UK looks to Sweden for a solution to nuclear waste:
Even after some 60 years of commercial and military programmes the UK's stockpile of the most dangerous high-level waste amounts to a few thousand tonnes, although there are also several hundred thousand tonnes of intermediate-level waste which will have to be dealt with as well.
[...] "Used fuel assemblies are intensely radioactive, and that radioactivity takes a long time to decay," explains Prof Neil Hyatt, chief scientific adviser to the UK's Nuclear Waste Services.
"After about 1,000 years, about 10% of the original radioactivity is left, and that will slowly decay away over about 100,000 years or so."
[...] "We can't rely on institutional control for timescales of much longer than a few centuries," says Prof Hyatt.
"The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.
"So the surface of the Earth and human civilisations change much more quickly than the rate at which the radioactivity in this spent nuclear fuel can decay."
Sweden has already reached its own conclusions. It plans to bury its waste in rock deep underground and leave it there for good.
This is a process known as geological disposal, and the country's scientists have spent decades studying different ways in which it could be carried out.
[...] Earlier this year the Swedish government approved plans for a real geological disposal facility (GDF), to be built at Forsmark, some 150km north of Stockholm.
The project is expected to cost about 19bn Swedish kroner (£1.5bn; $1.8bn), and create 1,500 jobs, though construction will take decades. Work on a similar scheme, across the Baltic Sea in Finland, began in 2015.
These developments are being watched carefully from the UK, which also intends to build a GDF, though repeated attempts to find a suitable location have been stymied by political intransigence, as well as by intense opposition from local protesters and environmentalists.
[...] It is unlikely that a site for a UK GDF will be settled upon for at least another 15 years. But some experts question whether it should ever be built at all.
Among them is Dr Paul Dorfman, associate fellow of the science policy research unit at the University of Sussex and chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group.
"Geological disposal is a concept, not a reality," he explains. "There is significant scientific uncertainty about whether the materials which would be used can survive the depredations of time."
He believes the government's enthusiasm for new nuclear power stations is the reason why it is pushing to build a GDF.
"If you can't get rid of the waste, you can't produce more, which means that nuclear's USP - that it's climate-friendly and so on - is completely dependent on the notion that you can get rid of this waste," he says.
"Geological disposal is in fact, unfortunately, a nuclear fig leaf."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday September 07 2022, @04:24AM (4 children)
I'd take these articles more seriously, if they mentioned obvious solutions like recycling/reprocessing spent fuel rods - which are by far the most dangerous sort of radioactive waste. When you describe a fuel rod that still has over 90% of its original energy content remaining as merely something radioactive for tens of thousands of years, you're not even interested in solutions but in creating a problem dire enough to kill nuclear power.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 07 2022, @05:16AM
Also, "looking to Sweden" would be code for "seeing how we too can keep kicking the can down the road by only using 'temporary' storage facilities". Final storage is still not a settled matter in Sweden (mostly because nobody wants to pay for it, it seems).
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Wednesday September 07 2022, @05:48AM
Well at least they can use Project Xanadu to document and control everything, that should be finished by about then.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday September 07 2022, @09:08AM (1 child)
Reprocessing to extract the still usable stuff (which is most of it) is still a preferred option. However it will always leave an active but useless residue. The volume of this residue is actually quite small if you go the reprocessing route, so it it should not be difficult or particularly expensive to bury it deep under a thick concrete cap that only a technically advanced civilisation could drill through - unless you do silly expensive things like putting it in thick copper containers as the Swedes have proposed.
The original UK strategy was to use partly reprocessed fuel in fast breeder reactors, which act somewhat like nuclear dustbins, but fast breeder development in the UK was stopped after the Chernoby scare, despite Chernobyl being utterly unrelated to either fast breeders or any other form of nuclear power in the rest of the world.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday September 07 2022, @11:32AM
For some. For others, any improvements in the usefulness or safety of nuclear power should be opposed because it makes the technology more viable in the long term. Consider the final statement from this Dr Paul Dorfman:
Think about that: "if you can't get rid of the waste, you can't produce more."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Wednesday September 07 2022, @08:57AM (3 children)
It is no use looking to Sweden for a technical solution because it is not a technical problem. The problem is a political one - how to deal with the local (and non-local) objections. Some of the opposition is from anti-nuclear power people who are simply looking for any political obstacle to throw in the way, whether their objection has any technical basis or not.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday September 07 2022, @09:07AM
In UK they had a site 20 years ago (essentially Sellafield in Cumbria). The local population was very supportive, but it got knocked on the head by the local tourist board. As you say, a political issue rather than a technical one.
There are technical risks with building a Geological Disposal Facility. However they are vastly outweighed by the risk of doing nothing. Should the UK or world economy take a dip, we do not want this stuff left lying around on the surface.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Wednesday September 07 2022, @02:01PM
Yep. The technical problem was solved by the CSIRO over 40 years ago. Synroc [wikipedia.org].
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by higuita on Wednesday September 07 2022, @05:38PM
Not only political, but also economic...
Nuclear plans are expensive to build, maintain and operate... and after end of live, no one wants to pay for the cleaning and storage of radioactive waste. it is always the "someone else problem" push. There are several solutions, but all cost lot of money and involve more or less risks (that can also cost LOT of money if something bad happens)
So yes, many nuclear supporters strategically forget about the waste cost, "someone" will be forced to solve that later
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Thursday September 08 2022, @03:39AM (1 child)
Pretty sure that when I was at school we were taught that the Roman Empire lasted for more like 1,200 years.
Is this guy just bad with figures? (in which case, maybe the wrong person to have responsibility for nuclear waste!) Or have the powers that be been busy rewriting history again? Or am I just getting too old to remember anything reliably?
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Thursday September 08 2022, @04:06PM
Those Westies never recognize the Easties