to prove that disposal was safe for any site. In 1997, following a five-month local planning inquiry, the Secretary of State for the Environment rejected Nirex's case. The Inquiry Inspector said "chemical containment is new and untried, with more experimentation and modelling development indubitably required. This work would to my mind be particularly difficult and important because of the problems of meaningfully testing some of the components of the concept. Implicitly Nirex feels unable to credit the notion that this barrier would fail; but the lack of any calculation based on an adverse, as distinct from a conservative, interpretation of this chemical containment seems to me to be an unfortunate omission from the emerging safety case, particularly having regard to FOE's impressive critique of the concept.". References External links NDA website Friends of the Earth's Evidence to the Nirex Inquiry (1995-6) Mining companies of the United Kingdom Radioactive waste repositories Nuclear waste companies Companies based in Oxfordshire 1982 establishments in England Waste companies established in 1982 British companies established in 1982