"Britain is going to be lumbered with huge volumes of radioactive waste if substitution is allowed to go ahead," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Pete Roche.
"This Government is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to prop up a failed, dangerous, uneconomic and environmentally damaging reprocessing industry. That it is prepared to contemplate turning Britain into the world's nuclear waste dump in order to keep it going is an outrage," he added.
BNFL imports foreign spent nuclear fuel to its Sellafield site in Cumbria for reprocessing, mainly from Germany and Japan. For every flask of spent nuclear waste fuel imported to the UK, about eight flasks of nuclear waste are created. If the Government accepts BNFL's substitution proposal, roughly seven of these eight flasks would remain in the UK.
Under current Government policy, all the nuclear waste created during reprocessing from contracts signed since 1976 must be returned to the country of origin. If the "waste substitution" option were to go ahead, BNFL would return slightly increased volumes of high level waste whilst all the bulky low and intermediate level waste would remain in this country. Intermediate level waste remains radioactive for at least a quarter of a million years.
The last Government told BNFL that it would allow this "waste substitution" option provided that BNFL found, within the next 25 years, an acceptable deep disposal site for the nuclear waste that would stay in the UK. However, it is clear that BNFL cannot achieve this. In 1997, permission was refused to NIREX to build a dump beneath Sellafield as it was considered too dangerous.
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Greenpeace press office on: 020 7865 8255
