Waste - the unresolved problem.

 

Britain has 2.3 million cubic metres of nuclear waste stored in this country .... more than enough to fill the Albert Hall five times. Exposure to even a tiny amount of the most potent type will kill an adult within 2 minutes.... and it remains lethal for millions of years.

David Milliband proposed in 2006 to bury the country's radioactive waste.(BBC News 27/4/06).

It will cost £85 billion to bury all this radioactive rubbish.

 

Can we safely bury nuclear waste? NO!

• It will take about 40 years to build such a deep repository.
• Transporting waste to a central repository will make it easier for terrorists to attack.
• Deep repositories will will remain dangerous for many thousands of years to come (the International Atomic Energy Agency says the waste needs to be stored for 90,000 years)
• It will be difficult to retrieve nuclear waste from a deep repository if something goes wrong.

All the above points were made by Steve Connor the science editor of The Independent Jan 2006.