A report in this week’s Sunday Times suggests that the agencies charged with cleaning the site up have, in effect, conceded defeat(1). Dounreay – or the area surrounding it – cannot be wholly decontaminated. Nuclear pollution from the site will last for as long as the fissile metals remain radioactive.
But the catalogue of errors which follows in this article is deeply disturbing to surely anyone considerig the life-extension of nuclear generation. But
The catalogue of idiocy at Dounreay is not necessarily an indictment of all nuclear installations: nuclear power stations built today couldn’t get away with practices like this. But it shows that when things go wrong they can be incredibly hard to redress. Dounreay’s story also reflects the fact that corner-cutting is a constant temptation, as disposing of waste properly is difficult and expensive.And you thought Monty Burns in the Simpsons was a theoretical comedy construct? Monbiot goes on to make this interesting observation.
it is another argument for open government. None of this could have taken place if Dounreay’s operations had been open to public scrutiny. The disasters there happened for the same reason as the disasters in Iraq: the government used “security” as its excuse for hiding the truth from the public.
Monbiot.com � A Catalogue of Idiocy:
Filed in: nuclear, energy, power, generation, clean-up, pollution, Dounreay
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