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This is life and death, not a spinning matter
Who would you choose to decide how to dispose of
nuclear waste — a focus group or leading scientists?
Magnus Linklater
Columnist, The Times
This article is reproduced from The
Times, 27th April 2005 by the kind
permission of its author and the newspaper
Filed 28 Apr 2005
IT IS A fair bet that, within a month or so of
Labour being returned to power, nuclear energy will be back on the
agenda. Ministers know that the options are running out, that the
only viable alternative, wind power, is beginning to encounter formidable
obstacles, and that if CO2 emission targets are to be met, the current
policy of running down nuclear plants may need to be reversed. They
also know that when they do change their minds, all hell will break
loose.
Ensuring good scientific research in this most
sensitive area would seem, therefore, to be a priority. Instead,
an unholy row has broken out right in the middle of the Committee
on Radioactive Waste Management, the body charged with finding a
solution to storing nuclear waste. One of the leading scientists
on the committee, Dr Keith Baverstock, the international radioactivity
expert, has been dismissed by the Labour minister, Elliot Morley,
and another, Professor David Ball, of Middlesex University, has
fired off a letter which is as devastating a criticism of a government
committee as I have ever seen penned by a scientist.
He accuses the committee of preferring PR advice
to scientific opinion, says that it seems to view the “laws
of science as changeable as the laws of parliament”; charges
it with “a misplaced confidence in in-house amateurism”;
says that it has been “an uphill struggle to get any respected
expertise, scientific or otherwise injected into (the committee)”;
and concludes with this devastating judgement: “I have never
previously encountered such an attitude to the use of science, and
other forms of hard-won knowledge, of the kind of which Britain
is normally justly proud.”
Quite how this has happened is hard to explain,
except when one realises that the committee comes under the auspices
of Defra — the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
— which has a lamentable track record in encouraging and retaining
scientific know-how. This is the body which, in its previous incarnation,
refused to listen to the world’s greatest experts on foot-and-mouth
during the 2001 outbreak, which allowed the leading scientists in
its animal health laboratories to be poached by foreign governments,
and which withdrew funding from Professor Alan Ebringer, who was
reaching important conclusions on the alleged links between BSE
and variant CJD.
Examining Professor Ball’s long and detailed
letter to Mr Morley, the same syndrome can be detected. Defra has
assembled a committee that draws together a broad range of lay people
rather than the best available experts in nuclear waste disposal.
Defra’s objective has been to win round public opinion to an
agreed solution. There is no question, of course, that the public
needs to be engaged in this life-and-death issue. The figures are
formidable: some 1,750,000 cubic metres of waste are currently stored
in Britain. Of this, 475,000 cubic metres have yet to be found long-term
storage space, and this includes 2,000 cubic metres of high-level
waste, described as “intensely radioactive and generating heat”.
No single acceptable solution has yet been produced that would guarantee
the safe storage of this material for periods that may amount to
many hundreds of years.
But in this case an exercise in accountability
seems to have taken the place of hard research. Some twenty options
were posted on the committee’s website and the public was invited
to give their comments. The choices included burying waste beneath
the seabed, storing it under the ice-cap, or firing it off in a
rocket into outer space. Professor Ball reckons that taking soundings
on the wisdom of sending nuclear waste into space occupied 17 months
of committee time before it was dismissed as pointless. The choices
have now been reduced to four — but that the public is in any
position to decide which of these should be favoured is surely absurd.
Defra itself says that the reason for dismissing
Dr Baverstock was personal and followed an independent assessment
of his work. Defra denied to me that it had ignored scientific opinion,
and said that its methods were “robust”. As to consulting
the public, it said as follows: “The old ‘decide- announce-defend’
approach failed to deliver a solution. We need . . . an approach
that engages with the public and stakeholders in a fully open and
transparent way. It is imperative to have a sound science and technology
input to this process, but it is equally right to expect that scientific
and technological views be set out in a manner which the public
and stakeholders can understand, if they are to be convincing. This
is a societal problem that must be addressed in a manner that acknowledges
societal views and needs.”
That is all very well. But when it comes to tackling
an issue as critical and as far-reaching as storing nuclear waste,
I need to know that it is backed by the very best scientific evidence
available rather than that it reflects “societal views and
needs”. Professor Ball’s views are too important to be
waved aside. This is one problem that will never be solved by a
focus group.
©Magnus Linklater
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