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Why Are We Making Such A Meal Of Our Nuclear Waste?
April 29, 2002Lord Oxburgh, President of the Geological Society of London [Note 1] and Chairman of the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee, will try to answer this question and propose a solution today in his final Presidential Address to the Society. You are invited to hear him speak at 1600 on Thursday 2 May at the Geological Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. (Please contact Dr Ted Nield if you wish to attend. There will be no transcript.)
Previewing his address, Lord Oxburgh writes in the April issue of the Society's monthly magazine Geoscientist:
"The radioactive products of civil and military programmes over the last half-century are currently held in temporary surface stores. Regardless of the future role of nuclear energy, these existing materials have to be properly contained and protected. They give rise to public anxieties that may in some ways be excessive, but which have been enhanced by the possibility of terrorist attack. In spite of decades of study and analysis we have made little progress on plans for managing such materials. Finland began later than we and now has a working subterranean nuclear repository."
Lord Oxburgh ascribes this failure in the UK to three main reasons:
* Planning processes that are adversarial, tortuous and capable of almost infinite protraction
* Public unease about 'things nuclear' and the conduct of the nuclear industry
* Extremely exacting limits on future radioactive releases from repositories
"In my view the demanding environmental requirements take the precautionary principle to an absurd limit. They were adopted in the 1950s and no longer make sense in the light of knowledge and experience gained since then. Current regulations for the management of wastes are obsolete and waste the UK hundreds of millions of pounds. Nevertheless it is probably impractical to change them in the near future.
"On the technical side, experts have allowed themselves to be drawn into arguments they can never win: the prediction, with high degrees of certainty, of future climatic and tectonic changes and the long-term performance of waste containment systems. Furthermore, it not enough for a practical solution to commend itself to experts as the safest and most cost-effective one available. It must be a solution that meets less well-informed concerns as well.
Oxburgh proposes a semi-empirical approach similar to that used in determining the working life of other engineering structures:
* Seek planning consents to construct shallow, waterproof, concrete lined, underground storage chambers. The depth requirement is that they be deep enough to withstand the maximum plausible surface impact - c. 50m.
* The consent should be good for 150 years - a period for which it is possible to make reliable geological predictions, to underwrite the properties of the chambers themselves and of the containment vessels.
* Within the chambers, store the containers so that their condition can be continuously monitored and they can be robotically extracted - though neither rapidly nor easily.
"After, say, 125 years, a decision should be made in the light of its performance whether to extend the life of the repository. A contingency fund should be built up to permit the relocation or reprocessing of the waste if found to be necessary.
"In practical terms, the geological requirements for such a repository would not be difficult to meet. The local community where the repository was located should be reasonably compensated for perceived loss of value to their property by means of improved or additional public amenities. Personally, as a local confidence-building measure, I would seek to establish a research facility for the environmental and health consequences of exposure to low-level radiation close to the site.
"This approach to waste handling, in which none of the elements is novel, could be implemented rapidly and inexpensively (relatively speaking, that is)."
Geological Society of London, The
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