EXPERTS advising the British government have devised a bold plan for
overcoming objections to the deep burial of nuclear waste: make the waste more
dangerous.
The nuclear industry already wants to dispose of 60 000 cubic metres of
medium-level radioactive waste in a repository deep underground. Now Gordon
Beveridge, chairman of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee
(RWMAC), says that 860 cubic metres of high-level waste and up to 6000 cubic
metres of spent fuel from nuclear reactors could be buried along with it. 鈥淚
believe that consideration should now be given to co-disposal of these wastes,鈥�
he wrote in a paper presented by a colleague at a conference on engineering
geology in Newcastle late last month.
Current policy on high-level waste, a by-product of the reprocessing of
spent nuclear fuel, is to store it above ground for 50 years to allow its
shorter-lived radionuclides to decay. Some of this type of waste has already
been stored at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria for nearly this long. 鈥淚f
we are not to leave these wastes for our grandchildren and their children to
dispose of, we need to be addressing their management now,鈥� Beveridge鈥檚 paper
concludes.
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Plans for the deep disposal of medium-level waste have been in disarray since
March, when the Conservative government in one of its last acts rejected an
application by the waste company Nirex to dig a rock laboratory near Sellafield
to test the idea.
In the light of this debacle, Rachel Western of the environmental group
Friends of the Earth argues that Beveridge鈥檚 plan is unrealistic. 鈥淩WMAC has
been asleep while Nirex鈥檚 science has collapsed and nuclear waste has been
piling up,鈥� she says.
Beveridge believes that Nirex will have to abandon the secrecy surrounding
its detailed proposals if the public is to be won over. Charles Curtis, a
geochemist at the University of Manchester and a member of the RWMAC, accepts
that it will be 鈥渆xceedingly difficult鈥� to win public backing for an underground
waste repository anywhere in Britain. But he agrees that it will still be easier
to find one site for three types of waste than to find three separate sites.