GOVERNMENT dithering over a long-term strategy for disposing of nuclear waste is increasing the risk of an accident or terrorist attack and undermining efforts to combat climate change, independent scientists said yesterday.

Experts accused ministers of ducking their responsibility to tackle the issue by needlessly commissioning an inquiry into possible options, even though there is an international consensus that burying radio active waste is the only viable solution.

This inertia means that hundreds of tonnes of hazardous waste will languish unnecessa rily in surface tanks for decades, when a much safer way of dealing with it already exists.

The danger of an accident is significantly higher when waste is stored in this way, and canisters kept at nuclear power stations or the Sellafield reprocessing plant are more vulnerable to a 9/11-type terrorist attack.

The lack of a disposal plan also makes it harder for ministers to approve a new generation of nuclear power stations, which many energy experts believe is essential to reducing Britain’s emissions of greenhouse gases.

Nuclear plants, which do not emit carbon dioxide, supply 23 per cent of Britain’s electricity, but all but one will be decommissioned over the next two decades. This means that even if the Government achieves its target of generating 20 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020, there will be no net reduction in Britain’s reliance on fossil fuels unless new nuclear reactors are built.

Influential figures such as Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society, and Lord Broers, the president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, have urged ministers to invest in nuclear power.

The issue of how to get rid of the waste, however, remains the chief obstacle to that course. Professor Mike Thorne, an independent nuclear waste consultant and visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia, said the attractions of deep burial were clear a decade ago: Finland has started to build an underground facility, and Sweden has identified two sites. Britain, however, has done nothing to take the issue forward: ministers have instead asked the new Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) to consider options from a “blank sheet of paper”. Some of these possibilities have been dismissed by experts as impractical or dangerous.

Professor Thorne, Neil Chapman, of the University of Sheffield, and Charles Curtis, of the University of Manchester, said they were dismayed at this approach, which seemed to be intended to postpone a decision that ministers had a responsibility to make urgently. Their criticisms echo those of the Royal Society and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, which have criticised the Government.

Professor Chapman said: “It’s astonishing that the committee is looking at things that have been ruled out internationally by technical experts. We have hopped about from one policy to another until we have got to the point where we haven’t got a policy at all.”

Professor Curtis said: “I think the Government has a responsibility to do its best to reduce the hazardous potential by delivering a waste management solution. If it is doing this, it is happening very slowly.”

While waste was at present kept reasonably safely in canisters at plants where it was produced, this was not a long-term solution and was much less secure than underground burial, the experts agreed.

RUBBISH TIPS

• Britain has 1,000m³ of high-level nuclear waste and 300,000m³ of intermediate. Some will be dangerously radioactive for 225,000 years
• Britain’s waste is in more than 20 sites, stored in tanks
• Mooted but controversial forms of disposal include firing it into space or sinking it beneath Earth’s crust

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