Towns, counties and even individuals with land across England have put themselves forward as candidates to host an underground nuclear waste facility for thousands of years.
The legacy of 64 years of nuclear power generation in the UK is waste stored at around 30 above ground sites around the country, the vast majority at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. The safest long-term option is seen as storing it far underground in a secure facility.
While countries such as Finland and Sweden have made progress on underground repositories, UK efforts floundered in 2013 and were rebooted in 2018 with offers of up to 拢2.5 million a year as an incentive. There are signs the new effort might be bearing fruit.
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A total of 20 interested parties have contacted Radioactive Waste Management, the government group overseeing the programme, to discuss the possibility of hosting the 拢12 billion facility.
While none can be named publicly yet, New 杏吧原创 understands they include everything from small local authorities to a county council. Some of the parties are businesses and individuals with land, although it is unclear yet whether their land would be suitable.
The potential hosts are all in England, in the north-west, south-east, south-west and the Midlands. None have come forward in Wales yet. The programme does not cover Scotland and Northern Ireland.
These initial expressions of interest are no guarantee the renewed search for a host site will succeed 鈥� unlike France鈥檚 approach of imposing a site on a community, the UK鈥檚 is based on consent.
Like the rest of the country, the project has been disrupted by the coronavirus crisis and lockdown measures. Events to meet the public and councils have been postponed, all of RWM鈥檚 offices except Sellafield are closed, and discussions with interested parties are taking place online.
The journey to this type of storage for nuclear waste is going to be a very long one: the process of finding a site is expected to take up to 20 years, even before any construction starts.
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