The UK government is to allow nuclear reactor operators to dump low level nuclear waste in ordinary refuse landfill sites accessible by the public. The move comes as part of an attempt to reduce the massive costs of decommissioning old nuclear reactors (currently £73 billion and rising).

Needless to say…

..the move has triggered a swath of applications around the country from big corporations trying to cash in on this potential new business…

The trouble with all this is the fact that, when it comes to dumping its waste, the nuclear industry simply cannot be trusted. Regulations are flouted and scrutiny is avoided. How can we be sure that other, more dangerous waste won’t find its way into these sites? There are, after all, so many past examples.

Take the so-called Low-Level Waste Repository at Drigg in the north-west of England. The facility’s current managing director, Dick Raaz, says he hates the word ‘dump’. Yet, that is exactly what Greenpeace found when it visited the site in 1994…

A lot of that waste was certainly not of the low level variety. Have things improved at Drigg since then? Could Dick Raaz give assurances that the waste in that video is now properly catalogued and stored? How about restoring some trust, Dick?

You see, it’s all about trust or, rather, the lack of it. The UK nuclear industry is still misplacing its waste fifteen years later. In 1998, at the Tricastin nuclear facility in France, it was revealed that military nuclear waste was being secretly stored at the site in mounds of dirt. Only last week it was found that nuclear waste is being stored in an open air car park in Siberia. In 2006 it was reported that nuclear waste had been dumped in secret pits on the Scottish coast and the official records of the dumping destroyed.

Look at the French Atomic Energy Commission keeping secret for five months the fact it had massively underestimated the amount of plutonium in its possession. How about Europe’s gift to Africa’s west coast? ‘Unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages’ all caused by nuclear waste and other toxic materials, dumped at sea. We could go on and on and on.

The weight of history is against the nuclear industry on this issue. It would take an unprecedented turnaround in its attitudes towards accountability and transparency for there to be even the tiniest amount of trust and confidence in the UK government’s latest announcement.

As history shows, again and again, the industry has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards proper regulation and scrutiny – a regulation and scrutiny they often ignore or circumvent. Why should we believe any differently this time?