Engineering news
Communities could be paid millions of pounds just to consider having a facility to bury nuclear waste in their area, the government has said.
Community projects could receive payments of up to £1 million a year if local people enter discussions about hosting a permanent geological disposal facility in their local area. This would rise to £2.5 million a year if bore-holes were drilled to assess the suitability of a site.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) outlined the potential payments as part of its strategy to develop a facility to safely bury radioactive waste deep underground. The process of finding a site and construction of a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) could take decades and cost more than £12 billion. Some £40 million is earmarked to pay to communities while investigating potential sites.
The move was welcomed by the nuclear industry but condemned by environmentalists as a “bribe”.
The latest strategy comes after a previous attempt to put the site in Cumbria was scuppered when leaders of Cumbria County Council voted against the plans. The government has been trying to find a place to permanently store nuclear waste for at least two decades.
The government said going ahead with a facility, which would be paid for by the taxpayer and take 100 years to plan, construct, fill and seal off, could also bring hundreds of jobs and economic benefits to an area.
Communities will be invited to come forward from 2016 to talk to the Government about hosting a facility.
Keith Parker, chief executive of Nuclear Industry Association, said: "This new approach should lead to much greater clarity on the key issues of underground storage, and more effective community engagement.
"This plan will provide a permanent solution to deal with the UK's waste both from nuclear power and other sectors.
"The local economy which agrees to house the site will also benefit from community investment arrangements, as well as from the long-term job creation such a facility will bring."
But Greenpeace UK energy campaigner Louise Hutchins said: "This is a bullying and bribing approach by a government that is getting desperate about solving this problem.
"First David Cameron reneged on his promises not to allow new nuclear reactors until the problem of waste disposal was solved.
"Now he's resorting to bribing reluctant communities just to talk about nuclear waste whilst stripping them of the right to veto it.
"A better use of this money and political will would be to spend it on the proven clean energy technologies that don't require thousands of years and billions of pounds to clean up."
Over the next two years, officials will develop the process of working with communities and conduct geological screening across England and Wales to assess the geology that might be suitable for a storage site.
The geological assessment will not identify potential individual sites but it may rule out areas with features such as large underground aquifers, coal or mineral deposits.