In the last act of the dying Parliament, MPs quietly voted to dump democratic planning processes to expedite a ‘facility’ for the high level nuclear waste in geologically fractured Cumbria, writes Marianne Birkby – so over-ruling strong and highly effective local opposition. Shame on them!
The nuclear industry concede that a nuclear burial site would definitely leak radioactive atoms that would get back up to the surface and into people’s drinking water and food – and so put them at risk of cancer.On the last law-making day of Parliament, MPs voted to dump democracy along with radioactive wastes.
There was no debate or even public vote in the lobbies of the Commons – voting was done by filling in a form. Incredibly MPs ‘voted’ 277 votes to 33 to dump democracy.
And in that act the dying Parliament gave birth to a monster – the adding of the geological disposal of radioactive wastes to the list of ‘Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects’ (NSIPs). Or as we see it in Cumbria, wiping out democracy to dump nuclear waste.
There were no notices of the impending birth. No outraged opinion pieces by environment journalists. No national countryside or environmental groups galvanising their members.
[…]
So who devised the cunning plan?
Who’s idea was it to scrap democracy in order to dump nuclear wastes? Was the bright idea given to Government by the PR firm Copper Consulting?
Copper – a PR firm with offices in London, Bristol, Suffolk and most recently Cumbria, told the Department of Energy and Climate Change in 2013 (following Cumbria’s decisive ‘No’ to a nuclear waste dump) that
“allowing local authorities to determine the outcome of a process which is designed to deliver a national Government policy may not be the most appropriate route. … local authorities are consultees rather than decision makers. A logical conclusion might therefore be to classify the GDF as an NSIP”
There is a revolving door between the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and Copper. Ivan Stone – Copper’s former Executive Director is now the Stakeholder Engagement and Communications Director of Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) – the new arm of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
And guess what – Copper have also just been awarded the PR job of selling new nuclear build and new nuclear wastes at Moorside to the public.
Read more at To dump nuclear waste, first they must dump democracy!
