Miliband announces plans to bury nuclear waste
David Miliband announced plans today to bury the nuclear waste from new round of nuclear power plants. Now your first thought might be “Who in their right mind is going to agree to having radioactive waste buried underneath them?” A reasonable question but Miliband’s got it covered - local councils will volunteer to take the waste. Same question as before right? Once again there’s an answer - the councils that are…err…lucky enough to get a nuclear dump will benefit financially from the multi-billion pound construction project for the facility. If that sounds a bit like a bribe then you should probably take a long hard look at how cynical you are. As a side note, Miliband has apparently taken to referring to this method of dealing with the problem as “geological disposal” rather than “burying nuclear waste with a half life of thousands of years” presumably because the latter’s a bit of a mouthful (and true).
Via The Register.
October 26th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Not to sound too cynical, but what council in their right mind would “volunteer” for this? A council that does “volunteer” will get a multi-million pound investment, which i assume has to be spent on the facilities. There might be some spare change, but they’re going to have to build it etc.
There is also no guarentee that the construction workers, materials etc will actually come from that area, therefore this won’t necessarily create jobs for the area- although some people might get employed to run it (but still they could commute from outside the council’s domain).
Then there is the negative effect of building such a facility, such as people not wanting to live near radioactive waste, the facility spoiling the view etc.
When you weigh this up, no council would choose to build it.
Its a shame the CORWM decided that sending the waste into outer space was too dangerous (not mentioning the fact its actually against international law).
October 26th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Well, yeah, you’re probably right. You’ll notice that I didn’t say I thought the plan would work. Unsurprisingly, the contingency plan (presumably forcing someone to take the waste) isn’t being talked up so much.
I’m not sure I’d describe it as a “shame” that it was decided not to blast the waste into space. If it’s unsafe it’s a damn good thing it’s not happening. I think we can all learn an important lesson from Futurama about sending waste into space.
What’s really a shame is that the government seem to be in the pocket of the nuclear industry and as a result are dicking around with this instead of getting on with large scale renewable schemes.