PHOENIX — Nuclear waste repositories planned in Finland, Sweden and Switzerland will help the public accept that nuclear power is safe, the head of the Nuclear Energy Agency said here Monday.
“This is going to help everybody,” William Magwood, director-general for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency, said Monday during prepared remarks at the plenary session of the annual Waste Management Symposia. “Production of radioactive waste is what scares people more than anybody else.”
However, said Magwood, a former commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there is not enough work going on to make sure that waste from advanced reactors can be safely stored in facilities like the ones planned in Europe.
Industry and government need to start working on the question of whether waste from advanced reactor designs that burn different kinds of fuel from the light water reactor fuel that will be stored at the European facilities, can go into existing and planned repositories.
“Do we have to do something different?” Magwood asked the audience. “A lot of this has yet to be decided [and] these questions can become barriers.”
Magwood said the agency he runs planned this spring to address some of these questions at a kickoff meeting for the Nuclear Energy Agency’s Project on Waste Integration for Small and Advanced Reactor Designs. The agency hoped to host a follow up meeting at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s Used Fuel Management Conference, scheduled for May 7-9 in Orlando, Fla.
Finland is building a deep geologic repository at Onkalo. Posiva, the company building the repository, began digging tunnels in 2021 and applied that year for an operating license with the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, which was still reviewing the license as of Monday. Posiva, which also needs other permits, has said it could start operating Onkalo in the mid-2020s.
In 2022, the Swedish government approved the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company to build a geologic repository near Forsmark, a village in the nordic country’s southeast, along the Gulf of Bothnia.
Switzerland’s National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste, or Nagra, has proposed building a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste at Nördlich Lägern in the northern part of the Canton Zürich in northern Switzerland. A canton is a governmental subdivision analogous to a state or county. Nagra planned to apply for a license to build the repository in 2024.
