Radioactive Waste - In a Landfill Near You ?

While people go to the tip and dutifully reduce, reuse and recycle their waste to reduce the pressure on landfill-and the environment ....

....the nuclear industry is busy trashing the environment and filling landfill up with radioactive waste.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Make Room for Nuclear ?!

A staggering 56,000m3 a year of radioactive waste from decommissioned nuclear plants is planned for Keekle Head and Lillyhall in Cumbria. Local councillors have opposed - but radwaste is already coming to Lillyhall landfill from for example Magnox North at Chapelcross at the
rate of 26000m3 a year.

Radiation Free Lakeland say : the nuclear industry is sticking two fingers up to Cumbria - while masquerading as "green" - there is an unfathomable void between nuclear power and the truth.

The Keekle Head planning meeting is scheduled to take place on 25th May in Kendal. This is a widely opposed proposal - even the pronuclear MP Jamie Reed has opposed the plan. Radiation Free Lakeland will speak in opposition. GDF Suez Watch are also opposing.

BUT Lillyhall is already being polluted with Radwaste unbeknown to anyone it seems including the Council officers in charge of the license.

RAFL enquired if the Lillyhall application to recieve Radwaste was to be heard at the same time as Keekle Head ..

- what was revealed is astounding and beyond satire-

according to the County Council and Copeland officials under "present conditions" the operators of Lillyhall landfill site can bring in as much High Volume Very Low Level Radioactive Waste as they like.

They have "no need" to apply for permission to do this- the "present conditions" run out in 2014. We have had sight of the conditions of the Lillyhall license (below) and there is no mention of radioactive waste in any shape or form.

"Very Low Level Rad Waste" is a new classification - made to enable radioactive waste to be put into ordinary landfill. No other individual or company could get away with polluting in this way. In fact the laws applying to everyone apart from the nuclear industry have been tightened
up "From July 2004, 'non-hazardous' sites have been only allowed to accept non-hazardous waste. The Directive has banned whole tyres from landfill since 2003, with this ban extending to shredded tyres from July 2006, while liquid wastes have been banned from landfill since October 2007. The Directive also brings with it tighter site monitoring and engineering standards. This is supplemented by the new European Waste Catalogue, which has extended the range of materials classified as 'hazardous', and the Waste Acceptance Criteria, which has introduced stringent pre-treatment requirements".

At the last council meeting the councillors were horrified that ordinary landfill could be used for radwaste and voted to oppose it - .....but according to the council official Radiation Free Lakeland spoke to yesterday -"the Waste Recycling Group and Energy solutions who run
Lillyhall do not 'need' planning permissions.

The site is not monitered unless there are complaints - then there is one man - the council's monitering officer who would go and have a peek- so no one would be any the wiser as to exactly how radioactive/dangerous the waste is.

This document from Magnox North outlines the industry's wish list - which Goverment departments are falling over themselves to provide at the expense of our safety...
"magnox north has a need to dispose of solid waste .....normally disposed by transfer to the LLWR (Drigg) .....LLWR has refused to accept the waste. It is now proposed to dispose of this waste to a specified landfill site"
it goes on
"This can take up to 4 months from the date of recieving the application ......there is usually another 28 days before you can start accumulating and disposing of radioactive waste"

according to the council this is happening now at Lillyhall - there is no monitoring and there is "no need" for planning procedures - they can "take as much as they want"

Document from Chapelcross Magnox North

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:B7lJN8DdWuUJ:www.sepa.org.uk/about_us/consultations/idoc.ashx%3Fdocid%3D9824bc77-c263-46eb-a25d-926703895f9e%26version%3D-1+lillyhall+chapelcross+magnox+sepa&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShJtfGYeEHaoxkkwH7FvFPwLKynNqax2GLhPS-1QHDRPP4Lm-o1-GUMyBgM8DYkmkJY0Fx2nCFQ4R-vdGzqh9qtvu6MhsvcaYy-xdUOXXoaoQiHZNXwbxf_fKlVr9cgDiQ_F5Jv&sig=AHIEtbTKxGZCMbzBc8X5K8_5f-a82h291g

Hazardous Waste and Landfill (for all except the nuclear industry)

http://www.letsrecycle.com/legislation/landfill/

"Present Conditions" for Lillyhall - the report and the minutes from the meeting
held on 27 May 2004 say nothing about radioactive waste!

Report

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/CouncilMeetings/Content/Public/2976/3812711341
9.pdf

Minutes

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/CouncilMeetings/Content/Public/2976/381829370.
pdf

Marianne Birkby
e-mail: rafl@mariannebirkby.plus.com
Homepage: http://web.mac.com/mariannebirkby1/iWeb/Radiation%20Free%20Lakeland/Radiation%20Free%20Lakeland.html

Comments

Hide the following 5 comments

Nuclear is safe.

10.04.2010 14:19

38 miners were killed in a coal mine in the US last week.

Nobody was killed at Three Mile Island. Sellafield has caused fewer deaths than the old coal mines in Cumbria - by a long, long way indeed.

I'm sure windmills and solar panels would cause even fewer deaths if you don't count deaths from hypothermia when not enough powwer was being produced.

Nuclear power is safe and has a fantastic safety record. Only the communist soviet regime has blotted its copybook and they were hopeless at most things.

By the way, arguing against nuclear power in Cumbria is a non-starter. It provides too many jobs. Not everyone can ush pens at the local councils - nearly everyone does in nice middle class Kendal but people in other places need real jobs.

Pete

Deaths in Uranium Mines/Radiation Linked Diseases

10.04.2010 22:46

There are many deaths each year in uranium mines and because of uranium mines... which have operating standards well below that of coal mines - strangely they receive far less attention

http://www.wise-uranium.org/umop.html

Yes the nuclear industry provides jobs - but net loss of jobs is greater - Seascale was a thriving victorian tourist resort - Ravenglass held fish fairs on the beach - farmers cannot sell their livestock .....

The nuclear industry itself runs a Compensation Scheme for Radiation Linked Diseases

Here is a poem by a Sellafield forman called Duncan Ball who died last year aged 49 before being 'compensated'

Ticking boxes.

The boxes are ticked by those men who’ve been picked, from the keenest of yes men there, for checks done each day so the bosses can say, that their workforce takes extra care.

But the bosses were tricked by some men that they picked for a job that all liars can do composing old fiction that begs a
conviction for writing what still isn’t true.

But on they run with boxes ticked, while welding’s cracked and something’s dripped, inside the cell where Foremen looked: for hours on end in ‘Logs and books recording all the names of crooks who wouldn’t see and didn’t look, behind those windows two foot thick, where fell a steady drip of ticks.

Soon crystals formed as crystals do, from tiny holes where pressure grew, a mist of droplets spewing out, a sight that should have brought a shout from foremen ticking thrice each day when signing names for easy pay: the country paying bigger lumps to lazy men for growing dumps.

Some columns formed with lost control, as Foremen ticked and shirkers stole five minutes here then hours there forsaking safety's measured stare for extra tea and flashy things, that overtime some boxes bring with elements whose mass can change the genes of everything in range.

Trapped outside their ticking box where spillage flows like molten rocks with dangers left to grow unseen until one idle Chargehand's scream said “Shut it down and do it quick before we’re all in deepest shit there’s been another situation, critical to every nation.”

Marianne Birkby
mail e-mail: rafl@mariannebirkby.plus.com

Dreamland

11.04.2010 19:54

'Yes the nuclear industry provides jobs - but net loss of jobs is greater'

Conjecture.

Seascale might well have been a thriving resort in Victorian times, but I doubt nuclear power has stopped it becoming a second Blackpool. Windscale was built where it was precisely because it is relatively remote and nobody really wants to go there. If it didn't exist now that area of Cumbria would depopulate quite quickly.

Local support for the nuclear plant is very high. There is absolutely no doubt about that.

Pete

Local support for new build is wildly misrepresented

11.04.2010 23:58

Jamie Reed MP is misrepresenting the majority of Cumbria when he stands up in parliament and says that new build is desired by Cumbrians. Even a poll in the local to Sellafield -Whitehaven News was overwhelmingly opposed to new build.

marianne Birkby
mail e-mail: wildart@mariannebirkby.plus.com

Its a job .....

12.04.2010 00:08

According to reports by the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP), work-related deaths in uranium mines are estimated at between 5, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 3 mSv) to 37, 500 deaths (for radiation workers @ 20 mSv) per million workers a year. This compared with deaths in the manufacturing industry (estimated at 110 deaths per year per million workers) and the construction industry (estimated at 164 deaths per million workers per year)*.

* ICRPreports ICRP27/ICRP60.

marianne Birkby
mail e-mail: wildart@mariannebirkby.plus.com