Letter submitted to The Guardian:
Your environment editor’s front page story (“Allow nuclear waste disposal
under national parks, say MPs,” 31 July; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/31/allow-nuclear-waste-disposal-in-national-parks-say-mps)
understandably concentrates on the most egregiously unacceptable recommendation
of the business and energy select committee report on burying radioactive waste.
However, there are other unacceptable elements of this
select committee inquiry, which is not like any usual select committee
proceedings, as it does not just make recommendations which ministers may or
may not chose to accept, but is regarded by ministers as an integral part of the
legitimisation of the government’s contentious proposals for subterranean emplacement of nuclear waste in a policy that amounts
long term to ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind.’
One recommendation made by the
committee states: “It is of paramount importance that prospective host
communities understand how their ‘right of withdrawal’ interacts with the
development consent orders for boreholes and geological disposal…The Government should clarify the degree of
priority afforded to community consent in the national policy statement for
nuclear waste (NPS) in a way that is accessible to a lay audience so as to give
prospective communities all the tools they need to engage with the siting
process.” (Paragraph 44)
But as
important as ‘host’ communities are ‘affected’ communities, through which thousands
of transports of nuclear waste will take place, which formed the core of my own
submission to the committee in June. This issue was fleetingly raised in the
oral evidence session on 10 July , when Conservative MP Mark Pawsey asked one
inquiry witness, Bruce McKirdy, managing director of Radioactive Waste
Management Ltd: “Is it your view
that communities are more concerned about transport of material to the facility
or the actual storage of the material once it is there?”(Q58)
McKirdy replied: “We have heard both views. They
are generally concerned about transport and immediate environmental effects…”
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After a series of email exchanges in June with the committee
clerk over my written submission, the committee declined to publish it, nor
did they make any reference to the
potential health and safety impact of many transports by rail and/or road of very dangerous radioactive wastes through
possible hundreds of en route
communities.
In
ignoring this crucial issue, the committee has failed to properly scrutinise
the government proposals and has, by default, endorsed a prospective future threat to human health and welfare for many decades as
the very long- lived radioactive waste is transported to the repository.
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