Hinkley mud - how NRW ignored international science-based asseessment

Why we can't "trust the regulator", NRW - they have disregarded the international agreements on detailed guidance from OSPAR (2014) and the expanded updated IAEA guidance (2015). OSPAR gets no mention and NRW's advisors CEFAS use guidance from 2003 that was superseded in 2015.

The IAEA Table below has five criteria: NRW's experts CEFAS find the first is met, but marginally; for the second CEFAS wrongly take the discharges to disperse as in Sellafield's discharges to the Irish sea, so far underestimate uptake of radioactivity by fish and exposure of beach-users. The three other bio-criteria - newly included in 2015 - were just ignored by CEFAS and NRW. NRW provides the 2017 CEFAS report which explains "Under the London Convention of 1972, only materials below de minimis levels for radioactivity may be considered for disposal at sea. The IAEA describes a generic procedure for calculating individual and collective doses that could arise from the disposal of candidate material at sea (IAEA, 2003; 2004) which has then been adopted for use in the UK using the procedure described by McCubbin and Vivian (2006) ... used to assess the sediment samples as safe for disposal at sea:  

consumption of fish, crustacean and molluscs as near the sea in Cumbria; also dirt ingested by the public active on the beaches".

Proper assessment in their scientific terms required CEFAS to conduct a 'habits survey' of sea-food consumption and beach use around the Severn Estuary, and to assess the amounts of contaminated sediments and spray coming ashore in our much more highly populated area. Quite a task, so NRW didn't require EdF to fund it and CEFAS covered up with "more detailed case-specific assessment is not necessary" while ignoring the fact that the public's collective dose (second criterion) could not be calculated without an assessment relating to the Severn Estuary. 

As the caption to the above Table says, these are not just IAEA guidelines (International Atomic Energy Authority) but have been adopted by IMO (International Maritine Organisation) to implement the "de minimis" concept. By ignoring the 2015 expansion of "de minimis" criteria, CEFAS fail the international criteria; NRW should of course have checked and picked up this failure, but didn't.  

The IMO 2015 document explains: 

"For candidate materials containing artificial radionuclides (other than from global fallout that is referred to in Step 2) and/or altered natural radionuclides stemming from human activities, the national permitting authority should consider previous decisions and action taken by the national radiation protection authority....The pertinent question in such cases is whether the decisions on exclusion, exemption, or clearance were made considering marine environmental pathways of exposure to humans and to marine flora and fauna and whether these are suitable to an assessment of the proposed dumping operation. If this is the case, the materials are de minimis."

This blocks the excuse, common to UK regulators, that the basic licensing decision had been taken under the old (2003) IAEA rules, so the 2018 decision can avoid using the 2015 rules. The NRW have not offered this excuse so far; if they and CEFAS were aware of the 2015 rules, they apparently decided not to draw attention to their failure to use the 2015 definition of de minimis..

The 2014 OSPAR Guidelines for management of dredged material at sea set the standards for sampling and assessing the Severn Estuary dumping site, and it specifies points to be included in a license. These will be detailed in a separate blog-post. NRW has a duty to follow these guidelines, but show no evidence of doing so, simply inventing their own criteria, taken from previous dumping practice.