nuclear waste it said in a statement

nuclear waste,” it said in a statement.Mr Stebbings added: “The facility offers a serious, credible, safe and immediate solution as an interim storage facility. All it has done, explained one of its directors, Lawson Stebbings, is to commission a survey which showed the site could be used and then passed this on to the Lords select committee.But why bother if the company does not intend to go ahead with the plans? The company points to the NSD report’s call for extra facilities. They also complain that the company has been secretive – refusing to come to public meetings on the issue – and that the affair has slashed the value of local housing.”We were within a week of signing the papers on our farm when all this blew up,” said Chris and Toni Westmacott, who farm 350 head of sheep on the hills above the valley. “Then the people said they wanted a written guarantee that there would be no nuclear dumping on the site. What are we supposed to do about that? It means we are stuck here.”Omega Pacific offers no guarantees, but it is quick to point out that it has not made any firm proposals to store nuclear waste. There they will deliver to Mr Parker’s neighbours tourism brochures showing the splendours of Pembrokeshire, annotated in the campaigners’ own handwriting with Omega’s proposals.”We want to show them our beautiful countryside and tell them that Mr Parker wants to dump nuclear waste here.

How does he think this will affect tourism?” said Andrew Clemence, Trecwn’s vet and chairman of the Pembrokeshire Anti-Nuclear Alliance.The coalition, which has also put its case to the Welsh Secretary, Alun Michael, lists the dangers of using the site as a waste dump. It points to the streams that run through the valley and join the local water source, the fact that no geological surveys of the valleys exist, and Omega’s lack of expertise with nuclear material. But we are not yokels.”In a show of their feelings, a group of 15 locals will today travel to the Cheshire home of Alan Parker, co-owner of Omega Pacific. “Why have they got to put it here? They think `Oh put it out in the country – they’re all thick there’. The point is, of course, that they do not want it in their valley.”People are horrified. We are only a small village but if there is any contamination we will be the first to suffer,” said Pat Stevens, a campaigner and member of the community council. A House of Lords select committee is due to report later this year on what it believes is the way forward for an industry whose benefits most people appreciate but whose leftovers nobody wants.A report recently compiled by the industry watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, said that half of the 70,000 cubic tonnes of waste currently stored in Britain’s 22 sites was in danger of leaking.

It added that an extra 20 sites needed to be found within two decades.Even the locals in Trecwn and the neighbouring communities admit that “they have to put it somewhere”. Omega Pacific, the company which two years ago bought the site of a former arms dump from the MoD, has proposed storing low-grade nuclear waste in the tunnels that run into the hillside. The villagers, fearful of leaks, disasters and leukaemia, are outraged.The dispute centred on the tiny West Wales village highlights the eternal dilemma for Britain’s nuclear industry: how and where to store radioactive waste. Inland lies the Trecwn valley, site of a heated and increasingly vocal battle between villagers and industry.
The details of this dispute are simple.

Behind the trailer are miles of agricultural land sloping gently to the Pembrokeshire coastline and one of the most beautiful, unspoilt parts of Britain. “Keep out nuclear waste,” reads the message, sited on the road to the village of Trecwn. THE SLOGAN on the hoarding hung from a hay trailer, painted boldly in black and yellow in English and Welsh, could not be clearer. “People want their journey to be a non-event and that is what we are aiming for.”However critics are already expressing doubts that the PPP can be made to work in a mutually beneficial way.Louise Hudson, of the Capital Transport Campaign, said the obvious way for London Underground to pay for the leases would be to increase fares.. Mr Smith insists the plans will be carefully tested “so that the public sector gains”.Mr Smith, a proponent of the Private Finance Initiative in his previous job as chief executive of King’s College Hospital in south London, says it is the only way of guaranteeing a sustained level of investment “We need modern signalling and stations so that we can move as many people as quickly as we can without compromising safety,” he said. The new track is now in place, the finished stations are covered in bubble-wrap and test trains are already running on part of the track but, according to Mr Smith, there is a great deal of work still to be done.The Government has allocated an extra pounds 365m to London Underground for the two years to April 2000, when the public subsidy is due to be scaled down as the private sector steps in.One worry, said Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, is that train drivers on the Jubilee Line, like the electricians working on its construction, will use the political need for success as leverage to get more money out of London Underground.A more immediate problem for Mr Smith is the looming threat of strike action by Underground staff unhappy about the planned partial privatisation of the system, which would see 6,000 employees transferred to new companies.Mr Smith, who was appointed by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, to the pounds 150,000-a-year post overseeing the introduction of a public private partnership (PPP), insists that Mr Prescott has given repeated guarantees over pay, conditions and pensions.The PPP compromise was announced by Mr Prescott last March as a way of providing the ageing infrastructure of the Tube network with a desperately needed pounds 7bn investment over 10 years.Campaigners had previously argued for Treasury restrictions on the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement to be relaxed so that London Underground could get loans at a cheaper rate, but this was rejected.Under the PPP, London Underground would hand over its infrastructure of tracks, stations, trains, and signalling to the private sector for a period of 30 years and lease it back as a train operator.The details of how such an arrangement could work are being thrashed out by government advisers and London Underground management.

Its transport managers would face a logistical nightmare.The line is due to open in three phases with the first, between Stratford and North Greenwich, scheduled for this spring. Derek Smith, who becomes managing director of London Underground tomorrow, said he could not guarantee that this autumn’s target date would be met.
Mr Smith said staff working on the project were confident the Tube line would be finished in time for the opening of the Dome, but the prospect of a tortuous journey across London for visitors to the Greenwich site remains.Failure to meet the deadline would be a huge embarrassment to the Government which has staked so much on the Dome’s success. THE MAN who this week assumes responsibility for seeing the new Jubilee Line extension finished in time to take visitors to the Millennium Dome has admitted that the project might not be ready. The management degree course offers a range of study options, including “Focusing on customers”, “Successful selling”, “Knowing your market” and crucially, “Advanced negotiating”.. Research shows that it becomes five times more expensive to get customers back if they have had a bad experience,” said Ford.Although the course at Loughborough is still in the planning stages, and the syllabus has yet to be finalised, Ford hopes to enrol its first students by the millennium.The company already sponsors one degree course at Leicester University, the BSc in Retail Automotive Management (Ford), which is designed for senior staff. While these anti-heroes are often perceived as lovable rogues, their real-life counterparts can have a negative effect on forecourt sales.”We want people to be pleased with their car and to return in the future. By training their dealers to identify a particular type of buyer and their particular interests and needs, Ford hopes to make the whole business more professional.The car-sales industry has long suffered from an image problem, epitomised by such TV anti-heroes as Arthur Daley in Minder, and Frank Butcher in EastEnders.