Nuclear Waste: Time to face the facts

Whether you are for or against the civil and military use of nuclear – whether you think it should be phased out or further developed – you can’t dispute the fact that the radioactive waste produced by the various applications is an issue that must be tackled. If we stopped creating more waste tomorrow, we still have to deal with the stockpiles that have already been created.

Even though we have been building up large quantities of extremely dangerous radioactive wastes for nearly 50 years, governments and industries across the world still haven’t decided what to do with it all. The absence of policy, particularly in Britain, is a recurring theme of this supplement. Perhaps this failure to act is because, so far, no ideal solution has been found. Yet that doesn’t stop the fact that action is urgently required, and it may be that the path we must take is a troubled one but preferable to the rest. As the contributors to these pages highlight, attempts to deal with the problem are being made around the world, and it seems that each country has to tailor-make its own solution.

As David Wild points out (page x), it was a Labour government, under the leadership of Attlee and Bevin, that first created radioactive waste in Britain in 1948. Perhaps, as Tom Watson MP believes (page xiv), it will also be a Labour government that finally comes up with a credible way of disposing it.

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