If you’re fortunate to have a government that records its proceedings online, you can gain access to all kinds of fascinating information. It might sound a little dull but trust us, there’s diamonds to be found amongst the dusty records of our democracies.

We took the UK parliament as an example. Its members are able to submit written questions to government ministers. A simple search for – let’s say – ‘radioactive’ in the parliamentary proceedings database gives us this question from July this year…

Simon Hughes (North Southwark & Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change from which countries (a) radioactive waste and(b) spent fuel has been received but not yet returned; and what the (i) radioactivity level and (ii) quantity held is in each case.

The answer from David Kidney (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Energy and Climate Change) tells us all kinds of interesting things. For instance, since 1976, the nuclear facility at Sellafield in the north west of England has received 4,500 kilogrammes of spent nuclear fuel from Japan, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden. But ‘to date’, waste has only ‘been returned to Sweden as a result of reprocessing’.

Unfortunately, ‘commercial constraints’ prevents the UK government telling its citizens the radioactivity levels of this nuclear waste. The interests and demands of the nuclear industry trump the interests and demands of democracy in the UK, it would seem.

We also find that the Dounreay nuclear site in Scotland, despite ceasing nuclear waste reprocessing in 1998, is still home to the following countries’ waste…

Australia 16.2kg
Belgium 69.73kg
Denmark (of Italian origin) 54.30kg
Georgia 4.36kg
Germany 746.7kg
The Netherlands 8.54kg
Spain 10.84kg

This time the government isn’t able to tell us the radioactivity levels of this waste not because of ‘commercial constraints’ but because it simply does not know. UK government says that Georgia’s 4.36kg of waste cannot be returned due to ‘international security reasons’. We also know that Australia might have sent just 16.2kg of spent fuel but reprocessing it created 53 drums of liquid nuclear waste which is being held at Dounreay on the country’s behalf.

Try it yourself. Go to your own government’s website and try searching for keywords like ‘nuclear’, ‘nuclear waste’ and ‘radioactive’. Who knows what you might unearth.