Policies devised by other countries to deal with their waste will not answer our special problems. Wastes generated at nuclear power stations contain only short- lived radioactivity They can be safely disposed of in a near-surface repository. It looks like an outbreak of a very British disease - those who understand the policy do not understand the science, and vice versa. The Government, it appears, has not grasped the implications of the fact that Britain and France are the only two countries in Europe to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. There are no exceptional circumstances."But the issue is not solely one of central government's arrogance towards people who must live near a nuclear dump.

The Government is getting the science wrong, as well as the democracy. According to a spokesman for the Department of the Environment: "Our view is that a full transcript of a planning inquiry is not required. Ministers have concluded that the Nirex inquiry should be conducted according to normal planning procedures. The Nirex repository will not be completed for at least 20 years. It will hold plutonium whose radioactivity will scarcely diminish over 10,000 years, yet once this public inquiry is over, nobody will have a full record of what was said. They ranged beyond the narrow issues of planning consents into national policy towards energy supply and into international issues such as proliferation of nuclear weapons.But the Government seems bent on emasculating the Nirex inquiry. It will not even provide the money for a shorthand typist to take notes of proceedings.

The third inquiry, into a successor station to Sizewell B at Hinkley Point in Somerset, was overshadowed by electricity privatisation. These nuclear inquiries represented major constitutional events in recent British history. At the time, the inquiry into what is now called the Thorp plant at Sellafield was the longest in British history. It was followed by the Sizewell B inquiry, which ran for even longer under Sir Frank Layfield before reporting in 1987. A meeting in the village of Cleator Moor today will decide how that public inquiry conducts itself when the formal sessions open in September.Already, the signs are that it will be a sham.This will be the fourth major nuclear public inquiry in Britain. The forerunner of them all was the 100-day Windscale inquiry under Mr Justice Parker, which reported in March 1978. The laboratory is so important to the overall project that it will be scrutinised by a public inquiry.

Now, UK Nirex, the industry's waste disposal company, wants to bury it some 600 metres underground at Longland's Farm, just inland from the Sellafield reprocessing plant in west Cumbria. As a first step, the company intends to dig a laboratory to test the properties of the rocks at depth. Eventually, the galleries excavated for the laboratory will be incorporated into the disposal facility itself and it seems likely that the laboratory's access shafts will be used to get men and machines down and to haul excavated rock up. At the centre of this is nuclear power, the most momentous of all post- war technologies. For 45 years, first to build the Bomb and to generate electricity for civil use, Britain's nuclear industry has been piling up radioactive waste. By coincidence, another event today, taking place far from the media spotlight on Westminster, also highlights the way in which the British system of governance disenfranchises the very people in whose name decisions are taken.