AN EMBARRASSING leaked internal memo from Nirex, the company charged with disposing of Britain鈥檚 nuclear waste, suggests that some of its senior scientists fear it has bungled attempts to convince the world that a planned underground waste store will be safe.
The firm is awaiting permission to build an underground laboratory to test the feasibility of the store. Britain鈥檚 environment secretary, John Gummer, is expected next month to give his verdict on the laboratory, to be built at Longlands Farm near the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria.
But late last year, Steve Horseman, an adviser to Nirex who works for the British Geological Survey, warned that a build-up of gas in the waste store could force ground water contaminated with radioactivity to the surface within a hundred years (This Week, 11 January, p 10). He suggested that gas could push water through access tunnels, breaching engineered seals en route (see Figure).
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The leaked memo, published last week by Friends of the Earth and Cumbria County Council, was written by Nirex鈥檚 director for science, John Holmes. It is dated 10 December 1996 and was sent to Alan Hooper, the company鈥檚 science manager. 鈥淭he gas pathway has been approached in a particularly flat-footed way,鈥� Holmes wrote. 鈥淲e need to generate a report which calculates what we actually think would happen rather than what we think would not happen but which would be a problem if it did.鈥�
Holmes added that Nirex should examine whether it can justify 鈥渁 lower central value鈥� for the permeability of the rock above the proposed dump. 鈥淚f not,鈥� he wrote, 鈥淚 have the feeling that we may struggle to make a case for the site.鈥�
The central value published by Nirex in 1995 has already been dismissed as 250 times too low by some other geologists studying the Cumbrian site. Nirex declined to tell 快猫短视频 the central value for permeability it is now using in its calculations.
Stuart Haszeldine of the University of Glasgow argues that Nirex鈥檚 models fail to match the water pressures found in test bores. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 seem to have fitted their models to reality,鈥� he says.
But the leaked memo does not appear to have diverted Nirex, which announced last week that, subject to Gummer鈥檚 approval, it had appointed contractors to dig the shafts for the underground laboratory and to design scientific experiments. Nirex says the leaked memo merely 鈥渞eflects the healthy level of scientific debate within the company鈥�.