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The Government’s White Paper on Nuclear Waste Disposal set out plans to invite UK communities to volunteer to store radioactive waste from the country’s nuclear power programme in geological repositories.
Prof Neil Chapman, Chairman, ITC School of Underground Waste Storage and Disposal, said:
“This White Paper should be a real milestone. If it is able successfully to propose a workable mechanism for siting a geological repository for Britain’s radioactive wastes then it will be a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of establishing a secure energy policy for the future. Apart from managing our legacy wastes, the government will be seeking to ensure that there is a credible route available for the wastes that will arise from a future nuclear energy programme.
“If, as expected, the White Paper maps out how communities can volunteer to host a geological repository, how they might partner the repository developer and how possible alternative locations can be weighed up, then it will be real step forward. Much of the UK is potentially suitable technically for a geological repository – this much has been known for decades. A wide range of engineering designs for a repository has been developed internationally over the last 30 years and most of these options can be deployed or adapted to suit the UK’s geological conditions. This gives us a good degree of flexibility while still ensuring safe and secure waste disposal. Our past history of failures to find a site has been due, to a large extent, to our being too tightly focussed on specific technical considerations, when there are clearly many other factors that are important. Involvement of the local community in taking key decisions, for example on many of the design and operational matters, is a modern, inclusive approach with recent precedents in several other countries. With such a range of geology in the UK, and with a properly defined process, we should be able to move forward again, after more than a decade of being stuck in the doldrums.”
Prof Ian Fells CBE, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said:
“This white paper is expected to confirm what we have known for years: that geological storage is the best solution for nuclear waste disposal. We now need this government to take a strong line on where the sites for disposal should be located. Until they do that we can’t even get started on planning for this extremely important issue.”
Dr Richard P. Shaw, Principal Scientific Officer at the British Geological Survey, said:
“The geological disposal of radioactive waste involves the construction of a purpose-built facility (or facilities) at depth (likely to be between 300m and 1000m) in rocks that will minimise the amount of radioactivity that moves away from the repository over long periods of time.
“There are a number of rock types and geological environments that are suitable for such a facility. These include low permeability rocks such as granites, clays, mudstones and halite (salt) beds. The principal geological consideration is that fluids, including groundwater, flow very slowly through the repository and the rocks in which it is constructed.
“In the UK we have a number of geological environments suitable for the construction of a radioactive waste repository which include:
* Basement under sedimentary cover (BUSC);
* Large inland sedimentary
basins (which offer potential in halite (salt) deposits, thick mudstone sequences and basinal brines that are stagnant);
* Low permeability sedimentary rocks;
* Low permeability ‘basement’ rocks;
* Low relief terrain.
Less suitable geological situations include:
* Within an aquifer;
* Areas with natural resources (coal, oil etc);
* Areas with high groundwater fluxes.
“Given the geological diversity of the UK and the number of potentially suitable geological environments that result from this diversity, the geological disposal of radioactive waste is a viable option. In total such environments represent a sufficiently high proportion of the UK land mass so as not to be prohibitively restrictive, with a significant proportion of the country offering potentially suitable geological environments.”