‘Not likely’ will be the response from those who saw the advert on the front page of this week’s Whitehaven News (12th February) helpfully placed by the consortium that now runs the UK’s Low Level Waste dump near the village of Drigg just south of Sellafied.
LLW Repository Limited’s advert implores workers who tipped nuclear waste into the site’s open trenches over a 25-year period from 1960 to try and remember exactly what it was they dumped – so that a comprehensive picture of the waste inventory in the trenches can be compiled. Given that the trenches have now been capped and sealed off for some years, those workers still alive will be hard pushed to recall exactly what they were chucking away up to fifty years ago, the inventory is unlikely ever to be completed.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today: “Be afraid, very afraid ! If they can’t even account for the lower category of radioactive wastes, what hope is there for the volumes of significantly more dangerous intermediate and high level wastes they now so desperately want to dump deep underground somewhere in the UK”.
Despite its Low Level Waste title, the once open trenches of the facility at Drigg are believed to hold an assortment of materials of a higher category than LLW. Information provided to CORE in the 1990’s revealed the dumping of assorted materials including debris from the 1957 Windscale fire in 1957, and subsequently materials from the US Three Mile Island reactor accident and from the Chernobyl explosion.