Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/25/2014
The Drigg low-level waste repository in the United Kingdom is pushing back against media reports this week that the site is at risk of coastal erosion over the long-term. The London Guardian newspaper obtained internal documents from the U.K.’s Environmental Agency that said that anticipated rising sea levels in the coming years would lead to erosion of the coast where the site is located. However, LLW Repository Ltd., which manages Drigg, downplayed this week the coastal erosion fears, saying that any effects of coastal erosion would take hundreds of years, a time frame that covers the half-life of most low-level waste. “Studies made in support of the 2011 ESC [Environmental Safety Case] concluded that the Repository will be subject to coastal erosion but concluded that the earliest erosion would start is a few hundred years from now,” LLW Repository project director Dennis Thompson told RW Monitor this week.
Thompson said, “The Repository will take at least 1,000 years to erode once erosion has started. The 2011 ESC demonstrates that even if the wastes are exposed by coastal erosion the impacts will be very low and consistent with regulatory guidance. This is because only waste containing low levels of radioactivity is disposed at the facility and after a few hundred years most of the radioactivity will have decayed away.” He added, “The report from the Guardian is accurate, but it does not provide any context. The context is that we do assume worst case scenarios and we do assume no human intervention, and in spite of all that, the analysis showed no real hazard.”
Even so, LLW Repository Ltd. has instituted changes to the waste acceptance criteria at the site. “The LLWR has introduced new restrictions on the wastes that can be disposed to ensure that there are no concentrations of radioactivity in the wastes that might cause harm if the wastes are exposed,” Thompson said. “We have done this by limiting the amount of radioactivity on some individual items of waste.” Thompson also said that the site would no longer accept asbestos in its raw form. It would need to be treated or vitrified first before it could come to the site.
