The staff of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency have produced a draft Authorisation to dispose of radioactive waste from Dounreay which considerably tightens up on the draft previously issued by HMIPI for public consultation. In practice it will reduce the amounts of radioactivity discharged each year to less than one tenth of the quantities released in the 1970s - the period when most of the problems now associated with Dounreay occurred.

This draft Authorisation is now presented to the North Region Board of SEPA for comment before it is considered by the main Agency Board.

At the same time the proposed Authorisation is sufficiently flexible to permit the treatment of potentially dangerous radioactive wastes to be completed as fast as the full use of all decommissioning plant on the site will permit.

The standards set are designed to ensure that even at the maximum authorised limits of discharge, effects on the human population and the natural environment are comfortably within the acceptable safety limits recommended by national and international radiological protection authorities.

The Authorisation will ensure that SEPA has control of and full access to the wide range of monitoring and operational data required to regulate activities on the site, to prevent accidents occurring - and to take firm and effective action if errors are made.

Subject to the environmental benefits produced being commensurate with the additional costs involved, SEPA will be empowered to seek and demand continuing improvements in performance, and the introduction of new methodology.

Staff believe that with the new Authorisation, SEPA will greatly increase the regulatory presence on the site, and will thereby encourage and assist the operators to anticipate hazards, to be constantly aware of their responsibilities and to be highly pro-active in the context of their environmental protection programme.

Our clear intent is to contain on site and have transformed into a safe and relatively stable condition the multitude of highly active and potentially dangerous radioactive materials which have accumulated at Dounreay during the forty years of development and operation of nuclear reactors on the site.

In undertaking this difficult task a balance has to be struck between a no-discharge policy, which even if technically feasible would involve huge sums of taxpayers money and our proposed approach of permitting a small proportion of the total amount of wastes to be released to the wider environment, involving a risk, albeit very low, of environmental damage.

Your officers have considered all of the 450 or so responses received from the public consultation exercise and as a result we have made substantial changes to the original consultation draft. We have also taken careful note of Government policy and all relevant legislation and regulations. We believe we have drafted an Authorisation which, coupled with firm and fair enforcement, reflects and provides for the needs and aspirations of the people of today and of future generations.

For further information: Professor D.W. Mackay - Director, North Region

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