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Waste Management: Radioactive Waste

My honourable friend the Minister of State for Energy (Charles Hendry) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement. I am pleased to inform the House of three announcements from my department—the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)—with regard to the safe management of radioactive waste. First, DECC is today publishing its response to the public consultation on the desk-based identification and assessment of potential candidate sites for geological disposal. Alongside the response we are also publishing a high-level framework—informed by our consultation—that sets out the process for identifying and assessing potential candidate sites within volunteer areas in England. The framework more clearly defines stage 4 of the managing radioactive waste safely (MRWS) process for implementing the geological disposal of higher activity radioactive waste. The consultation, which ran from June to September last year, considered how desk-based studies would be used by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to identify potential sites following a decision to participate by a local community at the end of stage 3 of the MRWS process. It also set out how potential sites would be assessed against agreed criteria and how decisions would be made—both at the local and national level—on which potential sites should go forward for detailed geological assessment in stage 5. Having considered all responses received during the consultation the Government have concluded there was general support for our proposals for site identification and assessment and for the criteria which will be used to identify and evaluate potential candidate sites. To accompany the government response we have produced a framework document that contains the agreed criteria and a high-level description of the desk-based site identification and assessment process for England. It reflects the proposals presented in the public consultation, including a number of additions and clarifications to the criteria, in response to comments we received. It confirms that sites will be assessed using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as a tool to aid decision-making, and it sets out the next steps to develop this methodology, including the development of scoring scales and the weighting of the criteria.