Radioactive waste management needs stronger scientific input
The Royal Society report, The long-term management of radioactive waste: the work of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, recommends that scientific and technical organisations should be involved with the exercise to assess the "weight" that should be given to different criteria being applied to CoRWM's short list of options for the disposal of radioactive waste.
As part of CoRWM's final phase, before it reports its findings to the Government in July 2006, citizens' panels will assess the relative importance of various criteria such as public safety up to, and beyond, 300 years, worker safety, security, environmental safety and social and economic costs in relation to individual disposal options.
Professor Geoffrey Boulton, coordinator of the Royal Society report and independent member of the CoRWM Quality Assurance Group, said: "CoRWM has a vital role to play in pointing a way forward for the serious and urgent issue of disposal of nuclear waste, and it is the Royal Society's intention to offer constructive advice to aid this important task.
"We are concerned that the hitherto relatively limited engagement with the scientific and engineering communities, apart from in small specialist groups, might result in a negative response to the final CoRWM proposals. We suggest the Committee seeks to avoid this by engaging now with the scientific and engineering learned societies to complement the public engagement work of CoRWM.
"We support the crucial importance of the public consultation and engagement processes that are being managed by CoRWM. It is important that when CoRWM reports, it is credibly able to claim broad public support for the preferred options. Without this, the CoRWM process will have been yet another ineffectual stage in the history of the UK's failure to develop policy for this vital issue."
The report says that, "CoRWM will need to consider providing recommendations based upon one or more combinations of its options as alternative, integrated strategies not just a simple choice of one option or another," and "that are flexible enough to respond to changing circumstances over many decades". Experience from all international radioactive waste management programmes shows that an integrated strategy covering all wastes requires elements of each option at different stages of a programme's life. This is particularly important for the UK, which has such a wide range of wastes to deal with. Moreover, international experience shows that such a strategy may take decades to develop and implement. And this will require stronger involvement of the science and technology community.
The Royal Society report also suggests that DEFRA should put in place an independent successor to CoRWM because the time scale for a final report in July 2006 is far too short to move from a series of discrete, favoured options to an integrated strategy based on those options. Such a body will need much greater scientific and technical capacity than CoRWM since accessing the knowledge of the science community and developing a consensus within it will be important in establishing a credible strategy. This body should maintain the CoRWM processes of societal and stakeholder engagement to ensure that emerging strategies and implementation processes are able to command broad public support. This will be particularly important as the process of site selection gets under way, when local communities in potential site areas will want to know about the longer term strategy in which their area is to play a part.
