West Cumbria MRWS Partnership warned about validity of Ipsos-MORI Poll.
Local campaign group CORE (Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment) has today warned that the Partnership cannot take yesterday’s Poll results as a clear mandate for inflicting an underground nuclear waste dump on West Cumbrian communities.
In presenting the results of its telephone opinion poll to the Partnership, Ipsos-MORI revealed that just under half of those polled knew little or nothing about the MRWS process. The presentation showed that of the 4262 people canvassed on the lead question ‘how much do you feel you know about the search in West Cumbria for a potential site for a deep underground facility for higher activity radioactive waste’, the responses were as follows:
4% Know a lot about it
16% Know a fair amount about it
36% Know just a little about it
25% Have heard of this but know almost nothing about it
19% Have never heard about it
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today “The poll shows that 44% (25% + 19%) – or 1875 out of the 4262 people contacted – had little or no idea about what was going on with the nuclear dump process. On that basis, Ipsos-MORI’s overall conclusion that ‘at least half support taking part in the search for a possible site’ is based on grounds as shaky and unsafe as the West Cumbrian geology”.
The closeness of the poll results and those apparently from the Partnership’s own public consultation clearly provides no clear mandate to the Partnership to advise the Local Authorities to move to the next stage of the MRWS process – the Decision to Participate. In effect, the ‘jury is still out’.
Martin Forwood added: “Should the Partnership advise moving to the next MRWS stage on the basis of the telephone poll, then West Cumbria will have been convicted by a jury from which at least 5 of its 12 members (44%) failed to hear or understand the evidence, and thereby sentenced to a future blighted by the nuclear industry and its dangerous wastes”