Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live, & as if you were to die tomorrow.
Mother Anna Lee, founder of the Shakers
Why might the hulks of nuclear powered submarines be stored at Sizewell until a permanent depository is built somewhere? Because they cannot stay afloat indefinitely and are too big to transport overland, so a coastal site with a current nuclear licence is appropriate, if they must move from where they are now (Plymouth and Rosyth). There is no more reason why they should come to Sizewell than anywhere else around the coastline, but they have to go SOMEwhere, and safely. And if Sizewell turns out to be the least worst place of all, then shouldn’t we make the best fist of it we can?
The ISOLUS Project was set up to find the safest and most environmentally and publicly acceptable way of dealing with the subs (numbering 27 at present and counting). Unprecedentedly the MoD decided to consult publicly on the Project. Less commendably they decided to hand over the driving of the Project to industry. Four years and two extensive consultations later, the MoD were boxed into a corner, told by the public exactly what it thought of their capitulation to big business. So the MoD took their ball away, with the excuse that they’d better wait until CoRWM had reported on the management of all nuclear waste, before doing anything else (in public anyway). And so the Project has sat and sulked for a year and three quarters, while behind the scenes at the MoD and in corporate boardrooms there is furious activity to discover how to prevent getting trashed by the public ever again.
One problem is that they are still building and planning new nuclear powered submarines. Here, as elsewhere, the argument of NO NEW BUILD applies. If only they’d stop building the ghastly things, they’d have the public eating out of their hands. Well, almost. Let’s get them to stop first anyway!
For more details of the ISOLUS Project contact Peter Lanyon: p.lanyon@tiscali.co.uk