It’s no secret that Cumbria in northern England has been repeatedly hit by torrential rain and wind this month.

But there has been little media focus on what this means for nuclear waste buried at Drigg, the UKs ‘Low Level Waste Repository‘, located near the Sellafield nuclear site on the Cumbrian coast.

Yesterday the Environment Agency issued a flood alert for the River Irt which runs alongside the Drigg nuclear dump. The Environment Agency’s flood map illustrates the River Irt inundating the Drigg site on the southward side with floodwater also encroaching from the northward side.

This has not actually happened yet – the map (right) illustrates risk, not actual flooding. But it certainly gives cause for concern as Storm Frank ditches further enormous quantities of rainfall on the Cumbrian mountains and fells.

On the same day, 30th December, Cumbrian campaign group Radiation Free Lakeland sent a letter to Cumbria County Council asking for Drigg’s gates to be locked to any more nuclear waste given the dangers from flood waters entering the site, eroding the landfill and contaminating land, river and and sea with radioactive waste.

“To describe the UKs nuclear waste site as a ‘Repository’ is putting a spin on the UKs main nuclear dump for ‘low level’ waste”, the letter states. “There is controlled discharge direct to the Irish Sea not to mention run off to the Drigg Stream and River Irt.

“Discharges to the air of radioactive gases are ongoing. According to the British Geological Society the Drigg site is above a regional aquifer. It is also likely to be destroyed by coastal erosion in 500 to 5,000 years (computer modelling can be wrong either way). Much of the waste is long lived and high risk.”

Drigg must stay open, says nuclear industry

Keeping the Drigg site open for continued dumping and extending the capacity of the site is something the nuclear industry are keen to do, seemingly at any cost to the environment. This plan is titled: ‘Low Level Waste Repository Site Optimisation and Closure Works‘.

Even the title of the application is hugely misleading. The date for ‘closure’ is set at 2079. So Drigg would continue to accept nuclear waste for more than six decades to come.

The site would be ‘capped’. Again this is misleading: to ‘cap’ a nuclear dump is akin to putting a cap on a fizzy lemonade bottle which has holes in the bottom. Despite a ‘cap’ the site will continue to leach aqueous emissions to groundwater and gaseous emissions to air for as long as the wastes remain dangerous – which in some cases is the half life of the universe.

The plan suggests that the waste at Drigg is low risk and short lived. Neither is true. As the University of Reading has pointed out:

“The Drigg site uses two disposal systems:
1) An original system operated from 1959 (?) to 1988 comprising a series of parallel trenches excavated into glacial clays, back filled with LLW and covered with an interim water resistant cap.
2) Current disposal of compacted waste placed in steel ISO-freight containers, with void space filled with highly fluid cement based grout. These containers are then disposed of in a series of open concrete vaults.

“Radionuclides with highest activities in the inventory include 3H, 241Pu, 137Cs, 234U and 90Sr, 238U and 232Th.”

This represents a cocktail of relatively short-lived, intensely radioactive species such as the tritium, caesium, strontium and plutonium with half lives measured in years and decades, with daughters such as americium 241 that’s dangerous for centuries, mixed in with uranium and thorium isotopes with half lives as long as 14 billion years.

Serious degradation already under way

But the waste has been dumped at the site with little or no regard to either short or long term hazards. From 1940 to 1988 chemical and radioactive wastes was simply ‘tumble tipped’ into trenches.

Now the waste is compacted into steel shipping containers filled with cement. But the containers, stacked up high on the site, are already suffering from serious degradation, with widespread cracking and corrosion, as the LLW management wrote in 2013:

“in containers at the tops of stacks, the external capping grout has undergone extensive physical degradation and settlement; the lids are not full of grout, and the grout is generally heavily cracked. The state of the capping grout in underlying layers is better; most containers only show sparse cracking. Standing water, sometimes contaminated with low levels of radioactivity, is present in approximately half of the containers at the tops of stacks … Corrosion, sometimes fully penetrating, is present in some container lids at the tops of stacks …”

In June 2005 the Environment Agency wrote: “BNFL (Now the NDA) has not yet demonstrated that the wider benefits to the UK from continued LLW disposal on this site outweigh the potential future impacts …

“We have concluded that the 2002 safety cases fail to make an adequate or robust argument forcontinued disposals of LLW because:
(i) Estimates of doses and risks from existing disposals to members of the public in the future significantly exceed current regulatory targets.
(ii) BNFL indicates that the LLWR is likely to be destroyed by coastal erosion in 500 to 5,000 years.
(iii) The 2002 safety cases include insufficient consideration of optimisation andrisk management, to demonstrate that impacts will be as low as reasonablyachievable (ALARA).”

But they have since revised that position and now take a formal view that “the potential for disruption of the site” (by which they refer to inundation by sea and floodwaters) “is an acceptable risk.”

Radiation Free Lakeland agrees with the Agency’s 2005 findings that that the real and present threat of inundation of the Drigg site – which is only about 300m from the sea and lies just 8 metres above mean sea level – by flood or by sea is not an acceptable risk to the people of Cumbria or to our international neighbours.

We also concur with Greenpeace’s 2005 ‘Comments on Environment Agency’s Assessment Documents on Drigg in which they highlight the Agency’s indications that much of the nuclear waste dumped at Drigg on the basis of being ‘low level’ should have been consider ‘intermediate level’ owing to the presence of the long lived isotopes in the mix. As the EA wrote,

“We are concerned by the potential for the destruction of the LLWR by coastal erosion. These concerns appear to be shared by both BNFL and BNFL’s peer review panel (Hilland Irvine 2003). Regardless of the calculated risks, the potential for the destruction of the LLWR by coastal erosion means that disposal of long-lived LLW in the LLWR might be creating undue burdens on future generations.”

Tell it to the birds

Up until 1958 thousands of black headed gulls eggs from the Drigg and Ravenglass gullery were harvested at a time in basketfuls and sold in London. The black headed gull is now on the amber list. The collapse in the mid 1980s of the largest black-headed gull breeding colony in Europe on the Drigg dunes has never been satisfactorily explained.

The official explanation is that a fox did it: “the concentrations of radionuclides in the foods, body tissues and general environment were at least three orders of magnitude too low to have had any effect. The more likely cause of the desertion of the gullery was the combination of an uncontrolled fox population, the severest outbreak of myxomatosis amongst the rabbits since 1954 and the driest May–July period on record, all in the same year (1984).”

Meanwhile childhood leukemia is officially blamed on ‘population mixing’ due to the influx of workers firstly to the 1940 explosives factory (Royal Ordnance Factory) at Drigg and then the ROF at Sellafield.

The irony of this incredible argument is that the plan for three new nuclear reactors at ‘Moorside’ a few miles from Drigg (‘Moorside’ is at the village of Beckermet) would involve a boom and bust influx of thousands of workers along with a further tsunami of nuclear wastes and ever more Driggs.

And let’s not forget the rising sea level problem. The Sellafield site lies within 100m of the sea and most of it is just a few metres above sea level. The nuclear site, already one of the most dangerous and contaminated in Europe, could be inundated by sea water within a century.

Is it really wise to go adding to the problem with a massive complex of three huge new nuclear reactors? When the current problems at the Sellafield / Drigg site have so monifestly not been solved?

Marianne Birkby is spokesperson for Radiation Free Lakeland (RFL). RFL is a voluntary organisation of local activists giving their own time and expertise freely. Any donations go directly to campaigning for nuclear safety.

Petition: ‘Lock the Gate on Drigg!

Petition: ‘Stop Moorside!‘

Action: Please submit any comments on the planning application : Application 4/11/9007 ‘Low Level Waste Repository Site Optimisation and Closure Works’. to Cumbria County Council at: developmentcontrol@cumbria.gov.uk.

Additional reporting by The Ecologist.

It’s almost 2016 and I want to begin by wishing everybody in Britain a very happy New Year.

For the Green Party, we’re looking forward with optimism, confidence and determination. 2015 was a huge year for us. We saw our membership more than triple.

We saw 1.1 million votes in the General Election, more than four times more votes than we’ve ever won before. We saw the return of Caroline Lucas as our brilliant Green MP.

2016 is the year in which we need to turn the Green surge into Green votes and that’s what we’re determined to do. What we need to do and will do up and down the country is provide voters with the real alternative.

So many voters, when we look at the local council elections that are coming up, are facing local government that’s totally, or almost, an one-party state. They are finding that they’re not having the tough questions asked. The local council isn’t getting the scrutiny it needs.

Local councils are suffering enormously under the governments hideous program of austerity but be should always be asking can they do better? Can they look after particularly the more vulnerable in their community better? Can they do a better job with their local environment?

In the Council elections, we’re looking to really grow our number of Green councillors across England and Wales.

Then we’ve got the assembly elections in Wales and in London. These are the chance where we can significantly grow our representation, win our first assembly members in Wales in what are fair proportional elections, in which people can be sure that their vote counts. If you vote for what you believe in, you can get it.

Our sister party up in Scotland is also looking forward with real confidence and enthusiasm to the Scottish Parliament elections.

One of the things we need to be getting out of 2016 is the same kind of elections, fair proportional elections all around the county, particularly to Westminster and of course getting rid of our un-elected House of Lords.

It was in 1918 when women got the vote. That was the last time we saw significant reform in the Westminster Parliament.

Now it really is time for us to think again, look again, plan again, and get real change in our democracy. To get to a situation where people know their vote counts, they don’t have to make complicated calculations about what other people are going to vote, they can simply vote for what they want, and get it.

That’s what I would urge everyone to make a resolution in 2016. To do your bit towards electoral reform. It is our human right to have a fair democracy that reflects our political will. Of course, in 2016, we’re also going to have to be defending our human rights. Human Rights act is under attack from our government and we need to stand up and defend it.

Time for real change

A new year, new possibilities. We’ve got a government that doesn’t have a mandate for the hideous austerity it’s imposing, for the disastrous environmental policies, for its threats to our human rights.

This government only won the support of 24% of eligible voters. That’s no kind of mandate.

Let’s pledge in 2016 to ensure that we make real progress toward the real change we need, a political system that works for the common good, not just for the few of the richest and a political system that delivers a society where we’re living within our environmental limits.

After all, at the end of the day, that’s not politics, that’s physics. We have to do it.

We have to have real change in Britain.

Critics of GM promote pseudo-science, make false claims based on ignorance and are driven by politically motivated ideology.

The actions of these affluent elitists effectively deny food to the hungry. They are therefore committing crimes against humanity. If you follow the GM issue, no doubt you’ve heard this kind of simplistic, tired and predictable diatribe before.

A good deal of the debate surrounding GMOs involves attacking critics of the technology who voice genuine concerns and put forward valid arguments to back up their case.

The attacks by the pro-GM lobby are nonsensical because there is sufficient, credible evidence that questions the safety, efficacy and the science used to promote GM, as well as the politics and practices used to get GMOs on the commercial market.

This evidence has been validated many times before by peer-reviewed studies and official reports. Furthermore, many of the slick PR claims made by the pro-GM lobby have been deconstructed and found to be seriously wanting. Such evidence has been referred or linked to on many occasions in my numerous previous articles, and I see no need to regurgitate this here.

Reasoned, informed debate? Forget it

Attacks on opponents of GM are designed to whip up emotive, populist sentiment and denigrate critics with the aim of diverting attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty, as well as ideology, commercial interests and political motivations of the pro-GM lobby itself.

Lobbyist Patrick Moore has called GMWatch “murdering bastards“. Journalist William Saletan portrays those who question GM as heretics clinging to faith and relying on an “army of quacks and pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science.” Claire Robinson has taken apart his pro-GM ideology and evangelising here, which is little more than disinformation masquerading as objective journalism.

Former UK environment minister Owen Paterson has described critics of GM as a “green blob” bunch of affluent elitists who are anti-science Luddites. Then there is Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard John Roberts, who calls for less politics in science, implying that critics have a political agenda. He says they should stop scaremongering and forwarding propaganda.

Roberts recently said that if you don’t want to eat GMOs, then don’t – conveniently ignoring that fact that Monsanto has denied choice by spending at least $100 million in the US to prevent labelling of GM food. He says that GM is probably safer than traditional foods, which it clearly isn’t, and has expressed dismay over the delay in the production of Golden Rice.

Mirroring the propaganda of the GM sector, Roberts says though Golden Rice became a reality in February 1999 and could have been used as early as 2002, the opposition to GM has ensured that it is not currently available, which again is simply not the case.

He claims more than 15 million children have died or suffered globally due to vitamin A deficiency since 2002. Roberts asks: “How many must die before we consider this a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted?” His claims are baseless and his tactic is deliberately inflammatory.

Another prominent scientist-cum-lobbyist, Anthony Trewavas, uses similar tactics by calling on critics to defer to (pro-GM) scientists and stop forcing their authoritarian views on people, thus denying choice and GM to consumers and farmers alike.

In a similar vein, C S Prakash has used politically-motivated attacks on opponents and made numerous claims in favour of GM in high-profile media outlets that he does not appear to want to back up.

GM proponents ‘driven by fear’

If scaremongering and propaganda are occurring, Roberts, Trewavas, Prakash and others should look a little closer to home because what they are doing is engaging in a high-profile roll-out of psychological projection: accusing opponents of the very things the pro-GM lobby is guilty of doing in order to shift the focus of attention.

The industry and its supporters are driven by politics, commercial gain and ideology. Its very foundation is based on a fraud and the capturing and corrupting of international and national bodies, including the WTO, trade deals, governments and regulators.

And, arguably, it is also driven by fear. “They are scared to death”, says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds:

“They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

While massive financial clout and the capture of key political institutions (thereby curtailing the option of prioritising more productive and sustainable models of agriculture) constitute the power base of global agribusiness corporations, we also must not overlook the role of prominent individuals, whether scientists or media figures.

These foot soldiers of the GM industry try to set the GM debate by painting critics as irrational, ignorant and politically motivated, whereas they (scientists especially) are supposedly objective and untainted by vested interests (clearly untrue). And they have been quite successful at getting this message into the mainstream media.

Readers are urged to check websites such as Lobbywatch, Powerbase and Spinwatch, where they will see links between some prominent GM scientist-lobbyists and big agribusiness companies, the ultra-right group the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Scientific Alliance (described as a front group for corporate interests) and Bivings Group (a public relations company that worked with Monsanto), among others.

And these connections have resulted in well-orchestrated smear campaigns against individuals and groups (see this, this and this), pro-GM propaganda (see this about the sweet potato) and dirty tricks (for example, using fake identities to attacks critcs of GM). At the same time, those responsible for such things carefully manage the message that they themselves are the persecuted victims of ideologically-driven anti-GM campaigners.

The doublespeak and hypocrisy is plain to see.

Carefully avoiding the real problems, and the genuine solutions

If anything matters to the pro-GM lobby, contrary to the public persona it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts.

And if it were to genuinely embrace these values, along with ‘humanitarianism’, a concept it also lays claim to, it would flag up and protest against the corporate capture of science and the infiltration by commercial interests of institutions and regulatory bodies, and it would also protest against the way trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small / peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

For all of its talk about GM ‘feeding the world’ and scaremongering about the actions of anti-GM activists leading to the deaths of “billions“ due to their resistance to GM, the pro-GM lobby sidesteps the true nature of hunger and poverty. It is only by understanding the issues raised by Eric Holt-Giménez in the article from which the following quote comes from that we can begin to see how ridiculous the claims of Moore, Trewavas, Roberts and the rest really are:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis.

“The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food.

“For this reason, thus far, there has been little official leadership in the face of the crisis. Nor has there been any informed public debate about the real reasons the numbers of hungry people are growing, or what we can do about it. The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

But certain people would rather attack those who do actually flag up and campaign against such things and who desire transparency, democracy and the proper accountability of institutions that supposedly exist to protect the public interest.

The myth of ‘green authoritarianism’

What we get instead is prominent figures decrying these campaigners as ‘murderers’, ‘elitists’ and regressive authoritarian ‘types’ and ludicrously comparing their actions with authoritarian regimes and mass death that occurred under such systems.

Anthony Trewavas is the perfect exemplar: “Most objectors in this area have a political programme not a scientific one but they like to bend science to their own political point of view. Science is by its nature not politics or political propaganda or anything like it. It deals with evidence not superstition, or political or social philosophies.”

Trewavas conveniently sidesteps the underlying politics and commercial interests underpinning GM and instead relies on a heavy dose of propaganda by stating:

“It is an unfortunate situation that in our present world many environmentalist groups have become typically authoritarian in attitude. Greenpeace notably decides its opinions must prevail regardless of others, so it arrogates to itself the right to tear up and destroy things it doesn’t like. That is absolutely typical of people who are unable to convince others by debate and discussion and in the last century such attitudes, amplified obviously, ended up killing people that others did not like. But the same personality type the authoritarian.”

Such a simplistic analysis indicates that Trewavas is not a psychologist, a historian or a political scientist. He is a molecular biologist but appears to think his status qualifies him to have his ill-informed personal views taken as fact and promoted by the media. And he is not alone.

Doing the bidding of powerful business interests

Kevin Folta, another molecular biologist (with close links to big agribusiness), argues that adopting GM would offer “plentiful and affordable food supply using responsible and sustainable agricultural practices.”

Is he also an economist, a political scientist, a trade policy analyst and an ecologist? No amount of gene splicing or fine-sounding rhetoric can overcome the structural factors that lead to poverty and hunger. (Folta has also often spoken on health-related issues, which again are beyond the field of his expertise and has got things wrong.)

Structural inequality, oil prices, debt repayment, trade policy, commodity speculation, land use (eg for biofuels), the destruction of indigenous food systems, access to land and credit, soil health, irrigation, etc, all feed into policies that determine plentiful, affordable food and sustainability.

As the backbone of global food production, especially in the Global South, small farmers increasingly face marginalisation and oppression due to corporate seed monopolies, land speculation and takeovers, rigged trade that favours global agribusiness interests and commodity speculation.

So, what are we to conclude? That certain figures within the pro-GM lobby are objective and independent? That they really do believe in choice and democracy, even when the evidence is clear that such things are being denied consumers and farmers through, for example, unremitting regulatory fraud, rigged markets, secrecy, manipulation of aid and trade and strings-attached loans? That they know where the line is between science and lobbying, between science and propaganda?

Or, based on their associations and their silence on crucially important structural issues that create poverty, hunger and food deficit regions and their false claims and inflammatory remarks on other issues, are we to conclude that they are effectively doing the bidding of extremely powerful commercial interests?

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

This article was originally published on Colin’s website.

The UK is drenched in flood waters again. With a changing climate meaning this will become a more and more frequent phenomenon, we’re going to have to start to think more seriously about how to stop heavy rainfall from soaking people out of their homes and rotting fields of valuable crops.

There used to be a creature in Britain which helped significantly with this effort. It was made extinct here around four centuries ago, but recent reintroductions of this rodent have shown the vital role they once had in reducing flooding – and how they could take up that mantle once more.

In spite of their reputation for causing floods, beavers also have the capacity for mitigating the impact of flooding, but on a rather bigger scale.

Before …

Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Some beavers were brought to a farm in the Tay catchment near Bamff in Perthshire, Scotland, to live in large enclosures in 2002, as a demonstration project.

Before there were beavers, across most of the flat land there was a five foot deep ditch running through. In dry times the ditch had very little water in it. In rainy times, and times of rapid snowmelt the water rushed down the ditch and tipped out into the burn that flowed down the little den and on to the neighbouring land.

All that water headed quickly on its way through the agricultural land to the east, and on down the burn and into the Isla and then the Tay. In January 1993, when a fast thaw followed a big freeze, the Tay flooded its banks downstream at Perth and caused widespread damage to homes and great misery to many.

Since then floodwalls have been built in Perth and there hasn’t been another flooding incident yet, but the water has come close to the top of the wall on a number of occasions. Other parts of low-ground Perthshire continue to suffer regular flooding.

The beavers on the farm got established and started breeding by 2005. Over time they built perhaps thirty dams and as a result they are holding up thousands of tonnes of water at the moment, as almost relentless rain has fallen in the last month.

Just beyond the ditch there are two ponds that were dug in the 19th century for recreational use. By 30 years ago they were starting to dry out. One of them had become more of a wetland than a pond, and not a very wet wetland at that. The other had shrunk and was heading the same way.

And after …

The beavers, released into the pond, began by building up the barrage to increase the height of the water. Then when water started to overflow it they dammed the overflow in many places, creating a series of terraced pools.

Looked at from a drought mitigation point of view there would be no question that the beavers have made the low-ground a wetter place than it used to be with plenty of water for livestock even in the driest summer.

But it is clear to see the result if this pattern were repeated in similar places all over the Tay catchment, or any river catchment.

In times of heavy rain or sudden snowmelt, the water rushing down from the highlands would be slowed up and absorbed more effectively by the large ponds, wetlands and streams with flights of beaver dams, than by deep cut ditches designed to channel water as fast as possible on to the next place.

Many small floods upstream prevent big floods downstream

A flood, of course, is a pond in the wrong place. And beavers don’t always put their ponds in the right place. Sometimes they decide to put them in someone’s garden, or over a road. In cases like that they are not seen a flood mitigators, rather as flood creators.

But the point is that, by creating multiple small floods, ponds, pools and wetlands upstream, they can help to mitigate bigger floods downstream.

And small floods made by beavers in inconvenient places can be reduced or drained in various ways. Dams can be removed or modified. Whereas large floods cannot be so easily dealt with and may cause widespread problems.

Along with floodwaters goes sediment, and this becomes a serious pollutant once it reaches the cities and the sea, clogging drains and damaging marine life.

Beaver dams hold back sediment to a hugely significant extent, as shown by studies done in Texas and Belgium. The two species, Eurasian and North American are shown to have much the same impact.

Restoring oxbow lakes and wetlands

With increasing climatic uncertainty it is going to be necessary to take some land in the former floodplains out of agricultural use and restore old oxbow lakes and wetlands to allow the absorption of floodwaters and sediment in times of spate.

As George Monbiot is quite right to point out, how upstream land is managed has a vital role in determining whether or not there are floods downstream. The way to stop water from flooding houses (alongside not trashing the climate) is to stop it from running so quickly off the hills.

For thousands of years, British beavers contributed enormously to this work. It’s time that we allowed them to once more.