Scientists Call for Plan to Deal With UK's Nuclear Waste
May 14 - Independent, The; London (UK)
No decision about building new nuclear power stations in Britain should be taken until a solution to the problem of nuclear waste has been outlined, a committee of senior scientists has told the Government.
Their intervention is a substantially complicating factor in the decision
about whether or not Britain should 'go nuclear' once more, as part of its
programme to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions from conventional coal and
gas-fired power stations in the fight against climate change.
Three weeks ago, The Independent reported that Tony Blair was preparing to do
just that, and this week the Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David
King, said that in the bid to combat global warming one more generation of
nuclear power stations 'may be necessary'.
But now the waste question has erupted into the policy process with a
vengeance. The scientists, mostly with a nuclear background, form a group set up
by the Government eighteen months ago " CORWM, the Committee on Radioactive
Waste Management " to consider how the big waste legacy of 50 years of
nuclear power can best be dealt with.
That is widely regarded as long overdue. Successive governments, Conservative
and Labour, have failed to come up with any long-term solution for disposal of
the mini-mountain of spent nuclear fuel and other irradiated products produced
by Britain's nuclear industry since the first atomic power station, at Calder
Hall in Cumbria " the Sellafield site " began operating in 1956.
The radioactive waste pile now totals 470,000 cubic metres " enough to
fill the Royal Albert Hall five times over.
Mostly it is being stored on site at nuclear plants, but this is merely an
interim solution. CORWM was set up to look at options for long-term disposal,
and recommend a way forward to the Government. The recommendation is due in July
2006.
After a public and scientific consultation exercise, that included public
meetings around the country, last month CORWM made its interim recommendations.
The committee ruled out a number of more extreme options for nuclear waste
disposal that have been (quite seriously) put forward, including firing it into
space or burying beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.
Instead, they listed four main options ranging from deep geological disposal
" putting the waste in rocks deep underground " to local shallow
disposal for short-lived wastes.
The committee is now setting out on another round of public consultations and
assessments of this shortlist, before its final decision in July next year.
And it is that process, the members believe, which will be seriously
compromised if the Government takes any decision to go ahead with 'nuclear new
build', as it is known, in the meantime.
They think that the co-operation of environmentalists in the process, for
example, will be withdrawn if Green activists think that all they are doing is
removing a hurdle " i.e. the waste problem itself " for a new
generation of nuclear power.
The committee chairman, Professor Gordon MacKerron, Director of the Science
Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, has written to the Government.
'We have told the Government that if there were a decision on nuclear new
build, it would complicate our process, and some stakeholders might not take
part,' Professor MacKerron said yesterday. 'It might mean that the level of
overall public confidence in our process might be lacking.'
Another committee member, Pete Wilson, a former director of Friends of the
Earth, said: 'We want to solve the problem and draw a line under it but if this
is only so we can create more waste and more problems for future generations,
people will feel they do not want to take part.'
Professor MacKerron said the committee did not take a view on whether or not
there should be more nuclear plants.
The four key options
n Four definite choices are on the table to deal with the substantial pile of
radioactive waste that Britain's nuclear industry has produced, and is still
producing.
The problem is now urgent because of the possibility of a new generation of
nuclear power stations.
Proposals put forward by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management are:
deep disposal, phased deep disposal, shallow burial and interim storage. It will
give its final report after a year of consultations.
In deep disposal, waste is permanently placed in a repository between 300
metres and 2km underground, in an area where rocks act as the protective
chamber. This option is the most expensive, likely to cost up to pounds 12bn.
Phased deep disposal is the same process as deep disposal, except the waste
will be retrievable.
Shallow burial is for waste with short-lived radioactivity buried just below
the surface.
Interim storage is a temporary solution. Waste could be stored above the
ground or just below the surface " but it must be out of the biosphere, the
envelope around the world in which life occurs.
The committee is not addressing the question of disposal sites, which will be
an even thornier problem once the Government comes to confront it. But it has
given an estimate of how much waste a new generation of power stations might
produce. This is calculated at about 47,000 cubic metres, or half an Albert
Hall.
Michael McCarthy
Sophie Borland