Power Engineering - Draft report recommends deep disposal of UK nuclear waste

28 April 2006 - The UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) (CoRWM) yesterday published draft recommendations for how it believes Britain should deal with its mounting stockpile of nuclear waste material, concluding that the best available option was to store the waste in a deep shaft drilled into stable rock somewhere in Britain.

Chairman of the committee Prof Gordon McKerron said, "We have a 50-year history in this country of not finding any long-term management option for very high-level, relatively dangerous radioactive waste."

As a result, waste has been stored in various forms on a multiplicity of sites and successive governments have failed to develop a policy to deal with, what most accept, in an untenable situation. The CoRWM was set up three years ago to help resolve this issue that involved wide consultation.

McKerron, said that the process of building a store would take "several decades" and that he expected there to be local opposition to it. In the meantime, the committee recommends upgrading the current temporary storage facilities so that materials can remain there for up to 100 years.

Since Labour came to power, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management has considered such varied options for the 470,000 cubic metres of waste produced by all previous nuclear facilities as firing it into space and burying it under the sea.

Prof MacKerron said: "We don't think we have reinvented the wheel, though deep geological disposal was a similar end-point to that recommended by scientists and the House of Lords."

CoRWM acknowledges that other countries are moving faster. Finland is heading for a mere 20-year gap between deciding on deep disposal and seeing the first canisters buried.

But Britain, the committee maintains, is different; the geology is more complex, the waste more varied, and the social questions more difficult. If everything went without a hitch, it believes the first batch of waste could find its way into deep disposal sites within a few decades. The last delivery would almost certainly be made in the early years of the 22nd Century.

Richard Shaw, the principal scientific officer at the British Geological Survey, said, ''Deep geological disposal is the preferred method for the management and eventual disposal of radioactive waste adopted by many countries, including Finland and Sweden. It offers a safe option for the management of these wastes in the United Kingdom now and in the future."
The idea of burying Britain's radioactive waste had previously been proposed by the nuclear waste agency Nirex but an experimental shaft at Sellafield was refused planning permission by the Conservatives before the 1997 election.

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