IT WOULD be difficult to think up a worse way of deciding where to put your nuclear waste. First, conduct the process in secret: lock the project’s scientists behind closed doors and do not allow them to publish to their peers. Then, abandon science as a way to select suitable sites and choose instead a politically convenient location near a nuclear plant.
That, in essence, is what the UK did in the 1980s and 1990s when it chose deep rocks beneath the sprawling nuclear complex at Sellafield in north-west England as the preferred destination for its radioactive waste (see “Politics…
