group spearheads move to create Community fund
Council urged to press for Dounreay cash
Published:
Highland Council is being pressed to ensure far north residents net a financial windfall should plans for a new low-level waste dump at Dounreay proceed.
The local authority is being urged to enforce a condition that the operators pay a one-off sum and a levy on each drum of waste which goes into the complex.
Residents at neighbouring Buldoo are against the proposed £110million scheme to lay out the underground concrete vaults on ground between their small settlement and the licensed nuclear site.
The move to create a community fund is being spearheaded by Dounreay Stakeholder Group, the liaison group between the site and the local community.
It is seeking to emulate the benefit package approved last year for those living close to the low-level radioactive dump at Drigg in Cumbria.
Its extension is set to net neighbouring communities a down payment of £10million, plus £1.5million a year in Government-funded sweeteners.
DSG vice-chairman Bob Earnshaw said a DSG working group has drafted a proposal, which includes a levy for each container of waste which goes into the dump. The annual payments would stretch over the lifetime of the dump, which is scheduled to start operating in 2014.
He said the area to benefit would be the Dounreay-travel-to-work area, which takes in Caithness and north Sutherland.
DSG is also pressing that any approval is made subject to the dump being used exclusively for low-level waste generated by operations at Dounreay and the neighbouring Ministry of Defence base at Vulcan.
The community group is seeking to distinguish between the benefit package and any claims for compensation local residents may have about the impact of the dump on them. It has tabled its draft proposal to the council’s planning and development director Stuart Black.
DSG has funded a study carried out by consultants to assess the environmental impact the dump would have on the residents of Buldoo.
In January, Dounreay’s operators announced it had shifted the site earmarked for the dump slightly further north after finding out that their preferred location site lay on top of a geological fault line.
