By Rob Edwards,
Sunday Herald, UK,
12 June 2005

Nuclear waste agency selected dumps on the basis of political expediency

From the window of his home on Barra, Donald Manford can see the small island of Fuday across the water. On Friday evening, he said, it was looking "peaceful and unperturbed - quite unaware of all the controversy that has been going on about it".

Fuday, just 250 hectares of rough grazing land, shot into the headlines last week after it was outed as one of five sites in Scotland shortlisted as a potential dump for all Britain`s nuclear waste. Unknown to anyone, the UK radioactive waste agency, Nirex, had planned to dig 26 huge caverns 500 metres under the island, along with a new harbour and causeway.

Unluckily for Barra and its 1000-plus inhabitants, Nirex also had similar, secret plans for the island of Sandray just to the south, costing ?1.8 billion over 50 years. "People are appalled that such things were considered," said Manford, who is the local councillor.

"That this organisation could talk about these things, organising, planning and plotting with people`s lives without telling them - I think it is obscene."

At six o`clock on Friday morning, Nirex released the sins of its past onto its website for all to see. In belated response to a freedom of information request lodged by the Sunday Herald and others in January, it published comprehensive details of all the potential nuclear waste sites kept secret by the government for more than 15 years.

On the shortlist, as well as Fuday and Sandray, there was the Dounreay nuclear plant and Altnabreac in Caithness and a site somewhere under the sea off Hunterston in North Ayrshire. In England, there were another seven potential dump sites: two in Essex, two at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, one in Norfolk, one in South Humberside and one under the sea off Redcar in Yorkshire.

At all these sites, Nirex had made advanced plans in the 1980s for constructing underground waste repositories without telling anyone locally. The idea was to leave the large volumes of waste created by half a century of nuclear power and nuclear weapons deep in a geologically stable rock formation.

The latest official inventory of UK nuclear waste stocks in 2001 showed that there were more than 92,000 cubic metres stored at 34 locations around the UK. This is set to rise five times in volume over the next 100 years, even assuming no new nuclear power stations are built.

The waste contains a massive amount of radioactivity - many times more than was released by the world`s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. It includes some very long-lived radioisotopes, such as plutonium, and will remain lethal for maybe a quarter of a million years.

The information released by Nirex shows that the shortlist of 12 sites was selected from a long list of 537 sites, of which 159 were in Scotland. Most of the Scottish sites were in Highland region (45) and Strathclyde (40), followed by Western Isles (21), Shetland (17) and Orkney (15).

Much of the list reads like a roll call of Scotland`s famous islands. It included Iona, Islay, Jura, Canna, Eigg, Muck, Coll, Gigha, Colonsay, Tiree, Ulva, Raasay, Rhum, St Kilda, Foula, Ailsa Craig, the Summer Isles and the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth.

There were also plenty of military bases and training areas, such as Lossiemouth, Kinloss, Leuchars, Rosyth, Machrihanish, Barry Buddon and Cape Wrath. Even Redford Barracks in Edinburgh was regarded by Nirex as a potential waste dump. As many as 33 sites in Scotland made it past the third stage of Nirex`s six-stage sorting process (see map, right).

Just as fascinating as the long list of sites is the process that was used to sift them. On Friday, Nirex also published a report which for the first time lays bare the nakedly political criteria that were adopted, alongside geological considerations.

First, places where lots of people lived were ruled out. Using guidance from the government`s Health and Safety Executive on the siting of nuclear power stations, Nirex devised "a population density criterion which excluded more highly populated parts of the country".

Then it restricted sites to those that were owned by the government or the nuclear industry, or where private landowners had offered their land (as happened at Altnabreac in Caithness). Next, it entirely omitted Northern Ireland "because of the political situation".

Finally, Nirex excluded a large proportion of the potential sites in Wales, particularly those owned by the Forestry Commission. This was because, in previous site selection exercises, "personal threats were received by staff involved in the consideration of such sites".

"The list shows that site selection in the past has been done on purely political grounds - where they think they can get away with it," said the Green MSP, Chris Ballance.

He pointed out that nearly a third of the 537 sites in the UK were in Scotland. "They seem to have chosen every uninhabited Scottish island they could find a name for on the map. Low population and low public opposition was a more important factor than geological and scientific suitability."

The only sites to which Nirex has previously admitted were at Sellafield and Dounreay in Caithness, which were both investigated with test bores in 1989. A farm near Sellafield was chosen as the preferred site, but this was rejected by the government as scientifically flawed in 1997.

If the full list had been published at the time, Sellafield would never have been "catapulted into the winning place", argued Stuart Haszeldine , a geology professor at Edinburgh University. "The technical and social merits of the different sites could have been compared, and we may well have saved the country a lot of time and expense," he said.

The list has only been forced into the open by the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations. The Sunday Herald, along with nuclear-free local authorities and other media organisations, lodged a formal request for it when the new legislation came into force at the start of January.

Since then, Nirex - instructed, it says, by government ministers - has twice refused to provide the list. It was very anxious not to release it in the run-up to the general election for fear of the political controversy it could generate around the selected sites.

Nevertheless, some time after Nirex changed its shareholding to become a creature of government rather than of the nuclear industry in April, a decision was taken in favour of a "managed release" of the information. The release was originally planned for this coming Wednesday, but it was hurriedly brought forward last week following rumours of a leak to a Sunday newspaper.

Nirex admits that it made many mistakes in the past. It shouldn`t have been secretive, its process shouldn`t have been so political and it should have involved local communities. It promises it won`t make the same mistakes again.

Chris Murray, Nirex`s managing director, has also been stressing that the list is historic. "This old list will not form the starting point of any new site selection process," he said, pointing out that geological understanding has greatly improved over the past 20 years.

Unfortunately, this has been spun further by the environment minister, Ross Finnie, in a letter to every MSP last week. He said the list was "purely of historic interest" and was "of little relevance to current UK policy".

This is not the whole truth, however. Nirex`s own briefing to MSPs concludes by pointing out that the geology of the selected sites has not changed. "Sites that were considered to be potentially suitable previously, on geological grounds, could be considered suitable in a future site selection process," it states.

Most experts agree. "It is possible that some of the areas that they identified could appear again in the future, but the local communities must be involved this time," said Phil Richardson, a nuclear waste specialist with Enviros Consulting.

The government is expecting recommendations on the best methods for disposing of the waste from its Committee on Radioactive Waste Management in July 2006. The committee is currently considering four main options, involving various combinations of deep, shallow and surface stores.

The next stage will be for the government to launch a new site selection exercise. Nobody can predict for certain what locations it will consider, but it is a good bet that Sellafield will be included, as it is still regarded as a prime site by Nirex.

If Scotland is to take responsibility for its own waste, some people assume that Dounreay would be the favoured location. Nirex insiders, however, suggest that previous geological investigations showed the underground rocks there to be too cracked and leaky to be safe.

That would mean that the other places on Nirex`s old shortlist could come back into the frame - like Sandray and Fuday around Barra. If this happened, promises Donald Manford, all hell would break loose. "We would resist it in every possible way," he said.