Nuclear Mutant Seals
Diane Brandon’s letter [ FT416:72] about impending nuclear mutations, and the importing of nuclear waste from “China, America and elsewhere” via Grimsby, are the sort of claims that does the non-nuclear cause no favours. Perhaps she was stirred up by the local press, such as the emotive Grimsby Telegraph headline “Nuclear waste from all over UK could be dumped on Lincolnshire coast” – the term ‘dumped’ implying that it’s just going to be tipped on to the beaches.
The vast majority of the UK’s waste comes from our own nuclear power stations (the UK relies on nuclear energy for 17 per cent of our electricity generation), and some hospital and military waste. Between 70% and 75% of the UK’s high-activity radioactive waste is currently stored above ground at the Sellafield site in north-west England, one of 20 storage sites around the UK, but surface storage is not a viable long-term solution beyond much more than 100 years, so a better solution has to be found. The three proposed sites for geological disposal facilities (GDFs) – at Hartlepool (Co. Durham), Theddlethorpe (in Lincolnshire), or Cumbria – are intended to deal with the UK’s long-running problem of storing our own legacy nuclear waste materials, accumulated from the 1950s onwards, by providing a safe deposit site for approximately 750,000 cubic metres of high-activity waste, hundreds of metres underground, in areas thought to have suitable geology to securely isolate the radioactive material for hundreds or thousands of years.
The waste would be solidified, safely packaged, and placed into deep subterranean vaults, which would then be backfilled and the surrounding network of tunnels and chambers sealed. Finland is doing exactly the same thing at Olkiluoto. Under international law, each country is responsible for its own nuclear waste storage (meaning it can’t be exported or transported internationally), so we have to store it somewhere.
While we can all sympathise with the desire of every proposed site to not be the one chosen, one has to be selected sooner or later, because the problem won’t go away. There are also some benefits in the form of 500 very well-paid jobs, and the inward investment they represent.
Whatever the final outcomes of discussions at all the various proposed sites, there is no possibility of the claimed nuclear imports from China, America or elsewhere, as that would breach international treaties on nuclear waste movement and management, and no such imports have taken place.
And mutated seals are unlikely. Apart from the fact that the storage will be in radiationproof containers deep underground, the Chernobyl forest has shown that animals appear not to be as easily mutated as was popularly thought likely in the 1950s. Plants yes, but survival of the fittest means that animals too deformed die early and only healthy ones survive into adulthood, so the animals seen in around Chernobyl are all normal-looking; in fact, animal populations have thrived [see FT324:6].
Andy Kelly By email