Nuclear alert: PM's bribe boosts dumping of waste

Nuclear chiefs are to give Britons millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to accept the dumping of radioactive waste near their home.

The operators of the controversial Sellafield nuclear complex have agreed to pay local people in Cumbria some 75m for expanding the only national dump for low-level nuclear waste, in a move that has surprised leading experts.

The unprecedented deal which is being called a "bribe" is widely thought to be the precursor of a payment of at least 1bn to the community that agrees to take a much more controversial planned repository for infinitely more dangerous waste that will remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Government plans to invite communities across Britain to "express an interest" in hosting such a repository, and expects them to put forward proposals for inducements to take it that will "enhance "their "wellbeing". The new deal agreed just before Christmas will provide concrete evidence of their intentions and raise the financial stakes.

Professor Gordon MacKerron, who until recently chaired the Government's official Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), said that the "totally surprising" move sets set a precedent for a much more expensive deal over a more controversial repository.

This week the Government will announce its backing for a new generation of nuclear power stations. John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, will publish a White Paper setting out the plans and an Energy Bill to implement them. Finding somewhere to put the vast amount of radioactive waste generated by existing and new reactors is one of the main legal and practical obstacles in the way of the new plants, which the Government promises will not be publicly subsidised.

Last night environmentalists denounced the payments deal the first ever agreed in Britain as "development by bribery", and as a breach of undertakings not to subsidise the industry. But the principle of compensating local people for taking nuclear waste is now accepted by ministers, and councils are making it clear that they will not give planning permission to new facilities unless they get the money.

Under the agreement quietly endorsed by Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who will ultimately provide the money the state-owned Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns Sellafield and operates the country's radioactive waste disposal programme, has undertaken to make indefinite payments to the people of west Cumbria, in return for extending a waste dump near the small coastal village of Drigg, a few miles from the complex.

It has agreed with the local Copeland Borough Council and the Cumbrian County Council to make a 10m down payment half of which will be paid as early as this summer, followed by annual fees of 1.5m a year for as long as the dump is in operation. If it closes in 2050, as one inquiry predicted, the total sum will just exceed 75m.

The village with only 300 inhabitants will receive a guaranteed 50,000 a year which could exceed 2m over the lifetime of the dump. Copeland Council plans to put all the money into a special "community interest company" and says it will be focused on attracting business, on environmental improvements and education, and on social projects and sports facilities.

In return, Cumbria council will this month approve the expansion of Drigg, which has been taking nuclear debris for almost half a century. Its existing eight vaults are expected to be full by the end of the year: both the county and borough councils have been refusing to grant permission for a ninth to be built until the payments are agreed.

Allan Holliday, Copeland council's deputy leader, said that he is "delighted" with the deal, adding: "The local community has had to live with the repository for many years without the recognition that was due to them." And David Moore, leader of the opposition Conservative group, adds: "A very important principle has been established."

Drigg, a former Royal Ordnance factory, takes low-level waste from all over the country, mainly made up of protective clothing, paper, packaging and equipment that has been contaminated by radioactivity. Most comes by rail from Sellafield just up the road, and the rest is trucked in from other nuclear installations, hospitals, firms and research facilities. It is mixed with cement, packaged in steel containers and then placed in the vast concrete vaults a few metres underground.

But this is the easy, relatively innocuous stuff. Although such low-level material makes up 90 per cent of the volume of the country's nuclear waste, it accounts for only 0.0003 per cent of its total radioactivity. What to do with the rest now standing at nearly half a million cubic metres of high- and intermediate-level waste, enough to fill the Albert Hall five times over has baffled ministers and the nuclear industry. It is being stored above ground, overwhelmingly at Sellafield, while a solution is sought.

The waste will remain extremely dangerous and will have to be isolated from people and the environment for at least a quarter of a million years, 20 times as long as the entire history of human civilisation from the time the first plough was put to the ground.

Over that mind-boggling time scale, ice ages come and go; seas rise and fall; tectonic plates move and continents continue to drift. Civilisations will certainly collapse and there is no guarantee that our descendants will be even as technologically advanced as we are, or able to decipher any warning signs we leave behind.

It is this indefinitely poisoned chalice that the Government will this year ask communities to volunteer to take, by acting as host to an unprecedented repository, buried at least 1,000m underground. Experts say that with the Drigg deal setting the precedent ministers are bound to have to agree to pay at least 1bn in inducements. The Government will have little choice, for 34 years of sustained failure to find somewhere to put waste is now one of the major obstacles to its ambition for a new generation of nuclear power plants.

Back in 1974, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded: "There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future." It was the turning point for nuclear power in Britain. Vast expansion plans were abandoned, and only one reactor has been approved and built since.

For most of that time, official policy in a classic Whitehall phrase has been to "dispose of radioactive wastes at appropriate times and in appropriate places". But attempts to find places ran into entrenched local opposition, and were abandoned.

The last a proposal for a repository beneath Gosforth, near both Sellafield and Drigg was rejected by the then Environment Secretary John Gummer on his last day in office before the 1997 election.

The Government is in a particular bind as it gave the lack of waste-disposal plans as one of the main reasons for deciding against nuclear power in a 2003 White Paper. And when it changed its mind last year, a judge overturned its decision, partly on the grounds that it had put no firm solution to the public. Now in desperation, ministers have adopted a policy of "voluntarism", hoping that communities will volunteer to take the waste. But Pete Wilkinson, a former CoRWM member, said: "Voluntarism is a euphemism for a bribe." He expects that a community would ask for "billions" to take the waste.

The Nuclear Legacy Advisory Forum of the Local Government Association, which represents all councils, told ministers that a "substantive benefits package" will be needed. Cumbria County Council added that it must be big enough to be "ambitious and transformational".

For its part, the nuclear industry has worked out that an invitation from the Sellafield area could save it 2bn from not having to look elsewhere.

Environmentalists attack the concept for putting political acceptability before safety. Tom Oliver, head of rural policy for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said the Government was "running development policy by bribe". Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, called the deal "another subsidy to the nuclear industry".

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