How Should the UK Manage Radioactive Waste?

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is pleased to respond to the second Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) consultation on long-term radioactive waste management. As before, this response has been compiled by the General Secretary, Professor Andrew Miller and the Policy Officer, Dr Marc Rands, with the assistance of a number of Fellows with considerable experience in this area. The specific questions in the consultation paper are now addressed below: 1. Narrow ing dow n the options: a proposed short-list Application of Criteria 10 (involving implementation overseas when implementation could be achieved in the UK) places a heavy bias in favour of UK based solutions. Radioactive hazards associated with nuclear disposal might not be confined by political frontiers and the issue could be subject to a European agreement, which would not exclude, but neither would it require, disposal in the UK. As noted in our previous submission, the EU has the possibility of some 15 different national disposal sites, compared to two in the similarly sized USA land area, and some EU countries (e.g. the Czech Republic) have a very restricted choice of appropriate geological subsurface conditions for nuclear waste storage. So it is not always possible for all EU countries to identify a potential disposal site, therefore EU cooperation my be essential. However, minimising overall risk is the paramount consideration. Short-lived and long-lived wastes The separation of short-lived and long-lived wastes will be difficult. Almost all waste streams contain some long-lived components and attempts to ignore these have backfired in other national programmes, such as those in Switzerland. Near-surface disposal There is a growing consensus that near-surface disposal, for all but the most trivial of wastes, requires the authorities to deny access to the site for effectively unlimited periods of time (e.g. Hanford and the Nevada Test Sites in the USA). In addition, the cleaning up of old disposal sites is a lot more expensive than doing it properly in the first place. Deep geological disposal For geological disposal, the use of existing underground caverns, such as mines should be explicitly noted (especially for lower activity wastes). This option may be very safe and cost effective and potentially cheaper than near-surface options. Such options have been actively pursued at the Konrad mine in Germany. The Phased Geological Disposal option appears to concentrate on monitoring and institutional control built onto conventional repository designs (such as the Swiss ca se mentioned in the consultation paper). However, based on present technology, there is little that can be monitored in such repositories without perturbing the key safety barriers. Monitoring (and even inspection) is possible in principle but then the design will need to be very different to a conventional repository, such as the cavern retrievable (CARE) concept featured in the November 2004 edition of Nuclear Engineering International. Proposals in relation to radioactive materials We support the proposals for CoRWM to build in inventory scenarios in the light of UK Energy policy, which may include, or exclude, nuclear power generation. The choice will have a large bearing on volume and type of wastes that will need to be disposed of. 2. Assessing the short-listed options 1 The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Transport The immediate risks a ssociated with the transport of waste are clear. However, managing wastes close to their current location could result in a multiplication in the number of long term storage sites which would increase the overall risk and expense. Equally valid criteria would seek to minimise the overall risk by minimising the number of waste storage or disposal sites, or favour sites where remoteness is a short-term inconvenience but a long-term advantage. Future generations Thought should be given to reducing the acceptable risk to future generations. For example, it might be acceptable to stipulate that the risk to future generations should be significantly less than (rather than not greater than) that posed to the present generation. This seems more consistent with the preference that future generations should be safeguarded and it parallels the pattern of radioactive decay itself. Additional Information In responding to this consultation, the Society would like to draw attention to the following Royal Society of Edinburgh publications which are of relevance to this subject: New and Renewable Energy (May 1999); Basic Safety Standards Directive Euratom 96/29 (June 1999); Energy and Natural Environment: A Way To Go (September 2000); Fuelling the Future (March 2001); Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (March 2002); Modernising the Policy for Decommissioning the UKs Nuclear Facilities (March 2004) and Long-term radioactive waste management (January 2005). Copies of the above publications and further copies of this response are available from the Policy Officer, Dr Marc Rands (email: evidenceadvice@royalsoced.org.uk) or the RSE Website (www.royalsoced.org.uk). June 2005

2 The Royal Society of Edinburgh