Sunday 5 April 2015

Hands Up Who Wants A Toxic Waste Dump

The problem with nuclear technology has always been its waste which stays radioactive and dangerous to humans for hundreds of thousands of years so it has to be stored somewhere safe away from humans.
At the moment the  4.5m cubic metres of accumulated radioactive waste kept in secure containers at sites across Britain but successive governments have been desperate to find somewhere to dump the lot and they have tried bribing the councils to take it but unsurprisingly the local population have refused and the Government return to square one and the problem of what to do with all this growing mountain of toxic waste. 
Finally they have come up with the solution, change the law so Nuclear waste dumps can be imposed on local communities without their support.      
Rushed through in the dying hours of the final Parliament before it was dissolved, the Secretary of State for Energy can now bypass any local planning considerations and designate anywhere it fancies a 'nationally significant infrastructure project' and dump the radioactive waste on it.
Last year the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a white paper which said ministers would prefer to work with public support, but reserved the right to take more aggressive action on planning if 'at some point in the future such an approach does not look likely to work'.
Zac Goldsmith, one of the few government MPs who broke ranks to vote against the move, criticised the lack of public debate about such a big change, saying: 'Effectively it strips local authorities of the ability to stop waste being dumped in their communities. If there had been a debate, there could have been a different outcome. Most of the MPs who voted probably didn’t know what they were voting for'.
It is almost guaranteed that none of these dumps will be in any of the areas controlled by the cabinet so most will end up in the backyard of poorer areas where there will be little resistance and the promise of new jobs in the communities.
Democracy at work, if you don't get the result you want, change the law to just do it anyway.

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