The government of the United Kingdom on Wednesday officially began its search for a site for a geologic disposal facility for its stockpile of higher-activity radioactive waste.
“There is no preferred location for a GDF and we are adopting a consent-based process to identify a suitable area to host the facility. A suitable site will be determined jointly by the willingness of a community to host a GDF and the suitability of the geology in the area,” Richard Harrington, parliamentary undersecretary of state for the U.K. Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, wrote in a ministerial statement.
It will cost several billion pounds to site and build the engineered repository, which will be dug 200 to 1,000 meters into the earth to hold radioactive material produced over six decades by the nation’s nuclear program and other sources, Harrington said. The material will be isolated from the environment within containers stored in “vaults and tunnels built inside a suitable, stable rock,” he added.
As of a report published in October, the U.K. had an “inventory for geological disposal” encompassing 744,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste of seven types: high-level waste generated by spent fuel reprocessing at the Sellafield site in Cumbria; intermediate-level waste from defense, industrial, and other nuclear-licensed facilities; low-level waste that cannot be disposed of at the Low Level Waste Repository; spent fuel from current commercial and research reactors; spent fuel and intermediate-level waste from future reactors; plutonium; uranium; and irradiated fuel and nuclear materials from defense operations. The material is presently held at various locations by the generator operation.
Radioactive Waste Management, a branch of the U.K. government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, is leading the search for a location for the new repository. Communities interested in hosting the facility would form working groups to engage with the government entity, followed by a community partnership encompassing individuals and entities in the impacted area.
The site selection process could last for 15 to 20 years, which would be followed by over a century of construction and operations. At that point it would be closed.
