Nuclear waste ‘may be blighting 1,000 UK sites’
I have talked previously of the need to think through the positive employment benefits of the role of the MoD in rural England. Interestingly the Rural Growth Network proposal for Swindon and Wiltshire seeks to think through the issues around changes to the MoD presence in that rural area.
This article demonstrates the darker side of an MoD legacy and I suspect may run and run. It tells us:
Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.
Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.
This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.
The MoD has come under fire from former prime minister Gordon Brown for trying to evade responsibility for cleaning up the contamination it has caused. His constituency in Fife, north of Edinburgh, includes one of the most notorious examples of radioactive pollution at Dalgety Bay.