News

Hunterston waste fiasco

Investigations have been launched into the risks to public health and safety posed by secret radioactive waste dumps on the North Ayrshire coast. Thousands of cubic metres of contaminated rubbish from Hunterston nuclear power station have been dumped in five shoreline pits accessible to the public. Yet official records of what the pits contain have been destroyed.

Recent monitoring of the Ayrshire foreshore has uncovered unexpectedly high levels of radioactivity, and there are mounting concerns that the pits could be eroded or flooded by the rising sea levels caused by global warming. The five pits are on reclaimed land outside the perimeter fence of the Hunterston A nuclear site, near West Kilbride. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the government agency which is now overseeing the clean-up of Hunterston A, says the pits contain about 6500 cubic metres of low-level radioactive waste. This is thought to include contaminated soil, rubble and concrete dumped between 1977 and 1982.

Information about the waste pits has emerged only because of persistent questioning by Rita Holmes, who represents Fairlie Community Council on the Hunterston Site Stakeholder Group. “These revelations show just how badly the industry has behaved,” she said. “It dumped contaminated waste on public land for years and then managed to lose the records of what it had dumped. As a result, we now have no clear idea of the threat that the pits pose to public health,” she added.

Sunday Herald 15th January 2006