£40m 'bribe' for communities to consider radioactive waste dump beneath them

Communities are to be paid £1m a year simply to discuss the possibility of having a radioactive dump built beneath them, under the latest Government attempts to find a burial site for Britain’s nuclear waste.

Areas which subsequently allow test drilling to take place could reap a total of £40m in payments with "no strings attached" before deciding whether to proceed with the project.

Ministers were accused of opting for a “bribing and bullying” strategy after unveiling the plans and admitting that councils in areas considering hosting the dump would no longer have a guaranteed veto to block its construction.

The Government has said it favours a “voluntarist approach” to finding a site for the dump, a so-called Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), which would cost an estimated £12bn and take decades to build.

It would be filled with at least six Royal Albert Hall’s worth of radioactive material before being sealed up a century from now as a permanent burial chamber for the waste, which may remain radioactive for 100,000 years.

Efforts to find a willing host have so far proved fruitless, however, with the only area to have expressed interest in hosting the site, Cumbria, last year pulling out of the process.

Copeland Borough Council had voted in favour of allowing tests to see whether its geology was safe for such a facility, but was vetoed by Cumbria County Council amid concerns over whether it would be guaranteed the right to withdraw from the plans subsequently.

Under the new plans, Cumbria County Council would no longer have such a veto.

“All levels of local government will need to have a voice in this process but we are keen that no one individual level should have an absolute veto over everyone else being able to proceed,” an official at the Department of Energy and Climate Change said.

Tim Farron, MP for South Lakes, said: “The GDF should not be foisted on a community without their wholehearted support. The mooted plans to remove the veto for local councils against a nuclear repository is undemocratic and makes an absolute mockery of the idea of localism.”

Communities who express interest in hosting the site would be paid £1m a year for up to five years while initial discussions and assessments take place. Officials say the funding required “no commitment” on the part of the community to proceed to the next stage, of drilling boreholes and assessing the geology.

However, if they choose to do so they would be paid £2.5m a year while the testing, which may last five to 15 years, takes place.

Officials insist the community would still then be free to withdraw from the process, despite potentially having received £40m in payments.

But they offered no answers as to what they would do if they ended up with no area willing to host it voluntarily, saying only they would “cross that bridge when they come to it”.

They rejected ideas that communities would agree to dead-end talks simply for free cash, describing it as “a very locally politically difficult issue”.

“If you’re a local politician you might be sticking your neck out a bit by engaging with the government or developer on this kind of thing,” one said.

The facility’s developers would talk to those communities “with most prospects of success”.

Ministers will spend the next two years conducting a geological survey of England and Wales that may exclude some areas as unsuitable, for example if they have significant aquifers or mineral deposits.

Officials admitted the survey could yet show that Cumbria is geologically unsafe for the site, as opponents have claimed.

Ministers committed when they opted for new nuclear plants that they would not do so without a credible strategy for dealing with the waste they produce. Officials insist the latest plans provide such a strategy.

Louise Hutchins, Greenpeace UK energy campaigner, said: "This is a bullying and bribing approach by a government that is getting desperate about solving this problem.

"First David Cameron reneged on his promises not to allow new nuclear reactors until the problem of waste disposal was solved. Now he’s resorting to bribing reluctant communities just to talk about nuclear waste whilst stripping them of the right to veto it.”