UK: Anybody want some plutonium?

On Thursday June 12th Hilary Benn, the environment minister, announced that, rather than try to foist Britain’s existing stockpile of intermediate and high-level waste on unwilling citizens, his government would instead invite local authorities to bid for it, in return for a generous cash infusion from Whitehall. It is a scheme that other governments around the world with unloved piles of nuclear waste will watch with interest.

Not everyone will be eligible. Any repository must last for many thousands of years, which limits the choice of sites to geologically stable parts of the country. Bribing voters to accept unpleasant pieces of infrastructure may carry the whiff of political expediency, but the government has little choice.
Its own Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CORWM), which it set up in 2003 to study the problem of nuclear waste, noted that the chief problem in disposing of nuclear waste is not scientific or technical—virtually every expert agrees that burying it deep underground is the only real option—but social.

CORWM itself is merely the latest in a string of committees set up to deal with the problem; all previous attempts stumbled on the delicate question of where such a bunker could be built. Ministers hope that the volunteering approach will avoid the protracted planning battles and bad publicity that have stymied efforts to dispose of nuclear waste in other countries.

Economist