5. What’s happening next?

We have already carried out some initial communications and consultation with people in West Cumbria to raise awareness of the issues involved and to start to gauge people’s views. We will shortly be starting a much more comprehensive communications and engagement programme to give everyone living in West Cumbria the opportunity to find out about the work of the Partnership and the issues that we are looking at, so they can forms their own views.

Eventually, once this work has been completed, and people have had their say, the Partnership will make a recommendation to each of the local authorities on whether or not they should make a formal decision to participate further in the process. This is likely to happen in the second half of 2011.

It’s important to understand that a decision to participate would not be a decision to host a facility. At this stage we are simply looking to make a decision in principle about whether we are prepared to consider hosting a geological disposal facility somewhere in West Cumbria.

If West Cumbria does make a decision to participate a Community Siting Partnership would be established to build on the work done by the current Partnership. Ongoing Partnership discussions would be coupled with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority looking at a wide range of criteria, including detailed safety, social, environmental and geological assessments to begin to narrow the focus to potentially suitable sites.

At each stage increasingly detailed assessments would be made of potential sites, with resources becoming focussed on investigating those that are most likely to be suitable. The community would be able to withdraw from the process right up to the point when a planning application is made to start work on building a facility.

For more information on the site assessment process see the NDA paper on Site Assessment Methodologies, which is paper 56 in the Document Library.

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