Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has announced controversial plans to make up to £1bn available to communities which agree to store nuclear waste. Any such burial site, claimed Mr Benn, “will provide skilled employment for hundreds of people over many decades. It will contribute greatly to the local economy and wider socio-economic framework. And it will glow in the dark for 10,000 years, reducing street-lighting costs significantly.”
Anti-nuclear campaigners, however, are horrified. “It’s about bribing a community with £1bn of taxpayers’ money to bury waste in their back garden,” said Nathan Argent of Greenpeace. “But there’s no guarantee a willing community will come forward.”
However, many of the quarter of a million residents of Plymouth - an unemployment blackspot a comfortable 240 miles from London – disagreed.
“We’s had old nuclear submarines rusting away in the No. 3 basin of Devonport Dockyard for years because nobody knows what to do with them - not to mention the navy dumping tritium in the river Tamar during refits - and it never done me no harm,” said one local, Mr Wayne Janner, waving his fins enthusiastically. “A few hundred tonnes of radioactive waste under the floorboards won’t make any difference, and if it means jobs for my tadpoles, I’m all for it.”
Although Mr Janner’s other head expressed reservations about Plymouth’s above-average leukaemia rates, a naval spokesman said that the few incidences of leukaemia that could be directly traced to radiation from the naval base could be counted on the fingers of one hand – as long as that hand belonged to ‘Mutant-Fingers’ Magee of Albert Road.
No comments:
Post a Comment