- Ministers are preparing to sanction a policy which could
turn Britain into the "nuclear dustbin of the world" by allowing
thousands of tons of radioactive waste shipped to the UK from abroad to
be stored here permanently.
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- A document slipped out on Friday by the Department of
Trade and Industry calculates that the shift in policy could earn between
£200m and £650m for British Nuclear Fuels if it kept waste
from its Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria rather than returning
it to the fuel's country of origin.
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- However, the document also acknowledges that this would
raise issues over where to store the radioactive material because a deep
underground repository might not be built until the beginning of the next
century. The earliest that one is likely to be approved is 2025, says the
document, meaning that the waste would need to be stored above ground.
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- Environmental groups and opposition parties reacted angrily
to the proposals yesterday, demanding an end to reprocessing and the return
of all foreign nuclear waste to the country that produced it.
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- Tony Juniper, the executive director of Friends of the
Earth, said: "Waste reprocessing is an undesirable trade fuelled by
an undesirable industry. Whoever creates the waste should get it back."
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- Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman,
also condemned the proposals: "This is a shocking suggestion deliberately
released in a week when the media's attention was elsewhere in an attempt
to bury bad news," he said. "The UK already has large amounts
of intermediate and high-level waste and this will merely add to the stockpile."
The UK's current policy is that all intermediate and high-level waste left
over after the processing of foreign nuclear fuel at Sellafield should
be returned to its original sender.
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- The consultative document from the DTI recommends that
the UK keeps all intermediate-level waste but ships back additional high-level
waste produced in British reactors that would otherwise have to be disposed
of here.
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- The document calculates that the amount of extra waste
to be disposed of in the UK would be roughly equal in volume to four medium-sized
detached houses. And keeping all intermediate level waste would mean a
reduction in the number of international waste shipments by sea and rail
from 225 to 38.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=486914
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