A Place to Stand

A committee set up to decide how to deal with Britain's nuclear waste in the long-term opted on Thursday to bury it deep underground forever.

The decision by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, known as CoRWM, will go for a final round of public consultations before being put to the government in July as the final choice.

"CoRWM considers geological disposal to be the best available approach for the long-term management of all the material categorised as waste," it said at the end of a three-day meeting in the south coast resort of Brighton.

The decision means putting the nuclear waste beyond retrieval forever rather than securing it but making it accessible for future generations should technological advances make it useable.

But the committee, noting that the process of identifying suitable sites, obtaining local consent and planning permission and then constructing the stores could take decades, also said the life of interim storage sites needed to be prolonged.

"It is important that the interim stores that are used should be safe for all security risks and be able to last for 100 years," committee chairman Gordon MacKerron told a news conference, recognising likely public opposition to the stores.

"The communities that are willing to be involved will have to be made much better off than they were before," he added.....

// posted by neil craig @ 6:44 pm