Decommissioning

By Gail Rajgor

With nuclear power now firmly back on the agenda in many countries, the drive to find effective long-term solutions for dealing with spent fuel and the safe disposal of waste has stepped up a gear. As Roger Cashmore, FRS, chair of the Royal Society working group and Head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) says: “Spent fuel can no longer be an afterthought and governments worldwide need to face up to this issue."

This way of thinking is shared not only amongst members of the current UK government, but others around the globe. In the past, “when waste started piling up, we effectively crossed our fingers and hoped that it would all go away,” said energy secretary Chris Huhne at a recent speech at the Royal Society.He vowed: “Never again.”

The UK already has around 6900 cubic metres of high-level waste (HLW), enough to fill three Olympic swimming pools, along with a hefty amount of intermediate-level waste (ILW) and even more low-level waste, Huhne noted in his speech. And that’s before you even contemplate the waste and spent fuel to be generated from the next generation of nuclear power plants.

So with that in mind, the Royal Society is urging the government to “make strategic judgement now to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and burdening future generations with a legacy of spent nuclear fuel”.

It’s a call being echoed across the Atlantic in the US, with the Obama administration under pressure to reverse its 2009 decision to suspend plans for a geological respository to be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Indeed, similar calls are being made on all nuclear-embracing governments around the world, too.

Storage as a coping mechanism

While storage is currently the coping mechanism in place (90% of the world’s used fuel is stored, mostly in ponds at reactor sites or in some instances at central locations), it is still a temporary solution and can only really be perceived as an intermediate stage in any nuclear waste management strategy, particularly with regards HLW. Re-use is an option also on the drawing board and growing in popularity amongst policy makers as some 95% of the usable energy in nuclear fuels remains after use in reactors.

However as America’s Nuclear Energy Institute says: “the development and commercialisation of recycling technologies is decades away” while the “pursuit of technologies does not relieve the federal government of its statutory responsibility to provide a disposal facility”. Plus, even “advanced fuel-cycle technologies cannot eliminate all of the byproducts in used nuclear fuel”.

Indeed, the World Nuclear Association (WNA) explains: “there is clear and unequivocal understanding that each country is ethically and legally responsible for its own wastes, therefore the default position is that all nuclear wastes will be disposed of in each of the 40 or so countries concerned”.

The general consensus is that the development of deep underground geological repositories, as previously planned for Yucca Mountain since 2008, is the way forward for long-term disposal of HLW. These would immobilise the radioactive elements in HLW and some ILW and isolate them from the bioshere, WNA explains.

Nordics take the lead

The only countries currently proceeding decisively towards developing such repositories now, however, are Finland and Sweden, says WNA’s Ian Hore-Lacy. While others are still debating, these two countries have set plans in motion, selecting sites, establishing firm development schedules and, crucially, “sticking to them”, he explains.

Finland’s repository for permanent disposal is planned to open near Olkiluoto in 2020, while in Sweden one will be built in Osthammar. Significantly, there is local acceptance in both countries for the disposal plans and this, he says, is key in getting such facilities built.

In America, critics have accused US president, Barack Obama, and others of using the plans for Yucca Mountain as a political football. But as Hore-Lacy says America has “plenty of options” other than Yucca Mountain, so if the original repository plans are not revived it will not be the end of the world. The Blue Ribbon Commission was established to review plans for HLW waste management in the US and evaluate alternatives to Yucca.

It’s July draft report acknowledged the “standstill” the country had come to in reaching decisions, but while supporting the need for a repository, it did not come out in favour of any particular site. Moreover, with general elections looming it seems unlikely a US decision will be made in the next year. Canada is also actively screening for potential sites and to date, several possible locations have been identified with none so far ruled out.

Meanwhile, for countries in the European Union time is running out for them to get their house in order as member states are under an obligation to publish firm waste management plans by 2015. According to Hore-Lacy, France is the country nearest to doing so, although as Chris Huhne told members of the Royal Society, the UK government “has just finished consulting on the long-term management of our plutonium stockpiles and will publish the results shortly.”

In Asia, “South Korea has made some progress”, but the region is “well behind”, adds Hore-Lacy. And so far plans for shared international repositories for countries without the right geological conditions for national repositories, following recommendations by the International Atomic Agency back in 2003, are still pretty much at the discussion stage.

Potential solutions for Europe in this regard have been investigated, with 14 countries hoping to establish a European Repository Development Organisation (ERDO) next year at the earliest. The Association for Regional and International Underground Storage (Arius), which is involved in the ERDO project, is also investigating whether similar, regional shared solutions would be appropriate for the Middle East and Asia.