From Helen Wallace, Greenpeace UK
London
“No detail is forgotten” when it comes to designing a deep nuclear waste
repository, say Julia West and Ian McKinley (“Some bugs like it hot”, 5 October
p 42). But where are the authorities they claim are being so cautious?
West and McKinley state that the site of a deep repository should be chosen
so that radionuclides take tens of thousands of years to reach drinking water
aquifers, so that the radioactivity in a dump has time to decay. In fact,
Britain’s nuclear waste disposal company, Nirex, predicts that groundwater can
travel through the connected networks of fractures in the rock at the proposed
Sellafield dump site in a mere ten to a hundred years. These are the tiny
estimated times that contaminated groundwater takes to leak from the waste into
the aquifer above.
Not only is there no minimum groundwater travel time in British regulations,
a formal site selection procedure has not been followed. Geological criteria
designed to avoid such complex, fractured, earthquake-prone sites as Sellafield
have therefore been ignored.
Advertisement
Partly as a result of this, Nirex’s predictions of the cancer risk to future
generations (particularly infants and children) now exceed the regulatory risk
target when an agricultural well is used to obtain water from the aquifer above
the waste. Instead of showing the “extreme caution” West and McKinley advise,
the government has weakened the regulations so the risk target no longer has to
be met.
Perhaps the authorities have quietly reformulated Murphy’s Law itself?
Presumably it now reads: “Cross your fingers and start digging.”
