On Wednesday 30th January Cumbria County Council voted not to proceed with a consultation to explore Cumbria being the host of a high level radioactive waste repository. This left Ed Davey with a problem.
The problem is very substantial and urgent as there are facilities at Sellafield full of decaying and highly toxic waste including B30 and B38, which are considered to be the most hazardous buildings in Western Europe. These structures are in a deteriorating condition and are in very urgent need of decommissioning. In addition the UK also has its ordinary spent fuel.
As a worried West Cumbrian, I would like to offer the following insights to Ed Davey and others who now need to find a way forward from this point.
I believe the consultation process in Cumbria has fallen down because the public have lost confidence and trust in it. This has happened for three reasons:
1. They are being asked to accept a waste repository which will be required to contain highly radioactive waste for 130,000 years.
2. In the past information of what was actually happening at Sellafield has been poor and often misleading. Promises made were not kept.
3. When they now ask about the possible alternatives to the repository, their questions are not being properly answered.
Mr Davey can act rapidly and effectively to address the third point, which is exacerbating concerns about the first two points in the following ways:
Firstly, in 2006 the decision was made to consult on terminal deep waste storage and to consult on that only. Since then, global technology has moved on rapidly, with several major countries having decided to invest in developing thorium reactors which will burn spent fuel to remove long-lived radioactive components. While Liberal Democrats have explored and developed policy in this area, it would appear that our national experts have not, because they seem unable to answer questions about whether we could process our waste products, rather than storing them for 130,000 years. We should commission a rapid, thorough and transparent review of the possibilities, in the light of emerging technologies. This knowledge will then need to be kept up to date so that reasonable questions can be fully and correctly answered in the future.
Secondly, residents who are concerned about the repository are chatting extensively on Facebook. The consultation processes which were set up to be transparent in 2006 were not based on an understanding of what would happen with social media. In the future experts can and should engage with the public in real-time through discussion forums and social media, rather than leaving them to engage only with each other.
* Rebecca Hanson is a teacher, a lecturer in education, an education adviser and a member of the LDEA committee. She was the Liberal Democrat candidate in the Copeland by-election in 2017.
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50 Comments
Thanks for publishing this LibDem Voice. I’ve been inspired by all the intelligent and caring comments I’ve received from Lib Dems around the country since the vote. If only there were as many physicists, engineers, nuclear scientists and geologists in society as a whole!
All comments and suggests as to the best way forward are very welcome.
I think all politicians seeking to sell unpopular projects to the public should take note of the points I’ve raised here .
Scientists have been working on the problem of long-term storage for a long time. All sorts of ideas have been explored, lots of research money has been spent, many government scientific reports have been written, and lots of things have been published in the open literature.
I was briefly involved in a small way 30 years ago. If my now fading memory still serves, an underground storage, on land, and in an area where the geology has characteristics including stability, is possibly the only solution that can score relatively highly on safety and security.
That was true at that time Richard. I think it was also true in 2006.
However other countries have chosen to invest in Thorium reactor technology in order to process their waste (and generate energy). This has resulted in rapid progress in technology in this area since 2006. Government references acknowledge this however they are limited in scope compared with the information and resources I have seen we have not been actively exploring this emerging technology. We are now building new reactors designed abroad so the idea of building a thorium reactor developed overseas to process our waste is not so unthinkable as it was then.
When I put some top nuclear experts in a room a couple of weeks ago and asked them to map out what it would take to get a thorium reactor licensed it became apparent that this may realistically now be possible within about 20 years.
This would obviously be a much more liberal solution in that we would know we would not be setting up huge problems for the future. However it addresses only the normal spent fuel, not the buildings at Sellafield I mentioned. It would be much more difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to process the decaying fuel in them. I don’t think we can avoid the need for building a repository to help us deal with those buildings but it may be right to build the possibility of reprocessing the waste created into the forward plan.
In this post I’m not saying that thorium technology is necessarily part of the best way forward. But I am saying that if it is not then I expect to to be able to access a robust justification as to why it is not and that at the minute I’m not finding that such an argument exists which is currently valid.
Sellafield and its predecessors has long time been a problematic environmental hazard that was not limited to Cumbria. The coast line of North West England, North Wales The Isle of Man and East Coast of Ireland (both Ulster and The Republic) as been contaminated. The history of the past fifty years has shown that radioactivity at Sellafield (a.k.a Calder Hall or Seascale) has a perverse talent for finding ways to leak. I think I speak for everyone living with 100 miles of the Cumbrian coast when I say that it is not just Cumbrians who view this development with grave suspicion.
The question is, why did Government choose Cumbria as the best place to put the repository? The answer seems to be, because that is where there are a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on nuclear technology, so, those are the patsies who should be the most easy to persuade to accept a nuclear dump in their back yards.
What a dreadful way to tackle nuclear safety!
The Swedes have spent a lot of time and money designing copper canisters to make a repository as safe as possible. I’m not aware we have done anything like that. Most other nuclear nations, I believe, have started out by searching for the places with the best stable geology, and chosen those as repository sites. Two-nil to the foreigners. Finally, there is the French principle, which says that when you have a load of nasties to dump on somebody, you offer financial compensation to the locality which is prepared to take them, and you then find that instead of angry protests, all you have to do is to administer the competition between different localities all eager to take the offer. Three-nil to the foreigners!
Hi David,
There was an open offer for areas to be considered. There has always been the promise of a package for the area but it’s never been specified what that would be. It might have helped if it had been but it might have been counterproductive.
Cumbria was the only place that responded and to be honest I think that was because people here are very concerned about the hazardous building at Sellafield and people elsewhere aren’t.
I think it was counterproductive that the consultation went ahead in just one county because the people of Cumbria felt like they were being trapped into having it and on the other side of the coin it put Cumbria in a position where it could demand a large compensation package or pull out – effectively holding the government to ransom. That didn’t happen because the process has stopped here but it was a worry that it might happen. I think the dynamics of the consultation would be much healthier if more than one county was being considered.
But thorium is not a way of processing nuclear waste, is it? Isn’t it simply a fuel that is expected to produce less radioactive waste than the present reactors? Thorium reactors are still in research, too, rather than producing?
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/11/norway-begins-four-year-test-of-thorium-nuclear-reactor/
Uranium was once a miracle solution. Its supporters in the beginning tended to emphasise its benefits and de-emphasise its problems. Might the supporters of Thorium be doing the same?
The welding technique for sealing the copper canisters in Sweden was developed by TWI [The Welding Institute] near Cambridge UK. The Swedes own the IP as far as I know but I’m sure they would happily licence it elsewhere. We are talking high level waste here as I recall. In terms of tonnage it doesn’t amount to a great deal. Sweden is storing it in caves. An alternative was to put id down redundant oil well pipes. These wells might be re-visited as the technology for extracting oil from depleted fields develops but it is most unlikely that old workings would be re-used so it’s a reasonable solution. The problem is that nowadays the UK seems dedicated to find reasons why we should NOT be technically adventurous. A total U turn compared to the Victorians. The real stumbling block is the ongoing delusions of grandeur about nuclear weapons which has caused Philip Hammond to propose some £35bn for a Trident replacement – one of the most comprehensively useless weapons for the 21st Century UK military that one could possibly imagine. Mind you it does let the Conservative Right Wing puff out its pathetic little chest. Also we have a huge investment in Uranium which would have to be wound down. Aldermaston makes the Trident warhead as if we didn’t already have more than enough warheads without needing new ones. It has also been manifestly obvious for a couple of decades at least that the Treasury would not recognise a sensible business and investment opportunity if it hit them over the head. We not only have a political battle to fight but a ‘competence’ one within the civil service and the corporations it chooses to contract to implement policy.
One way of getting rid of some nuclear waste would be fast-breeder reactors. I don’t see how thorium reactors help much. The trouble with breeders is that they generate Pu 239 from the unburnt U238 in the old fuel rods, and Pu239 is very useful for bomb making.
The comment about keeping waste for 130, 000 years seems a bit strange. High level waste, being highly radioactive has a short half life – days or less, while anything with a long half life, like 1,000 years or more, cannot be very radioactive because otherwise it would have a short half life.
It might be more productive to worry about the radiation exposure from granite worktops than from something with a 130,000 year half life in a repository.
Thorium doesn’t seem to be a solution to the disposal of existing waste, but rather a possible solution to the problem of reducing the production of new waste.
Back in the 1980’s people were investigating ways to store stuff for 100,000 years. One option was to fire torpedoes containing the radioactive material into the deep seabed. It was rejected on a variety of grounds, but had to be looked into because everything had to be looked into.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_waste_treatment_technologies,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal
Re the 130,000 years:
The main problem components of the waste are elements called the actinides.
Many people who have some understanding of radioactivity naturally assume that the level of toxicity of the radioactive waste will rapidly fall off, following the pattern of exponential decay. This does not happen with the actinides because they have to decay many times to become safe. The graph on page 3 of this iaea report shows the http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1415_web.pdfcontext for the 130,000 years.
Remember the waste will be highly toxic for all this time and you’re talking about that being about 26x as long as the pyramids have existed for….
Rebecca – the link you provided doesn’t seem to work. Also, thorium is one of the actinides, so are you saying that it has the same problems as uranium, which is another actinide? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinide
@Rebecca Hanson “If only there were as many physicists, engineers, nuclear scientists and geologists in society as a whole!”
According to Ian Duncan Smith, “when they can’t find the food they want on the shelves, who is more important – them, the geologist, or the person who stacked the shelves?”. So perhaps the priority of the tory part of this government is to produce shelf-stackers rather than scientists (who are, after all, ultimately responsible for there being anything to stack or any shelves on which to stack it).
Here’s another go at that link Richard. Sorry about the problem.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1415_web.pdf
The 130,000 years graph is on page 3.
The key radioactive decay chains are found in the wiki on decay chains.
I’m a bit worried because I’ve made several posts to answer questions which have not appeared. They may appear later and that may confuse things so please accept my apologies for that if it happens but for now I’m going to carry on trying to answer questions as I think this is a very useful discussion.
Here’s a link to the wiki on thorium based nuclear power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Although it doesn’t focus on reprocessing (but it is referred to in the 6th ‘pro’ bullet point) it provides a lot of useful information.
In particular it’s worth looking at the section ‘Current Thorium Projects’ to understand my claim that this technology has made very rapid advances since 2006.
It isn’t clear to me that the IAEA publication is recommending thorium as a solution to the existing waste problem. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think it is. The report concludes (bottom of p.63): “At the present time, we cannot predict future nuclear energy deployment scenarios with any reasonable certainty. Therefore, we cannot decide on an optimum approach to manage minor actinides.”
So, is Cumbria Country Council recommending that we put the problem of existing waste on hold, and wait and see how actinide research develops? But then, there’ll be new developments, and after that, more new developments, and in the meantime the problem grows. Don’t we need to say “Now is the time” sometime? And isn’t that time now? Or are they simply waiting for the French to arrive?
https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-59-33259.html#comment-240387
“It isn’t clear to me that the IAEA publication is recommending thorium as a solution to the existing waste problem.”
My purpose in providing a link to that report was to reference a graph which shows how spent nuclear fuel decays.
To get back to the second important point I made at the end of my post…. which was the one about consultation.
I’ve received an email from someone who suggested that the consultation process and the discussions going on between the people who had concerns were like large ships which passed in the night without noticing or engaging with each other.
I think that’s a good description. I was watching what was happening on facebook and trying to engage with it constructively but I don’t think anybody in an official role was and there were no signs of any input all from them.
Consultation is a procedure devised by governments to substitute for actually listening to anybody.
There’s obviously a need for more information to be provided, t avoid social media going off at a completely inappropriate tangent and doing more harm than good. There must and should be ways of bringing social media into the frame, but I see two significant issues. One would be that consultation is about setting out positions and considered views, not transient chat. Another is in terms of the volume of positions and views that can be heard.
David Allen I think that’s sometimes true and sometimes not true depending on the culture of the government at the time and the efforts made to demand transparency by concerned parties.
Another reason why it seemed right for this consultation to go on in Cumbria was that we have a very high density of nuclear experts, many of whom have many decades of experience and the quality of discussion and analysis extremely high. So it’s possible for the public to retain a higher degree of oversight of what’s going on than would be possible in most places. The local Libdems sought robust reassurances that we would be able to halt proceedings if we did proceed further but those reassurances did not appear so that oversight would have been lost.
Richard the engagement of consultation with social media shouldn’t be about transient chat. It should be about answering questions and countering false claims made. To do this those involved need a body of good reports and resources to link to . Because the consultation on Facebook was biased I tried to engage with in this way which is how I became aware how outdated a lot of the reference we have are. Hence the two recommendations I’m making go hand in hand. One will not work without the other.
One thing we haven’t mentioned so far in this discussion is that the current estimated cost of the cleanup is £67.5bn.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117
That’s been (and continues to be) an emerging cost as different things have been investigated and quantified over recent years. It’s based on the technologies being currently consulted on. I think it would be wise to review these costs in the context of alternative ways forward.
This is a big issue.
Thanks for putting it out there.
I think Rebecca makes a very good point. Here in Cumbria we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Sellafield itself provides a lot of people with a decent living but it also serves to prevent practically any other large employer even thinking of coming near us. That’s what we live with and it won’t be going away.
Then some bright spark comes up with the idea of digging a big whole to put the junk in
– out of sight and out of mind – that’s all it is.
They’ll be sitting on their hands on the bus of survivors.
We can spend many fortunes digging a big hole and putting the junk in but it is still the junk, it is still deadly, it is, in my opinion even less safe out of sight and out of mind – and I know there will be those who will say that it will most certainly not be out of mind. Well, things go wrong even at Sellafield and we are in a much better place to be able to handle our difficulties if we can handle to stuff, keep a very public eye on it, and be responsive and proactive when new technologioes come along, after all that’s how it came about in the first place?
Personally, and it is only my personal opinion, I believe we should continue to store this junk at near ground level. Here in Cumbria we have the best concete technology you could hope to find. We don’t need to go digging holes like old miners, we can build earthquake proof, bomb proof, just about anything proof bunkers and be totally aware of what’s going on. We can be ready to respond to new technology and act quickly. We Cumbrians don’t like the stuff any more than anyone else, but we are stuck with it and we can manage it easily without ravaging half the population of Cumbria with a curse under their homes??
It’s not some bright spark coming up with a crazy idea. A lot of ideas have been looked at very carefully, over many years, and many countries have come to the conclusion that underground storage is the best option. For one thing it’s far less susceptible to the corrosive effects of weather, which flattens most things over the timescale involved.
Probably an underground site will be monitored for many years, both to detect any technical problems before they get serious, and for security against terrorist or criminal attempts to compromise the facilities. Costs are huge. Imagine paying just one guard an average wage for 130,000 years – it comes to about £40 billion net present value. We’d likely save an awful lot on wages by putting it underground, where it’s more secure against weather, a lot easier to guard, and a lot easier to contain in the highly unlikely event of something going wrong.
According to Wikipedia there is quite a lot of industry up there in Cumbria, but I wonder if perceived problems with attracting industry might be more to do with its geographical isolation than with Sellafield? It’s a lovely p;ae for tourism too. Maybe improved transport links are something to press for?
Richard Dean, our county has already undergone numerous geological surveys that prove beyond doubt this area is not suitable for even the current types of underground storage now being employed, this present proposal however has never been tried, let alone tested.
The present underground storage repositories are all suffering the same problems, ground water leaks in, this then has to be delt with ie; pumped out and also has to be treat as radioactive waste as it is now contaminated.
If this were to find its way into our drinking water Cumbria, and those we supply with drinking water would be layed waste ie; Liverpool and Manchester, now just to take you off on a tangent, how many droughts do we suffer? Will we end up in a position where Briton has to import fresh(?) drinking water for the population?
Selafield has an awfull safety record as all us Cumbrians can testify to, our water would be at an unreasonable risk from this experimental endevour, we as Cumbrian’s have had our voices heard and the proccess hear should now be layed to rest, any move towards this kind of endevour should be fact based not finacial as is currently the case, it is not Cumbria’s problem but rather the whole country’s.
Thanks for coming across from Facebook Ged.
Can anybody present any evidence which contradicts Ged’s points?
Nobody was doing so on Facebook.
Thanks again to direct emails – I’m pleased to be able to publish a link to this report:
http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/6568/Scientific-and-Technical-Basis-for-the-Geological-Disposal-of-Radioactive-Wastes
The conclusion forms a useful summary of the arguments.
Then there is Ged’s point about Cumbria having been investigated and rejected. It certainly was the case that substantial investigations were done and big chunks of Cumbria were eliminated from consideration. But were the areas currently being investigated rejected? Ged can you provide your evidence which suggests they were?
Having said that the above booklet which claims that most countries are planning to use geological storage for their waste was published in 2003 and, as I’ve said repeatedly, things seem to have changed since then.
This booklet was published in 2009 and looks at retrievability from repositories because by then people were thinking more positively about reprocessing:
http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/8022/Geological-Disposal-of-Radioactive-Waste-Technological-Implications-for-Retrievability
Rebecca – this raises so many important issues.
The cost – the estimated (and till growing) pricetag of £67.5bn is over twice that of HS2 even with extensions to Manchester and Leeds – and all just to clear up the mess left by poor decisions in the past. We need to get this right or we will all be poorer as a result.
Buildings B30 & B38 – their poor state is scandalous and needs to be fixed PDQ irrespective of longer term plans. Who is ultimately accountable or is any disaster going to be just another “systemic failure” with no-one to blame?
Geological repository – as a student many years ago one of my lecturers was someone who later went on to become one of the world’s foremost experts on geological disposal. I recall he said that anywhere near mountains was not a good location because hydrostatic pressure could conceivably cause groundwater to circulate through the repository (even if it was below sea level) and emerge in springs. He suggested a good location on purely technical grounds would therefore be Huntingdon where, apparently, the ancient rocks of the Baltic Shield are relatively close to the surface and any groundwater would be stuck in situ. It is disturbing that the linked consultation video glosses over this aspect and just says, in effect, “no problem”.
But maybe the heat generated by the radioactive decay of the waste is itself a problem even in the longer term. (it’s certainly one reason why final disposal cannot be done in the first few decades after the waste is produced). The linked IAEA document gives 100W/tonne even after 900 years. Multiply that by a few thousand tonnes and that’s megawatts which, given that rocks are poor conductors of heat, has to go somewhere. Is this enough to create a hot (thermally and radioactively) spring or is the proposal to actively manage the waste and maintain cooling for >1,000 years?
Thorium is certainly something we should be investigating, partly as a better power generation technology and partly as a way of burning up existing waste stockpiles. Given the costs, it should be a no-brainer for the government to commit whatever it takes to first evaluate all the possibilities properly and then, in all probability, build thorium reactors to secure our future energy needs.
This is certainly an issue for the whole country, not for Cumbria alone to solve, if only because any kind of disaster in Cumbria will affect the whole country just as Chernobyl affected the whole of Europe.
Groundwater is always considered in the risk assessment of any storage proposals. The IAEA booklets that Rebecca links to are very helpful. Are there any links available to professional geological survey assessments for Cumbria and/or Huntingdon?
I wonder if Liberal Eye’s memory of lectures might be faulty? According to Wikipedia, the Baltic Shield is in Scandinavia and North-West Russia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_shield
Richard Dean – My memory of long-ago lectures may indeed be faulty but Wikipedia describes only the exposed parts of the Baltic Shield which are indeed around the Baltic Sea. It extends much further under a thin (in geological terms) veneer of much younger rocks. As I recall the point was that younger cover rocks in parts of eastern England are thin enough that it would be possible to sink a shaft deep enough to reach them.
However, I am not holding my breath!
Thanks for your comments.
I suggested earlier that I thought a thorium reactor would need to be a fast (or fast breeder) reactor.
Apparently it doesn’t need to be. It could be a thermal reactor and most of the current research (especially from the Chinese and the Canadians) is focusing on thermal reactors.
Re: the geology. Most of the rock in Cumbria is severely cracked and so is unsuitable – which fits with Liberal Eye’s comments, but of course that doesn’t mean it all is. But if most of it is and some of it isn’t could that which isn’t become cracked? Does the hydrostatic pressure which is associated with mountains and also with the ice ages which are expected back over Cumbria during the next 130,000 years matter? Might there be movement of tectonic plates? People who I respect have reassured me that I have no need to worry as the cracking occurs in the early stage of rock formation…….
…..but the Fukushima disaster happened because nobody had predicted the kind of tectonic plate movement we now know causes this kind of tsunami at least every 1000 years.
There was an excellent file on 4 tonight on plutonium which is well worth a listen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qm4pt/File_on_4_Britains_Plutonium_Mountain/
These geological questions of cracking and pressure and tectonic movements were certainly being asked at the time I was peripherally involved in the research, 30 years ago. Fukushima may have prompted some revision of the then estimates, I don’t know, but given that people were thinking in terms of 100,000 years as opposed to just a few decades in the design of Fukushima, I should think that a Fukushima-type event might well have been considered in the case of long-term storage – and possibly worse events still. It’s always good to ask these questions, and a public enquiry is one of the best places to ask them!
The think is that when Fukushima was built all the right questions were asked Richard. But there is just so much about our earth that we are still discovering. The evidence which would have predicted the tsunami was there in the earth but it wasn’t being correctly interpreted.
Unfortunately, Rebecca, doing nothing is probably the most dangerous option of all!
I would not worry about tectonc plate boundaries – we are in a completely different geological setting from Japan with stable rocks which is why earthquakes in Britain are typically very small.
The point about a hydrostatic head is that it might – in the wrong circumstances – cause water to circulate through the depository (obviously this would only happen if it had been abandoned and sealed) potentially leaching out radioactive elements as it went. I think it’s a rather remote possibility even if the rock is fractured but remote possibilities are what any disposal plan has to allow for. However, given the way govt works, I don’t believe any studies would ‘see’ any problems – they would be paid to ENABLE the plan, not to find difficulties.
What should certainly be allowed for is the possibility of the ice caps melting in part. Estimates suggest that Greenland melting would raise sea level by around 7 meters so any repository entrance would have to be well above this level and for full prudence should be over 90 meters to allow for Antarctica melting as well. This is very unlikely but not impossible. Incidentally, for the same reason why are we planning a whole new generation of reactors on the coast?
For me the big problem is successive governments’ complete inability to manage any complex process illustrated yet again by the dreadful File on 4 linked by Rebecca. As long as things remain like that there is NO solution to the problem of waste (or of the underperforming economy or any of the other big problems we face) yet I’m hearing remarkably little political debate about this. Do we really think that this is how it must be?
In fact, people are paid to find the difficulties, and others are paid to see if solutions can be found. I was peripherally involved in one of the latter groups, but it was clear from the documentation that all sorts of possible problems were being considered, including pore pressure changes and tidal waves and sea-level change and many other things. What some of us are doing here is essentially starting at the beginning in the process of finding difficulties – government thinking and research has already gone well beyond these beginnings.
I am sure there is plenty of documentation from the IAEA and the UK HSE and others, but as Rebecca says, it’s a question of communicating information in accessible formats – this has perhaps not been done adequately, particularly as social media is a new format that creates new possibilities, of valuable new ideas being created, but also of unfounded and counter-productive rumours being circulated.
Richard, many of the rumours circulated in Cumbria are true. They are things which are known by those involved but which are systematically covered up – sometimes in the interests of national security but more often than not in the interests of the people who are trying to protect their own reputations.
Liberal eye said:
“the big problem is successive governments’ complete inability to manage any complex process illustrated yet again by the dreadful File on 4 linked by Rebecca. As long as things remain like that there is NO solution to the problem of waste (or of the underperforming economy or any of the other big problems we face) yet I’m hearing remarkably little political debate about this”
This makes sense to me. In the 1980s privatisation was supposed to be the miracle cure for the horrific state of UK businesses. I suspect that technology, and especially internet based technology have been much more positive forces for making a positive difference to the quality of our management of complex organisations.
But I still think there is further to go in our quest for a level of enlightenment which will allow us to have proper oversight of our most complex systems such as projects like this and our systems of democracy.
Perhaps you might like to join me at the RSA Liberal Eye where I’m working on writing about the capacity of mass online discussion to generate enlightenment in the 21st century? I think we have interests in common!
Although the situation seems very bad I see positive elements here because it think re-enlightenment requires much greater transparency, communication, crowd sourcing and more rapid movement on conclusions than has previously been possible or expected. I think the crisis we’ve hit has occurred both because people are demanding this and because it’s now possible.
Also on a positive note Liberal Eye I think it’s safer to have reactors on the coast as you have an almost infinite supply of cooling water. I don’t think the current generations of reactors are likely to run for long enough for Antarctica to melt completely. Let’s hope not anyway.
@Rebecca. What rumours?
Richard it’s hard to know where to begin. I live in a society where so many people have personal stories to tell which are first hand or second hand from family members.
To start in one particular place which was touched on in the radio program I linked to above – I’d like to know who was responsible for the decisions which caused the Mox plant to fail. It would just be so helpful if this kind of thing was out in the open rather than concealed.
Rebecca, that’s not a rumour, it’s a question to be answered.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/minister-admits-total-failure-of-sellafield-mox-plant-793489.html
“Failed” here looks like it means that the plant did not produce the amounts of MOX nuclear fuel that had been expected, not that it collapsed or posed a danger.
That said, it would certainly be interesting to have more information, and indeed reassurance about the safety issues.
You are correct Richard, I’m not talking about safety issues – I’m talking about a failure to function effectively.
I too used to work in the nuclear business, which is why I am anonymous for this post.
A great variety of people work in the nuclear business. Many are old-fashioned gentleman scientists, who patiently and academically analyse risks impartially, and who may overcomplicate problems and miss the wood for the trees, but who have a passionate and justified belief in their own integrity. At the other extreme, there was the guy who told everybody “My job is to lie for (his employer at the time).”
When things go well, the nice boffins are to the fore. When they don’t, the professional liars take over.
I was in nuclear generation, but I’m seeing just the same things in the posts about waste security.
(Incidentally, it’s nothing to do with public versus private. Of course the profit motive could promote dishonesty. But my time was when the industry was nationalised, and, things were bad then. Monopoly power can be just as corrupting. At least in a privatised situation, there will be competitors around, who could attack any company which put itself at risk of the charge of inadequate attention to safety issues. Also, the NII is better at its job than it used to be.)
But that’s the worst aspect of nuclear – the lies, the cheating, the failure to handle responsibly a technology that can only be viable if handled responsibly.
The UK industry united to declare that Chernobyl couldn’t possibly happen here, because the technology was totally different. In truth, Chernobyl happened because of human error – and, human error by a team of top scientists, whose overweening self-confidence led them to believe that they knew how to disable all the safety systems so as to do experiments! Is human error a purely Belarussian deficiency, might one ask?
Nowadays, I work on coal-fired plant. We also make mistakes. Occasionally, the mistakes do kill people, one or two at a time. I can sleep at night, nowadays.
If you start to look at these things I think you’ll get some insight into why the people on the ground feel they need to stand up and speak out if they see things differently to what they’re being told. In the past they didn’t and couldn’t because they didn’t have social media.
Nonsense, Rebeccca. Social media are not needed for standing up and speaking out, there have been a few who have done that over the years well before social media came along. There were a lot of awkward questions in the early days and a lot of care was taken by BNFL and their predecessors to keep everyone informed. I bet you can still go on trips around the plant and look inside through the leaded glass windows and ask awkward questions and get truthful answers. There was even a very impressive drama on TV about a fictional monstrous cover up with a great music score by Eric Clapton. But the truth really is that the people involved in this work do take their responsibilities very seriously indeed. They have families and lives too. So seriously in fact that they would likely fire a person like Anony, whose generalizations are really rather childish. Which is perhaps why he/she is now in coal..
Thanks for your post Anony.
The NII is now the ONR (Office of Nuclear Regulation) and I think it’s continued to become a more powerful and positive force in the nuclear industry. But of course it’s only responsible for working to ensure safety in what’s happening, not for deciding what is to happens at policy level.
I think your negative comments need to be balanced against the passion, dedication and drive of those who set up Sellafied with the focused determination that by making the UK a nuclear power we would avoid another world war in the second half of the 20th century and the vision of creating cheap energy. These people were dedicated, intelligent and respected and they were the first in to sort things out during the windscales fire. Whether you think they were right or wrong elements of what has happened at Sellafield and the people involved at high levels deserve respect. A close friend was a secretary to them so I hear stories you won’t know about. That’s Cumbria for you!
Richard Dean please let me explain how social media help people to stand up and speak out. It’s not what you think.
When decisions are made by experts the group who make the decision often become self insulating and they prevent those who do not agree with them being recruited into their group. Those in the group have access to the evidence, the conferences, the connections, the discussion and the opportunities to develop their expertise. Those outside the group do not. When the group is first set up there may be some objectors but their ability to comment effectively and convincingly soon atrophies because they can’t develop their expertise.
What I see going on in discussion forums is that people who would not normally have the chance to meet each other or talk about these complex issues can chat at great lenght, educating themselves to very high levels and analysing the arguments and evidence of each other and of the expert group in detail. As this culture has developed, so has the culture of freesourcing information and so has the breadth and depth of infomration available on the internet. So you have bright people going from a standing start of having just some knowledge or concerns to being highly educated about topics very rapidly where previously they could not take that journey.
And if they can convince people that their arguments are more coherent and based more coherently in evidence than those of the expert group they can win their case as has happened here. I’m still not entirely sure if it’s happened because the expert group were wrong or because they simply didn’t realise they had a case to prove. Or perhaps they did realise but were not given the resource or authority to do it.
Richard I’d also like to point out that I have no intention whatsoever fo showing disrespect for those who were supporting the plan to continue to stage 4 consultation. I have respect for both groups. My intention is not to support one or other point of view – it is instead to look hard at the situation we are now in and to try to make some helpful suggestions about how we could move things on positively from here.
This is very encouraging:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/top-scientists-recommend-alternative-nuclear-for-uk/13346
Sorry I should have explained to that the link above goes to an article which says that the government’s top scientific adviser is recommending alternative approaches to nuclear fuel. I find it encouraging because it shows we have some high quality expertise in government which they can draw on.
This article gives a useful insight into how the Russians are approaching the problem:
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2013/new_reprocessing_zheleznogorsk
I’ve often heard that we were on the verge of getting fast reactors right when Margaret Thatcher cancelled all research and that there was then systematic spin to discredit our fast reactor program to justify her decision. I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’ve heard it several times from credible sources which would have the expertise to comment properly.
Underground repositories ie dumps are designed to leak because of heat and gas generated. People who campaigned against going forward to stage 4 were mainly concerned about the leakage enviromental problems that would be created and left for future generations to sort out never mind all the disruption in the Lake District for yrs and associated knock on effects for various works and businesses.
After speaking with people who have family who work/worked at Sellafield im not reassured one iota about the safety standards there and the cancer rates in the surronding area. Check out the Asse nuke waste dump in Germany – cant post link at the mo cos on iphone. The Lib Dems were once anti nuclear – have seen videos of both Chris Huhne when energy minister saying more NPS are financially unviable and also Ed Davey the same but now in coalition they have changed their tune and now pro more nuke power stations.
And, if anyone wants an underground dump as Eddie Martin said at the ‘Call In’ 2 wks ago one of the most suitable areas is nr where David Cameron lives in Oxfordshire (clay)