Michael Folger, the chief executive of the nuclear industry's waste disposal company, UK Nirex, is a man of strong Christian faith. But this Easter, rather than the story of Christ's Passion, his mind may have been dwelling more on the Psalms. In particular, the warning of psalm 146: "Put not your trust in princes."
If there is one industry to which the government owes a debt of gratitude, it is nuclear power. It was nuclear power stations that kept the lights on during the miners' strike. Yet Margaret Thatcher and her successors turned against it. On 17th March, the day John Major announced the general election, the government announced the latest stage in its long retreat from the dream of cheap and plentiful civil nuclear power. In blunt language, John Gummer, the secretary of state for the environment, rubbished Folger's plans for the disposal of nuclear waste. Gummer referred to "the poor design" of the project and expressed his concern "about the scientific uncertainties and technical deficiencies in the proposals presented by Nirex."
In June 1994 UK Nirex had applied for planning permission to excavate a laboratory near the Sellafield reprocessing plant in West Cumbria, to analyse the suitability of the rocks for Britain's first deep waste repository. In December Cumbria County Council rejected the planning application, although the laboratory was just the first stage in the process. Nirex appealed and thus triggered a public inquiry, from September 1995 to February 1996. The inquiry ruled against the laboratory project and on 17th March, Gummer endorsed its decision.
no waste strategy, no industry
Britain has thus joined a large club of nuclear nations which has failed to solve the problems of radioactive waste disposal. Germany has a strategy but, as the mass demonstrations at Gorleben showed at the beginning of March, it has not won public assent. In the US, spent nuclear fuel is piling up at some power stations in transport casks which have been adapted for use as temporary storage, while political horsetrading will decide the fate of the proposed repository site at Yucca mountain in Nevada. After several false starts, France seems to be getting it right; surprisingly for a country with a reputation for centralism, extensive local consultations are being undertaken with a view to securing consent. Perhaps Sweden has the most advanced strategy with longterm stores and one disposal already operating. But the Swedes voted to phase out nuclear power in a referendum held more than 15 years ago.
In Britain, as long ago as 1976, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution warned that nuclear power could not continue "unless it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that at least one method exists for the safe isolation of these wastes for the indefinite future." Over the two decades since then, the nuclear industry has spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to find a safe way of disposing of its waste. Two of Gummer's predecessors, Tom King and Nicholas Ridley, tore up earlier plans. Now, Gummer has done it too, and this time has raised doubts about whether the waste can be disposed of at all.
Without a proven waste disposal route, the future of nuclear power looks bleak. The industry had already made itself politically unpopular when the nuclear power stations had to be withdrawn at the last minute from Cecil Parkinson's privatisation of the electricity supply industry in 1989. Almost in passing, Parkinson killed off the technology on which the industry had been pinning its future hopes: the fast breeder reactor.
It has thus been easy to overlook the industry's advantages: that uranium is comparatively plentiful and, unlike gas and oil, it is not supplied from politically volatile regions; that nuclear power accounts for 27 per cent of Britain's electricity, and whatever other environmental problems it may pose, it does not contribute to global warming.
State owned Nuclear Electric succeeded in building the Sizewell B pressurised water reactor to time and budget. Sizewell was supposed to be the forerunner of a series of PWRs, mass produced comparatively cheaply on a standardised production line. But these plans were stillborn. The station had hardly warmed up before Nuclear Electric was bundled into a forced marriage with Scottish Nuclear. Established late in 1995, the combined enterprise, British Energy, owns eight nuclear power stations all producing around 1,200 megawatts of electricity. In addition to the American-style PWR at Sizewell, the company owns all of Britain's advanced gas cooled reactors, the second generation reactor of British design. Even though many of the AGRs can look forward to another 20 or 30 years of productive life, the whole thing was sold off as a job lot for less than the construction cost of Sizewell B.
Britain's elderly first generation reactors, known as Magnox, are nearing the end of their lives. They proved unsaleable and have been retained in state hands in the ownership of a specially created company, Magnox Electric plc. The plan ultimately is for Magnox Electric to be subsumed by the nuclear fuel company British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). BNFL, too, remains in state ownership, but its new reprocessing plant at Sellafield, known as Thorp, has provided plenty of unwelcome controversy for the whole nuclear industry.
for want of a hole
Britain has been producing nuclear waste for 50 years-much of it from military use-so even were the industry to be closed tomorrow, a lot of waste would remain to be disposed of. Radioactive waste divides into three categories: low level, intermediate level and high level. Low level waste includes materials that have been slightly contaminated and cannot be cleaned up: worn out equipment, protective overalls, air filters and ash from the burning of low level combustible wastes. Radioactive wastes are not measured by weight but by volume. Between 20,000 and 30,000 cubic metres of low level radioactive waste are produced in Britain each year-enough to fill a block of flats.
Intermediate level waste includes the metal cans that contained the fuel in the core of the power stations, worn out reactor components, equipment and gas filters, as well as sludges and resins from effluent treatment systems. Between 2,500 and 5,000 cubic metres of intermediate level waste are produced in Britain each year, enough to fill a detached three storey house.
High level waste is produced when spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed to strip out the unused uranium and separate it from the fission products which are intensely radioactive. It contains more than 95 per cent of the total radioactivity which results from the nuclear industry's waste products, and needs artificial cooling because of the heat it produces. From the past 35 years of civil nuclear power in the UK about 1,600 cubic metres of high level waste have been produced-about enough to fill a pair of semi-detached houses-and it is being added to at the rate of about 200 cubic metres per year. Most of it is at present stored as a hot acidic liquid at Sellafield. In 1992 BNFL, which is responsible for dealing with high level waste, began the process of "vitrifying" it, that is, turning it into glass. This makes it easier to store and also reduces its volume by about two thirds.
This nuclear waste is a legacy of strategic decisions taken by governments of both political parties. But Gummer's decision exemplifies how ministers can distance themselves from any difficult legacy of their predecessors. Disposal of nuclear waste is a national issue, but the fate of Nirex's plans were decided by a local planning inquiry-which gave equal weight to such issues as visual intrusion and the increased likelihood of accidents at a local road junction.
When deciding on an inquiry inspector's report, the secretary of state for the environment acts in an impartial, quasi-judicial role. But in a different section of his departmental portfolio, Gummer is the minister responsible for setting the policy for the disposal of nuclear waste. His department, ultimately, had the responsibility for being satisfied that Nirex's plans were sound and well thought out before they went to a public inquiry. Gummer has not quite matched the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass who believed three impossible things before breakfast, but he has managed to maintain, as secretary of state for the environment, two contradictory positions: that Nirex's plans were sound enough to withstand the scrutiny of a public inquiry and that they were not.
There is also the matter of sheer political expediency. Gummer's announcement coincided with the start of the election campaign. Earlier proposals to sink boreholes near Loch Doon in the southern uplands of Scotland, in the Cheviots, at Widmerpool near Loughborough and in Somerset aroused so much opposition that the then secretary of state for the environment, Tom King, cancelled the programme in 1981. The site in Somerset was in King's own constituency and the one near Loch Doon provoked protests in the seat of George Younger, then secretary of state for Scotland.
After this setback ministers bought themselves time by declaring that waste was to be stored on the surface for at least 50 years-thus removing it from the political agenda. The government then devolved responsibility for intermediate and low level wastes to the nuclear industry itself. A new organisation, the Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Executive (Nirex) assumed responsibility for low and intermediate level wastes. Nirex is wholly owned by the nuclear industry, its two biggest shareholders being BNFL with 39.5 per cent of the shares and Magnox Electric with 35 per cent.
But waste disposal continued to be an intensely political issue. In October 1983, Nirex nominated a former anhydrite mine in Cleveland for intermediate level waste. More than 83,000 people from Billingham signed a letter of protest and ICI, the owner of the mine, refused to co-operate with Nirex. In January 1985, the government told Nirex to abandon the site. Instead of adapting an existing mine, Nirex was to design and build its own underground repository for intermediate level waste-somewhere else.
A year later, in February 1986, Nirex announced that it wanted to investigate three further sites for shallow burial of low level wastes: South Killingholme in Humberside; Bradwell in Essex; and Fulbeck in Lincolnshire. All the sites were in constituencies with Conservative MPs and all dissolved into uproar. On 1st May 1987, less than two weeks before the election was called, Nicholas Ridley announced the abandonment of all four sites. The board of Nirex then decided that because it had to bury intermediate level waste deep underground anyway, it would cost very little extra to hack out a couple of extra caverns to take low level wastes too.
Nirex realised that to dispose deep underground of both low and intermediate level wastes it would need to dig a hole of the same capacity as the Channel Tunnel. But the company was then confounded by its main shareholder. BNFL claimed in September 1990 that it could dispose of virtually all low level waste that was likely to arise for the next 60 years in its existing shallow burial site at Drigg, just along the coast. Not only could this be done technically it would be cheaper, too. Nirex's hole suddenly shrank and national policy reverted, on cost grounds, to what had been abandoned, on cost grounds, just three years before.
no end of a mess
In July 1991, Nirex finally announced that Sellafield was the site. But doubts soon set in about the suitability of the area. The problem was the hills of the Lake District and their effect on the movement of underground water. Crucial to the safety of any nuclear waste repository is that underground water should be static or flow through the area very slowly. That way, if any radioactive chemicals were to dissolve out of the waste and be carried by the water, thousands of years would elapse before they came up to the surface. In such a long transit, most of the radioactivity would have decayed away. However, geological problems associated with Sellafield's proximity to the sea meant that Nirex would have to spend much longer examining the rocks and the movement of water in the area. It announced that, before applying for planning permission for the repository itself, it wanted to construct an underground laboratory. The switch to a two stage approach-first the laboratory and then the repository-came shortly after Folger took over the helm at Nirex. Now, after six years in the job, he has heard virtually every aspect of his company's work condemned out of hand. Insiders say that, although Folger knew that his plans might face problems, he had no inkling that the rejection would be so total.
There will now have to be a total rethink, probably with high level and intermediate waste disposed of together. It is not clear that this can be done by Nirex because Gummer has so damaged the company's credibility. Whatever happens, it will be years before the industry comes up with a fresh proposal.
