No local democracy on nuclear issues

The government has given the go-ahead for Augean Plc to dump nuclear contaminated waste in an ordinary landfill site outside the village of Kings Cliffe near Peterborough, despite massive local opposition.

Community Secretary Eric Pickles overruled Northamptonshire County Council, which turned down the company's application, and ignored a local referendum where 96% of local people opposed this dangerous move. This is the same man who is piloting the Coalition's Localism Bill through Parliament, leading Kings Cliffe Wastewatchers to express “surprise and disappointment that the wishes of local people appear to have been ignored”.

Augean, which has no experience of handling nuclear waste, is now permitted to transport 250,000 cubic metres of the stuff each year, by road, from the UK's original nuclear research plant at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Local people fear now the precedent is set, waste from other sites, for example Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex, will follow. They point out that the landfill site is above an aquifer that serves cities like Peterborough and Milton Keynes, but Pickles insists the risk of “actual harm is low”.

The mis-named Environment Agency recently made a similar decision allowing waste from Sellafield to be dumped at a landfill at Lillyhall in Cumbria. Allerdale Borough Council, Cumbria County Council and Copeland Borough Council all objected, but were overruled. The county council claims the decision does not follow the Agency's own rules, and "may have significant implications for future waste policy issues".


Councillor Tony Knowles said: "My fear is that this decision opens up the market for this waste to be disposed of at wherever offers the best deal on costs, rather than factoring in the wider environmental and economic concerns.” He is dead right there.

The coalition government has clearly decided that the only way to keep their commitment to nuclear power on track is by completely ignoring any local objections and forcing the programme through. More evidence of this came when environment and energy secretary Chris Huhne made clear that the UK, unlike other countries, will not allow the post-Fukushima concerns to halt, or even slow down, the building of new nuclear power stations.

Having considered a report from Dr Mike Weightman of the Office for Nuclear Regulation, which said it was unlikely that the UK would suffer an earthquake like the one that hit Japan, Huhne claimed that he report provided the government with the “basis to continue to remove the barriers to nuclear new build in the UK”.

Of course, nobody thought there would be an earthquake, but Weightman did identify a range of other issues that should be reviewed. These included

international and national emergency response arrangements, public contingency planning, communications and the review of flooding studies, site and plant layouts, electricity and cooling supplies, multi-reactor site considerations, spent fuel strategies and dealing with prolonged accidents.

But none of this stopped Huhne from declaring: “We want to see new nuclear as part of a low carbon energy mix going forward, provided there is no public subsidy. The Chief Nuclear Inspector’s interim report reassures me that it can.”

So the government will bring forward Energy National Policy Statements for ratification. These provide a framework allowing the state to overrule local objections to major energy infrastructure projects and to shorten the planning enquiry process. They could be implemented not only for new nuclear stations, but also coal-fired, and shale gas exploitation (which by the way also got the go-ahead yesterday).

The government is driving through this profit-driven energy policy at whatever cost, including riding roughshod over local democracy. In practice, the Localism Bill means centralised decision-making on behalf of the energy corporations, as the people of Kings Cliffe have discovered.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Poisoned legacy of nuclear option

Wildfires raging across Russia are spreading towards the highly contaminated forests of the Bryansk region, threatening to release low-dose nuclear radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster of almost 25 years ago.

The Russian government claims that only two fires have broken out in Bryansk and that they have been put out. However Greenpeace has published a map that suggests there are, or have been, more than 20 fires in the area.

The impact on health of low-dose nuclear radiation combined with smog generated by the fires, plus the horrific heat, which continues in Russia’s hottest summer since records began, is not easy to predict.

It’s a reminder of the long-term damage caused by the world’s worst nuclear accident, when in 1986 one of four nuclear reactors exploded at Chernobyl, spreading nuclear material right across Europe. Whole areas of Russia and Belarus are still no-go zones and high levels of birth defects and thyroid cancer have been identified.

The original concrete sarcophagus enclosing the exploded reactor is crumbling to dust, and a massive new steel structure is being constructed on site at an estimated cost of $1.4bn. It is hoped it will contain the radiation for 100 years.

At the same time, the ConDem government has published its annual energy strategy review, and whilst nuclear power warrants only a short paragraph, reading between the lines one can see that it is a key part of the coalition’s plans.

Indeed energy secretary Chris Huhne was quick to respond to an accusation in the Financial Times that the government was not pursuing the nuclear option and that “green dogma threatens to saddle it with the wrong energy policies”.

Former nuclear opponent Huhne promised the FT: “I have said clearly – most recently in the annual energy statement – that nuclear power will play a important part in our future energy mix, and that the government will continue with all the facilitating measures such as streamlined planning and the national policy statements.

“Moreover, nuclear power will benefit from the framework put in place to encourage low carbon electricity generation, such as the European Union’s emissions trading scheme and our own plans for a carbon price floor to provide greater investor certainty.” Huhne said that the industry would not receive public subsidies but that he was “confident that there will be new nuclear power as planned by 2018.”

What this actually means is that the government is not going to directly subsidise nuclear power, but is pushing to raise the floor for the European Union carbon price, so that new nuclear power stations are potentially profitable, not only in the UK but across Europe.

And with the planned closure of a number of coal-fired power stations, and a predicted shortfall in electricity generation in the UK in coming years, the nuclear option looks even better for shareholders.

This is the same Huhne who wrote in 2007: "Nuclear is a tried, tested and failed technology. New nuclear would be economically foolhardy, environmentally irresponsible and pose long-term security questions that are impossible to address.

"If we opt for a new generation of nuclear reactors, future generations may rue the day. We will be encumbering them with high costs and enormous and unknowable liabilities. We will miss a key opportunity to pioneer a green future." Quite!

Having entered the coalition, and accepted the logic of the continuation of the profit and growth-driven, privatised, energy industry, all Huhne’s former opposition to nuclear inevitably disappears. In the context of capitalist short-termism, nuclear can successfully masquerade as a low-carbon, “green”, option. Nuclear has certainly fooled a lot of people!

The issue of disposing of toxic nuclear waste will be fudged, and left as a problem for future generations to tackle, just as generations of Byelorussians and Russians continue to live with the poisoned inheritance of Chernobyl.

Penny Cole
Environment editor