclear waste facilities?

…………………… https://jonathonporritt.com/uk-nuclear-policy-risks/

August 30, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Podcast | The 30-year journey to an underground facility for long-term nuclear waste storage

This month’s podcast discusses the UK’s long-term plan for a vast
underground storage facility for nuclear waste – known as a geological
disposal facility (GDF) – with Nuclear Waste Services (NWS).

NWS chief
scientific adviser Neil Hyatt and NWS head of major permissions Malcolm
Orford join host Rob Hakimian to discuss the need for a GDF, especially in
the context of the UK ramping up its nuclear power intentions. They discuss
examples of similar facilities being developed elsewhere in the world and
how the UK’s will compare.

Malcolm and Neil also talk about the long
process to getting to build a GDF, including the extensive dialogue and
collaboration with the communities that could potentially host it, the
in-depth siting process and what NWS is looking for to determine its final
location. Looking even further into the future, the guests tell Rob about
the potential construction and engineering that would be required to
undertake an infrastructure of this scale and when we might see work begin.

New Civil Engineer 28th Aug 2025, https://www.newcivilengineer.com/podcast/podcast-the-30-year-journey-to-an-underground-facility-for-long-term-nuclear-waste-storage-28-08-2025/

August 30, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK | Leave a comment

UK aware of Israel’s ‘terror’ for over 20 years

Declassified files show Britain has long known of Israel’s criminality against Palestinians, as Whitehall has deepened its military, trade and diplomatic support.

MARK CURTIS, 15 August 2025, https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-aware-of-israels-terror-for-over-20-years/

The parallels are remarkable.

There were “numerous reports that the Israeli authorities have prevented medical and other humanitarian assistance from reaching those in need”.

The Red Cross was saying “that their staff have been threatened at gunpoint, warning shots have been fired at their vehicles and two ICRC [Red Cross] vehicles have been damaged by tanks”.

There were “media reports of people dying for lack of treatment” and on the “humanitarian impact of curfews affecting over 1 million people”.

There were Israeli soldiers indulging in “theft and looting from homes and shops and the vandalism of people’s homes”.

And “many reports of the killing of unarmed Palestinians”.

Sound familiar?

But this is not Gaza in 2025. It was the occupied West Bank in 2002, described in an internal Foreign Office report revealed in the British archives.

‘Defensive shield’

Then as now, Israel claimed to be acting “defensively”.

In April 2002, it launched “Operation Defensive Shield”, a large-scale military intervention in the major cities and surrounding areas of the West Bank.

Ordered by then prime minister Ariel Sharon in response to numerous suicide bombings against Israelis by Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, the Israeli military killed nearly 500 Palestinians within a month.

An official in the Foreign Office’s Middle East Peace Process Section wrote that the intervention in the West Bank involved a “pattern” of “human rights abuses” by the Israeli military.

Some British officials protested at the nature of those Israeli military operations. Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, privately told Sharon’s foreign policy adviser, Danny Ayalon, that he was “appalled at the military assault on the Palestinian areas”.

“The IDF’s behaviour was worthy more of the Russian army than that of a supposedly civilised country”, he told him. “There was no doubt that individual soldiers were out of control, and committing acts which were outraging international opinion”.

Lord Michael Levy, prime minister Tony Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East, was just as blunt. He told Israeli defence minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer in another private meeting that “There was no military solution to this kind of problem. We condemned terror from either side, Palestinian or the IDF”.

Ben-Eliezer responded by repeating that Israel sought to “destroy all terrorist infrastructure”.

Indeed, as in Gaza today, the onslaught in 2002 was supposedly meant to end terrorism against Israel.

Two weeks before major operations began, Ayalon told Cowper-Coles that “the plan was to mount long-term, large-scale military operations in the Territories, which would dismantle once and for all the terrorist infrastructures there”.

‘Routine excessive force’

The files, released last year, contain an extraordinary report by an unnamed senior British army officer, who wrote that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were a “second rate, ill disciplined, swaggering and bullying force”.

“They routinely use excessive force such as firing at the ‘legs’ of stone throwers or at ‘car tyres’ with the inevitable stream of ambulances ferrying youths to hospital with fatal bullet wounds to the head and body”, he wrote.

The officer added, in another echo of the present: “The only area where individuals have been held accountable is where IDF actions have resulted in deaths of their own as opposed to the deaths of Palestinians”.

He believed the IDF “look down on the Arabs and despise them… It needs to be said that the average Israeli does not value an Arab life as equal to a Jewish one.”

Then as now, Israeli actions involved war crimes. The files contain a report from Oxfam lamenting that in April 2002 the Israeli military used its tanks and bulldozers to cut the main water supply pipelines at 24 different places in Ramallah and other towns in the West Bank.

When Israel cut off water supplies in Gaza in October 2023 Keir Starmer notoriously supported it. When asked on LBC, he said Israel had the “right” to do that.

Indeed, Oxfam’s 2002 report could virtually have been written at any time during Israel’s latest onslaught against Gaza.

It noted “grave breaches of humanitarian law, including the targeting of medical personnel, denial of medical care to the injured and chronically ill, actual and threatened violence against clearly-identified staff of the ICRC, Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the UN, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure for water and electricity, and a basic lack of respect for civilian life and welfare”.

20 years of support

What has the UK been doing in the 23 years since officials were privately horrified by Israeli war crimes during Operation Defensive Shield?

The answer is that it has been deepening relations with Israel across the board.

In April 2002, the UK was supplying less than £1m a year in arms to Israel, the files state. Even since 2008, the UK has exported no less than £590m worth of military equipment to Israel.

At times, during other episodes in Israel’s criminality, Britain has temporarily halted some arms exports, as it has today. But then they always resume, supplying the same army known to have committed war crimes.

Then there’s the military training and exercises, across all branches of the UK and Israeli services, ongoing over the decades, again benefitting the forces promoting “terror” against Palestinians.

There’s the secret military agreement the UK signed with Israel in December 2020 and the strategic ‘Roadmap’ accord agreed between Britain and Israel in 2023.

Not to mention the 2022 “strategic approach” to securing a new trade agreement and a host of further financial and diplomatic backing emanating from Whitehall, in Westminster and at the UN and globally.

Over the past 20 years, Britain has been one of the leading world forces aiding Israel, helping to prevent international action against it as the brutal occupation and illegal settling of Palestine have intensified.

Promoting terrorism

All this has been done in the knowledge that Israel’s repressive policies and “routine excessive force” have inspired the terrorism that Israel says it is fighting. The 2002 files are explicit on this point.

Levy told Ben-Eliezer in April 2002, referring to Israel’s military activities, that “all it would do was produce more suicide bombers”.

Indeed, Levy wrote to Blair and foreign secretary Jack Straw on 1 April 2002 stating: “Dreadful suicide bombs almost daily and motivation only increased by current IDF operations”.

He added: “My experience in the region is that it is just not possible to keep 3½ million Palestinians under formal occupation against their will. If a 16 year old girl is prepared to join the ranks of suicide bombers something is fundamentally wrong”.

But still helping Israel

Yet these officials, while coldly recognising the reality of Israel’s actions, still couldn’t bring themselves to make Britain seriously challenge it.

The write–up of Levy’s meeting with Ben-Eliezer states: “Lord Levy ended the meeting by underlining our wish to help Israel get out of the mess into which it has got itself by launching the campaign into Palestinian areas.”

On 9 April, Blair’s private secretary Matthew Rycroft suggested that his boss “reaffirm my own commitment to Israel” in being awarded an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.

Neither could those officials bring themselves to unequivocally recognise Palestine as a state.

The 2002 files contain a ten-page report by the Cabinet Office called “Making a Palestinian State”. Twenty three years on, the conditions for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state are far worse, with hundreds of thousands of illegal Israeli settlers now living in the West Bank.

British officials knew then of Israel’s effective opposition to a Palestinian state. David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote on 2 April that Sharon’s government offered only “some extremely vague idea of a Palestinian state that might at some point acquire the attributes of true statehood, but only when it suited Israel”.

Two years later, Blair even considered establishing a “privileged Israeli partnership” with Nato and the European Union in the event of a peace deal with the Palestinians, the British files also show.

There were no red lines, there are no red lines. British ministers, in both 2002 and in 2025, remain knee-deep in aiding and abetting what they know is Israel’s brutal criminality.

August 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

‘Nuclear Priests’ could warn future people about wastes under the Irish Sea

When Sir Keir Starmer entered No 10 last summer, it did not take long for
him to pick up where his predecessors left off on delivering more nuclear
power stations with a promise to “build, baby, build”. The Prime
Minister has vowed to “fast forward on nuclear” and so far has stuck
true to his word, with the Government taking up a larger stake in the
Sizewell C power plant in Suffolk, while loosening planning rules to allow
new small modular reactors to be built across the country.

But with the push for more nuclear power, bringing with it a steady supply of low-carbon energy, the question is inevitably asked: what do you do with all the
nuclear waste?

The answer is to dig a hole nearly the size of Wembley
Stadium 1km down beneath the Irish Sea, that could one day see the rise of
a new “atomic priesthood” and even, some have jokingly claimed, the
creation of glow in the dark cats.

But policymakers are aware that to push
ahead with this new nuclear drive, they will need to develop a stable,
long-term storage facility in which to hold not just future nuclear waste,
but all the nuclear waste the country has produced since the dawn of the
nuclear energy age in the 1950s. This is what the proposed Geological
Disposal Facility will provide.

And when they say long term, they mean long
term. “The purpose of the facility is to keep the radioactivity away from
humans and the environment so that it can’t cause harm for a sufficient
period of time – and that’s of the order of a few hundred thousand
years,” Neil Hyatt, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Nuclear Waste
Services, tells The i Paper.

iNews 24th Aug 2025, https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/nuclear-priests-glowing-cats-how-warn-future-generations-atomic-danger-3875319

August 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Revealed: The KGB plot to poison loch with radioactive waste… then blame it on American nuclear subs CND peaceniks were campaigning to ban from Britain

Daily Mail, By MARK HOOKHAM, 24 August 2025

The KGB secretly plotted to attack the UK at the height of the Cold War by polluting Scotland’s coastline with radioactive waste, it was revealed this weekend.

Masterminded by a Soviet spy based in London, the plan involved dumping nuclear waste into Holy Loch on the Clyde, which was a crucial base for US nuclear-armed submarines.

The proposed attack was designed to fracture the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with America, by falsely implicating the US military in a devastating radioactive incident, and to stoke Britain’s anti-nuclear movement.

Details of the shocking plot have been unearthed from declassified FBI files by security expert Richard Kerbaj and are revealed in an explosive book about the extraordinary life of Oleg Lyalin, a Soviet agent who defected from the KGB in 1971.

Lyalin claimed to be a ‘knitwear’ specialist with Russia’s trade delegation in London. But in reality he was a spy attached to Department V, a top secret KGB unit tasked with assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage.

A heavy-drinking partygoer engaged in a string of extramarital affairs, Lyalin defected, aged 33, after his wife secretly told his Soviet colleagues that he was a liar and a cheat and that he was dissatisfied with his work for the KGB.

During his debriefing by MI5 he revealed how he had been tasked by Moscow with drawing up plans for a series of attacks to destabilise the UK and spread panic if a war looked imminent.

Lyalin’s bombshell revelations led to the UK’s expulsion of 105 suspected Soviet intelligence officers from Britain – the largest ever such expulsion by a single country and a turning point in MI5’s fight against Soviet spy networks during the Cold War.

The KGB agent’s dramatic defection came at the height of the Cold War, with the West and the Soviet Union locked in an arms race amid fears of nuclear conflict.

Official MI5 files on Lyalin remain under lock and key in Britain. However, information the Security Service passed to the FBI has now been unearthed by Kerbaj after painstaking research.

A file with hundreds of pages of intelligence reports and memos related to Lyalin’s defection gathered dust in an FBI warehouse until it was declassified in 2018.

One three-page FBI report, written in September 1971 and stamped ‘Secret’, revealed how ‘Lyalin revealed that on one occasion a proposal was submitted to headquarters for an operation to contaminate Holy Loch with radioactive material with a view to implicating US Naval forces’.

Holy Loch, a sea loch 25 miles from Glasgow, was used by the US Navy as a ballistic missile submarine base between 1961 and 1992.

Home to up to ten submarines carrying Polaris nuclear missiles, a floating dry dock and a depot ship, it was the epicentre of protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Crucially, unlike other KGB plans designed to sow chaos after the outbreak of war, the plot to poison Scottish waters would have been launched during peacetime.

The Kremlin had already targeted the base, obtaining a secret submarine manual in 1967, which led to the arrest and jailing of three KGB agents.

In his book, entitled The Defector, Kerbaj writes that the KGB ‘believed they could stoke the ongoing fears held by anti-nuclear protesters, who had been warning for years about the potential release of radioactive debris from the nuclear submarines in the Firth of Clyde’.

CND and other anti-nuclear protesters had established a camp on Holy Loch and tried to intercept US support ships using kayaks.

In May 1961, Michael Foot, one of the founders of the CND who later became Labour Party leader, led 2,000 people in a huge protest against the submarines in nearby Dunoon. Around 350 protesters were arrested later that year during another big demonstration.

The declassified FBI documents reveal how Lyalin’s audacious proposal required approval from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15027913/KGB-plot-poison-loch-radiation-blame-American-nuclear-subs-CND-peaceniks-campaigning-ban-Britain.html

August 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Albion Stupidities: Palestine Action and Anti-Terrorism Laws

24 August 2025, Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/albion-stupidities-palestine-action-and-anti-terrorism-laws/

Protest in Britain has become dangerous of late. Shaky lawmakers minding their elected positions, displaying decorative ignorance, have been criminalising protests against the war in Gaza, branding certain groups “terrorist” in inclination. While the laws dealing with criminal damage to property and such are already more than adequate, the government of Sir Keir Starmer thought it wise to enlarge them. There are people dying in large numbers in Gaza, and those protesting that situation have become a nuisance.

The keen obsession of this government – and a majority of the cerebrally softened legislators in the House of Commons – is that a group called Palestine Action is somehow worthy of being bracketed as a terrorist group under the Terrorist Act 2000. On June 20, members of the outfit broke into a Royal Airforce base at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire and spray painted two military aircraft alleged to be aiding US and Israel in refuelling tasks. This seemingly minor display of indignation by the organisation was enough to warrant its proscription by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper three days later under section 3 of the Terrorism Act.

United Nations experts linked to the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, among them Francesca Albanese, Ben Saul and Irene Khan, issued a press release on July 1 calling the labelling of a protest movement as “terrorist” an unjustified measure. “According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.” Despite there being no binding definition of terrorism in international law, the experts were of the view that it would be limited to such acts as would cause death, serious personal injury, or involve the taking of hostages “in order to intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

Were a national law to criminalise property damage in democracies, it would have to exclude acts of advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action not causing death or serious injury, an approach approved by the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate. In the case of banning Palestine Action, individuals would be needlessly “prosecuted for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and opinion, assembly, association and participation in political life.”

A leaked report by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), obtained by human rights activist and former diplomat Craig Murray, further showed the decision to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act as one marked by mendacity and panic on the part of the Starmer government. While JTAC is not sympathetic to Palestine Action, it did note that “The majority of the group’s activity would not be classified as terrorism under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000.” While it assesses the group as having “promoted terrorism”, the primary focus of the direct action, according to the sanitised version of the report, is on inflicting property damage. Serious damage to property could bring the group within the legislation, but even then, as the UN experts have noted, that would not meet necessary international standards to warrant the label of terrorism.

According to Murray, had Palestine Action, as claimed or implied by the government, deliberately attacked individuals, received foreign funding from Iran or any hostile power, attacked Jewish-owned businesses based on racism, or planned a “future unspecified appalling terrorist acts”, then JTAC’s report would have made mention of it. “Palestine Action,” insists Murray, “is what it says it is: a non-violent direct action group which targets the Israeli weapons industry and its support and supply line.”

The High Court has granted Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori judicial review regarding the proscription of the organisation on two grounds: that it arguably amounts to a disproportionate interference with Article 10 and 11 rights of the claimants, which guarantee free speech and peaceful assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights; and that the proscription was made in breach or natural justice and/or contrary to article 6 the ECHR, which entitles all to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. The Home Secretary, it was noted, had failed to even consult PA in making the decision.

The decision by the Starmer government was astonishing and, as with all bad laws, the foundry of astonishingly stupid results. It has made the police imbecilic enforcers; it has turned prosecutions into a dismal circus. Protesters otherwise regarded as very English and very middle class have found themselves facing arrests and charges. Over the course of one weekend this month, section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was used to arrest over 500 people, most of them carrying a placard supporting PA. That provision criminalises the wearing of clothing items or the wearing, carrying or displaying of any article, and the publishing of an image of an item of clothing or any other article “in such way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.” Sentences range from six-month imprisonment to a fine.

One particularly absurd arrest was that of retired head teacher John Farley, who was carrying a placard making reference to Palestine Action. Farley was eventually released on bail pending charges, which were never pressed. The incident last month did not even involve the proscribed organisation but was connected with another organised protest group.

The protest held in Leeds began as a solemn, silent march. Two police caught sight of Farley holding the placard. They proceeded to drag Harley away, and, typical of those types of recruits, refused to listen to any explanation: that the cartoon on the placard was a replica from the satirical magazine Private Eye, commenting on the banning of Palestine Action. The Private Eye piece, brutal, grim, and apposite, sought to explain what “Palestine Action”entailed: “Unacceptable Palestine Action” involved “spraying military planes with paint”;“Acceptable Palestine Action” entailed “shooting Palestinians queuing for food.”

Private Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop, roundly condemned the arrest as “mind-boggling” and “ludicrous”. The cartoon had been “a very neat and funny little encapsulation about what is and isn’t acceptable, and it’s a joke about – I mean, it’s quite a black joke – but about the hypocrisies of government approach to any sort of action in Gaza.”

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police expressed some contrition for Farley’s consternation, and went on to express a view in tortured middle management speak. “As this is a new proscribed organisation, West Yorkshire Police is considering any individual or organisational learning from this incident.” That ship would seem to have sailed into the waters of sheer lunacy, leaving the judges to decide in November whether the proscription order for Palestine Action struck a proportionate balance. Till then, this egregious application of the law will continue to make pro-Palestinian protests in Britain a perilous affair.

August 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Legal, UK | Leave a comment

Call for investigation into serious nuclear leak at Faslane

By James Walker, Political Reporter

THE SNP have demanded urgent answers in a letter to the Ministry of
Defence (MoD) after the UK Government confirmed a serious nuclear incident
took place at Faslane earlier this year. Figures released to The Herald
last week revealed that a Category A event – the most serious category
– took place between January 1 and April 22 this year.

The MoD have since
claimed it posed no risk to the public. It came a week after it was also
forced to admit that Loch Long, which is next to the UK’s nuclear bomb
store at Coulport, is now contaminated with radioactive tritium following
years of infrastructure decay. Bill Kidd, a longtime campaigner against
nuclear weapons and SNP MSP (below), has condemned these revelations as a
“damning indictment of Westminster’s disregard for Scotland’s safety
and environment” and said it was proof that nuclear weapons are
“dangerous, immoral, and completely incompatible with the values of the
people of Scotland”.

The National 18th Aug 2025,
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25397459.call-investigation-serious-nuclear-leak-faslane/

August 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK | Leave a comment

Treasury criticises ‘unachievable’ plan for underground nuclear waste dump in Cumbria

Sandra Laville, Guardian, 18 August 25

The UK’s proposal for a new underground nuclear waste dump has been described as “unachievable” in a Treasury assessment of the project.

Ministers have put new nuclear power at the centre of their green energy revolution. But the problem of what to do with 700,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste – roughly the volume of 6,000 doubledecker buses – from the country’s past nuclear programme, as well as future waste from nuclear expansion, has yet to be solved.

The government is proposing the vast underground nuclear dump, known as a geological deposit facility (GDF), to safely deal with legacy waste and new nuclear material.

No site has yet been confirmed for the dump and Lincolnshire county council recently pulled out of the process, leaving only two possible sites, both in Cumbria.

A Treasury assessment this month, contained in the annual report of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista), has rated the project as “red”, which means successful delivery appears to be “unachievable”.

A red rating states: “There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need rescoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”

Richard Outram, the secretary of Nuclear Free Local Authorities, said: “The Nista red rating is hardly surprising. The GDF process is fraught with uncertainties and the GDF ‘solution’ remains unproven and costly. The report also suggests the cost could soar to up to £54bn

“A single facility as estimated by government sources could cost the taxpayer between £20bn and £54bn. This being a nuclear project, it is much more likely to be the latter and beyond.”

Most nuclear waste is currently stored at Sellafield in Cumbria, which the Office for Nuclear Regulation says is one of the most complex and hazardous nuclear sites in the world.

The power stations that need decommissioning include 11 Magnox power stations built between the 1950s and 1970s, including Dungeness A in Kent, Hinkley Point A in Somerset and Trawsfynydd in north Wales, as well as seven advanced gas-cooled reactors built in the 1990s, including Dungeness B, Hinkley Point B and Heysham 1 and 2 in Lancashire.

Waste from more recent nuclear facilities, including Sizewell B, a pressurised water reactor in Suffolk, and two new EDF pressurised water reactors – Hinkley C, which is under construction in Somerset, and Sizewell C, which is planned for construction in Suffolk – will also need to be deposited in a GDF.

It is likely to take until 2150 to deposit the legacy waste into a GDF, if one is built. Only then would a GDF be able to take waste from new nuclear reactors………. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/18/treasury-criticises-unachievable-plan-for-underground-nuclear-waste-dump-in-cumbria

August 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Dumbing down: UK Taskforce charged with pushing nuclear deregulation .

The ‘reset’ is clearly driven by the frenzied demands of nuclear operators, developers, lobbyists, industry trades unions, politicians and sections of the media who are all interested at securing new nuclear with minimal red tape.

18th August 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/dumbing-down-taskforce-charged-with-pushing-nuclear-deregulation/

Despite conceding that the UK has a ‘strong track record in safety, delivered within a well-respected regulatory system’, the Government-appointed Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce has just published an interim report proposing deregulation of Britain’s civil and military nuclear sectors.

The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities are gravely concerned that this agenda amounts to the dumbing down of regulation in order to reduce the associated costs and administrative burden on nuclear operators, and that this will inevitably compromise safety, environmental and public protection, transparency and accountability.

Deregulation in the civil nuclear sector was a direct contributory factor in the Three Mile Island accident in the United States, and the latest pivot towards nuclear deregulation in the UK worryingly mirrors the direction taken by the Trump Administration, with the President having recently dismissed the Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Although the remit of the NRT is supposedly to support ‘energy security and national security’ it is based upon several falsehoods.

It is assumed that civil nuclear power is necessary to meet Britain’s future energy needs and that nuclear weapons are necessary for her defence:

‘Nuclear technology is critical to the UK’s future, both for low carbon energy and for our national security’.

And it is assumed that nuclear regulation is excessive, and therefore to facilitate the expansion of nuclear power and Britain’s nuclear arsenal there is need for reform:

Such sentiments have sadly been echoed by senior politicians. The Prime Minister has called for the nuclear sector to be freed to ‘Build, Baby, Build’, and Ministers have publicly stated their desire to railroad new nuclear projects past legitimate community objections with activists opposed to Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C having been dismissively branded ‘Nimbies’. Government intends to change the law to limit the ability of campaigners to challenge project approvals through the courts and is introducing new policies that grant considerable autonomy to developers in siting new nuclear projects.

Now the Taskforce proposes measures that represent a ‘radical reset’ and a ‘once in a generation’ transformation of the regulatory landscape.

This despite that fact that the report concedes that ‘The UK nuclear sector has a strong safety record overseen by expert and independent regulators’ with many consultees emphasising ‘the high level of credibility and trust in UK regulators’, which begs the question of if it ain’ t broken, why fix it?

It is assumed that civil nuclear power is necessary to meet Britain’s future energy needs and that nuclear weapons are necessary for her defence:

‘Nuclear technology is critical to the UK’s future, both for low carbon energy and for our national security’.

And it is assumed that nuclear regulation is excessive, and therefore to facilitate the expansion of nuclear power and Britain’s nuclear arsenal there is need for reform:

‘Over time, the regulation of civil and defence nuclear programmes has become increasingly complex and bureaucratic, leading to huge delays and ballooning costs, often for marginal benefit. With the UK’s ambitious civil and defence programmes set to expand to meet energy security, net zero, and deterrent demands, a reset is needed’.

In response to the NRT’s Call for Evidence earlier this year, these parties clearly responded by bewailing the current ‘system’ as ‘unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly’.

Now the Taskforce proposes measures that represent a ‘radical reset’ and a ‘once in a generation’ transformation of the regulatory landscape.

The Taskforce has said that it ‘will continue to gather evidence and views [on its initial proposals] over the Summer and will publish final recommendations in Autumn 2025.’

The interim report can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce-interim-report

‘Concise and evidence based’ responses to the report are invited by email to nuclearregulatorytaskforce@energysecurity.gov.uk by 8 September.

For its part, the Nuclear Free Local Authorities wish to see no watering down of Britain’s current arrangements and will be robustly outlining our objections to any changes which favour expediency and profit over safety, public health and environmental protection. We urge all those with a similar mindset to do the same.

For the NFLAs, the only points of consolation to be found in the interim report are that nuclear fusion is excluded from the NRT’s remit and that the Taskforce cannot ‘make recommendations for devolved governments in devolved areas’..For more information, please contact the NFLA Secretary Richard Outram by email to richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk

August 19, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK | Leave a comment

US flies nuclear bombs to Britain.

“The new nuclear bombs which are now based at Lakenheath are entirely under the control of Donald Trump and could be used without the UK having any say at all in the matter.

August 17, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational

Nukewatch UK reveals how US nuclear gravity bombs were deployed on US soil for the first time in 17 years

By Peter Burt

US nuclear bombs were delivered to Lakenheath air base on Thursday 17 July as part of NATO plans to deploy new battlefield nuclear nuclear weapons intended for war-fighting in Europe. The following is an examination of how we know this, with an update also below.

The flight

The arrival of a special flight transporting the bombs was observed by Nukewatch UK, who judge that the evidence publicly available from our observations and flight-tracking data now supports the conclusion that nuclear weapons are based at the Lakenheath US air base in Suffolk. This article explains how the weapons were brought to Lakenheath by the US Air Force and sets out the evidence which indicates they are now stationed at the British base.

Shortly after 7 am local time on Tuesday 15 July a giant C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft, flight number RCH4574 (‘Reach 4574’), assigned to the US Air Force’s 62nd Airlift Wing left Joint Base Lewis–McChord, its home base in Washington state. The 62nd Airlift Wing is an elite, highly trained transport unit which serves as the US Air Force’s Prime Nuclear Airlift Force: the only Air Force section tasked with the role of supporting the US Department of Defence and Department of Energy with their nuclear airlift operations. The aircraft undertaking the flight was a C-17 with the serial number 08-8200, flying on high priority mission with the air force mission number PAM112271196.

The aircraft flew across the continental United States to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico – the hub of the US Air Force’s nuclear operations, where the largest nuclear weapons storage facility in the world is located: the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex(KUMMSC). KUMMSC stores a significant portion of the US nuclear arsenal, including gravity bombs and warheads.

At Kirtland the aircraft almost certainly loaded up with a cargo of anything up to 20 newly manufactured B61-12 nuclear weapons – a new, modernised version of the US Air Force’s principal nuclear gravity bomb with greater accuracy than older variants of the weapon. Manufacturing of the B61-12 variant was completed in December 2024 and the weapon is currently being rolled out on deployment. Whilst at Kirtland the aircraft was parked on Pad 5 – the section of the airbase designated for handling hazardous cargoes. Other aircraft at the airport were given a warning not to overfly the aircraft on Pad 5 for a period of over five hours, which ended only once the C-17 had departed.

Mid evening local time on Wednesday 16 July Reach 4574 took off, with the pilot reminding the ground controller that the aircraft has “haz cargo” on board. The aircraft flew through the night across the Atlantic Ocean, rendezvousing with two KC-46 tanker aircraft from Pease Air National Guard Base and McGuire Air Force Base to refuel over the ocean east of New York.

In a co-ordinated operation, a second C-17 aircraft (aircraft number 09-9211, flight number RCH4205, mission number PAM112472196) also left Lewis-McChord on 15 July and flew to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany (stopping briefly at Lakenheath) to be on standby in the event of a failure or emergency involving the primary aircraft. This standby aircraft may have been loaded with nuclear emergency response equipment for dealing with an accident involving the primary aircraft.

Reach 4574 approached the UK flying south of Ireland, then flew up the Bristol Channel, cut across north Devon, and flew north west along a corridor taking it close to Oxford and Milton Keynes, but avoiding overflying major centres of population. The plane landed at Lakenheath air base at 12.50 local time.

Unloading the bombs

Nukewatch UK was able to observe the aircraft landing and unloading from outside the Lakenheath base. During the unloading operation base security was at an unusually high level, with USAF security patrols and police cars undertaking patrols inside the base’s security fence and plain-clothed (but badged) personnel from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations patrolling outside the base……………………………………………………………………………………………..

Nukewatch UK believes that this C-17 aircraft was transporting a batch of B61-12 nuclear weapons to Lakenheath. Our reasons for arriving at this conclusion are given below.

US nuclear weapons in Europe

The 62nd Airlift Wing regularly conducts Prime Nuclear Airlift Force missions across the Atlantic to transport materials and equipment to air bases in Europe which support NATO’s nuclear mission in Europe, under which B61 bombs are stored at US bases in Europe and bases of European nations which take part in NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements with the US. Nukewatch has been actively tracking these flights for three years, and has used archived tracking data to analyse flights since the beginning of 2020. Over this period missions have included occasional operations which have been unusually complex, involving up to seven aircraft as stand-bys and for in-flight refuelling. In addition to operations involving nuclear weapons, the unit also conducts missions transporting special nuclear materials which visit several NATO nuclear bases in Europe in sequence, and also conducts missions involving training with ground personnel at several nuclear bases.

It is possible that the earliest of these missions were training and rehearsal flights for the delivery of new B61-12 nuclear bombs to Europe, with more recent flights actually transporting the nuclear bombs across the Atlantic for deployment at bases in Europe. Nukewatch has observed that Lakenheath has been involved in many of these missions, initially as a location for basing a stand-by aircraft in Europe – possibly for use by a nuclear emergency response team. More recently Lakenheath appears to have been involved in a series of ‘work up’ exercises and security drills involving aircraft from 62 Airlift Wing to prepare the base for the arrival of nuclear weapons, culminating in a large-scale exercise over two days on 10 – 11 June 2025 which may have been a dress rehearsal for the nuclear delivery operation. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

What we think

Speaking on the delivery of US B61-12 nuclear weapons to Lakenheath, Juliet McBride of Nukewatch UK said:

“The new nuclear bombs which are now based at Lakenheath are entirely under the control of Donald Trump and could be used without the UK having any say at all in the matter. In fact, we wonder whether the UK government has even been notified by the US Air Force that the weapons are now stationed at Lakenheath.

“The nuclear weapons now stored at Lakenheath have an explosive power of up to 50 kilotons. For comparison, the atom bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive yield of 15 kilotons. Far from protecting Europeans during wartime, these nuclear weapons would contribute to turning Europe into a radioactive wasteland.

“Despite the significant issues and risks involved in basing these weapons of mass destruction in Europe, neither the US nor the UK government have bothered to inform citizens or Parliament that they have been deployed here. Nukewatch UK believes that UK citizens have a right to know that these preparations for fighting a nuclear war are under way, and we will continue to report on nuclear movements to Lakenheath and other European nuclear bases”.

Update: Second nuclear flight arrives at Lakenheath

Following a delivery of nuclear weapons to Lakenheath US air base in Suffolk on 17-18 July 2025, a second Prime Nuclear Airlift force flew to Lakenheath on 24-25 July to delivery a high priority hazardous cargo……………………………………………………………………….

Nukewatch concludes the following:

A high security unloading operation for hazardous materials took place at Lakenheath.
The operation seemed to follow slightly different procedures to the one observed the previous week.
Nevertheless, the degree of security and general circumstances of the flight seem to indicate that a nuclear-related load was probably delivered in the aircraft. This may have been components and equipment related to nuclear weapons, or possibly weapons themselves.
Between four to six loads seemed to be transported away from the aircraft in small convoys to a location on the airbase nearby.
Assuming two or three transporting vehicles in each convoy, and each convoy carried one nuclear bomb, this suggests that between around 8 and 18 ‘units’ of cargo were delivered by this flight. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/08/17/us-flies-nuclear-bombs-to-britain/

August 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Rachel Reeves to cut ‘bats and newts’ in boost to developers

Developers would also no longer have to prove that projects would have no impact on protected natural sites, under plans that would abolish the “precautionary principle” enshrined in
European rules.

Chancellor considers making it harder for concerns about nature to stand in
the way of infrastructure projects, in an effort to boost the economy.

Rachel Reeves is preparing to strip back environmental protections in an
effort to boost the economy by speeding up infrastructure projects. The
chancellor is considering reforms that would make it far harder for
concerns about nature to stop development, which she insists is crucial to
restoring growth and improving living standards.

The Treasury has begun
preparing for another planning reform bill and is thinking about tearing up
key parts of European environmental rules that developers say are making it
harder to build key projects. Labour ministers have repeatedly insisted
that their current planning overhaul will not come at the expense of
nature, promising a “win-win” system where developers will pay to
offset environmental damage.

But Reeves is understood to believe that the
government must go significantly further, after expressing frustration that
the interests of “bats and newts” are being allowed to stymie critical
infrastructure. She has tasked officials with looking at much more
contentious reforms, which are likely to provoke a furious backlash from
environmentalists and cause unease for some Labour MPs.

A smaller, UK-only
list of protected species is being planned, which would place less weight
on wildlife — including types of newt — that is rare elsewhere in
Europe but more common in Britain. Developers would also no longer have to
prove that projects would have no impact on protected natural sites, under
plans that would abolish the “precautionary principle” enshrined in
European rules. Instead, a new test would look at risks and benefits of
potential projects. Further curbs to judicial review are also being
considered by Reeves to stop key projects being delayed by legal challenges
from environmentalists.

Times 17th Aug 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rachel-reeves-strip-back-environmental-protections-planning-projects-xjxn02crs

August 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, UK | Leave a comment

Ministry of Defence urged to publish full details of Faslane incident.

The Ministry of Defence is being urged to publish full details of
a nuclear incident which took place at Faslane earlier this year. As
revealed by The Herald, the most serious grade of Nuclear Site Event Report
(NSER), Category A, took place at HMNB Clyde between January 1 and April
22.

The facility on Gare Loch is home to all of the Royal Navy’s
submarines, including the Vanguard class which are armed with Trident
missiles and the nuclear-powered Astute class hunter-killer vessels.

A Category A NSER carries an “actual or high potential for radioactive
release to the environment”. Approached for comment, the Ministry of
Defence said there had been “no unsafe releases of radioactive material” in
the Category A incident at Faslane but that it could not disclose details
of individual incidents for reasons of national security.

The MoD had previously admitted that radioactive material had been released into Loch
Long from RNAD Coulport after the Royal Navy failed to adequately maintain
the network of 1,500 water pipes on the base. Now SNP MSP Bill Kidd is
calling for the Ministry of Defence to publish full details of the Category
A incident, provide a complete contamination report for Loch Long, and set
out a clear plan for clean-up and prevention.

Herald 18th Aug 2025,
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25394175.mod-urged-publish-full-details-faslane-incident/

August 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Unproven and costly: Nuclear Waste Dump ‘Red’ Rated as Unachievable.

NFLA 18th Aug 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/unproven-and-costly-nuclear-waste-dump-red-rated-as-unachievable/

A leading Government body charged with responsibility for monitoring the delivery of major taxpayer funded infrastructure projects has just published a report in which the plan to develop a subterranean Geological Disposal Facility to hold Britain’s legacy and future high-level radioactive waste has been ‘Red’ rated as ‘unachievable’.

The GDF was previously rated ‘Amber’ in an assessment by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority published in January of this year[i], signifying that: ‘Successful delivery appears feasible, but significant issues already exist, requiring management attention. These appear resolvable at this stage and, if addressed promptly, should not present a cost/schedule overrun.’

But in a report just published by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), a new body formed by the Labour Government[ii], the GDF is now instead ‘Red’ rated indicating that: ‘Successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.’

The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities were unsurprised to hear the news. When contacted by New Civil Engineer for a quote, NFLA Secretary Richard Outram said:

“The NISTA Red rating is hardly surprising. The GDF process is fraught with uncertainties and the GDF ‘solution’ remains unproven and costly. A single facility, as estimated by government sources, could cost the taxpayer between £20-54 billion, but this being a nuclear project it is much more likely to be the latter and beyond.’

Government policy for the Geological Disposal Facility is predicated upon finding a project development site that is publicly acceptable, geologically ‘suitable’ and affordable.

So far, the first two of these hurdles have proven problematic to jump for the taxpayer funded body charged with finding a site and developing the facility. Nuclear Waste Services has being forced to retreat from South Holderness and Theddlethorpe in the face of steadfast public opposition and obliged to withdraw from Allerdale citing a lack of suitable geology.

Consequently, NWS is once more now limited to the pursuit of a site in Mid and South Copeland in West Cumbria. Both areas adjoin the beautiful Lake District National Park. They were previously the focus of failed attempts to impose a GDF, but the geology was found unsuitable, and the opposition of Cumbria County Council ended the process.

Resistance is growing to a GDF in South Copeland. Local people have formed an opposition group; two local Councils have condemned the plan and withdrawn their support from the process; and a review of the Community Partnership found it to be in disarray with factional infighting.

It is therefore not inconceivable that plans for a GDF in South Copeland could also soon be shelved.

Now Radiation Free Lakeland / Lakes against the Dump is gathering signatures from Cumbrians on a petition calling on Cumberland County Councillors to debate and vote upon their continued engagement with the GDF process. Once 1,000 County residents have signed the petition, the Council’s constitution provides for such a debate to be held in response.

Here are links to the petition: www.change.org/CumbriaNuclearDump https://www.change.org/p/massive-mine-shafts-and-nuclear-dump-for-cumbria-coast-tell-cumberland-council-vote-now

August 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

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