UK’s dishonesty on nuclear waste rapped

MoD came under fire last month after a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) found number of contaminated sites across England and Wales is far higher than previously estimated.

According to Decc survey, up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are.

However, the new figure is far higher than MoD’s last December estimates according to which only 15 sites in the UK were contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.

“They’ve started to use their lawyers to get out of what is, in the first place, I think, a moral responsibility and in the second place, will become a legal responsibility,” said Brown whose constituency in Fife, north of Edinburgh, includes one of the most notorious examples of radioactive pollution at Dalgety Bay.

Brown also slammed the UK government’s failure to act on a 1958 Cabinet report, which urged ministers to control the disposal of the radium painted on dials of military planes.

“The truth is that, at that point, someone did know that there was a potential problem. Someone should have then passed it to the Ministry of Defense, and urged them to take the appropriate action,” Brown added.

Furthermore, referring to his order to identify and produce clean-up plans for the contaminated sites in 1997, the British former environment minister Michael Meacher MP said, “I am astonished and deeply concerned that that does not appear to have happened”.

SSM/MYA/HE

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