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Nirex, Britain's nuclear waste disposal agency, has made clear that it does not want responsibility for choosing a new waste-disposal site — even if the government decides that it should retain its independence.

According to John Holmes, Nirex's director of technical services, the government and not Nirex should take the lead in any future site-selection process; and, once a decision is made, it should be protected from politically motivated interference.

Nirex took much of the blame for the choice of the Sellafield site, even though the decision is believed to have been fully endorsed by the late Nicholas Ridley, environment secretary in the then Conservative government, only to be overturned by his successor, John Gummer.

Holmes was speaking last month at a discussion organized by the Geological Society of London on the future of radioactive waste disposal in Britain. He acknowledged that Nirex had made mistakes, by, for example, not discussing its plans with more sc ientists outside the company.

Despite planning for a sealed underground repository, one Nirex official has revealed that Nirex's eventual choice of repository would have had a degree of retrievability almost by default.

The safest, but most expensive and least retrievable, option would have been to build a deep repository that would be filled with concrete every time waste was placed at weekly or monthly intervals. A cheaper, more retrievable method would have been to fill a repository with concrete only when it was full of waste. “Nirex was tending towards this option,” he says.