Ed Davey, the UK Energy Secretary of State, declared – probably through gritted teeth – ”I am confident the programme to manage radioactive waste safely will ultimately be successful.” [1]
He made this prediction in January this year, upon learning that plans to construct an underground nuclear waste repository had been voted down by local councillors in the Lake District, north western England. The vote brought to an end a four year formal collaboration with the local council in the search for a suitable local site at which to construct a store for the UK’s high-level nuclear waste.
Like its equivalent facilities in the US, Scandinavia and elsewhere around the world, the UK repository will take decades to design and obtain all needed approvals, it will then take 100 years to build and fill with wastes. It will then be entombed and must be capable of remaining sealed for at least 100,000 years to cater for the slow decay of the radioactive waste.
In invoking the ‘longer term,’ time is being co-opted in favour of the pro-nuclear facility’s cause, and yet it is the very time stretching nature of nuclear waste that makes it such an intractable policy (and physical) issue. For, much as the UK Government would like to see progress towards a solution, so the notion of an eventual success of ‘playing the long game’ runs against the grain of the short-termism endemic in democratic politics, and the fixation on immediacy of return. Yet conversely it also plays into the hands of prevarication, and a ‘not in my term of office’ political instinct.[Read the rest of the article]: Thinking in radioactive timeAuthor informationLuke BennettSenior Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam UniversityIn 2007, after 17 years in commercial practice as an environmental lawyer, Luke switched to an academic position at SHU. Key projects include research into metal theft; the afterlife of abandoned military bunkers and owners and climbers’ perceptions of safety and liability for access to abandoned quarries (a project he's working on in collaboration with the British Mountaineering Council).
Original article: Thinking in radioactive time©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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