By John Stang
The United Kingdom needs a community willing to host its permanent deep geologic repository for nuclear waste.
So far, no one has volunteered.
That’s the dilemma the House of Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee faced Tuesday when it sought feedback from experts on a proposed national policy statement to build an underground disposal complex for the nation’s nuclear waste. The document is required before the nation can proceed with the complex that is expected to be 200 meters deep and made of layers of steel, rock, and clay.
The nation has roughly 30 nuclear waste storage sites. The bulk of the U.K.’s material, primarily from nuclear power operations, is stored at the Sellafield site in Cumbria, a northwest county just south of the Scottish border. The Cumbria County Council in 2013 rejected the government’s plans for a centralized disposal site in the county, contending not enough was known about the area’s geological makeup.
The U.K. government early this year renewed its search for a host community for what is expected to be a £12 billion project.
A 2017 government report estimated that the nation as of the prior year had 7,000 tons of uranium, plutonium, and other heavy metals within its high-level radioactive wastes, plus another 870 cubic meters of high-level wastes that had been converted into glass.
The draft National Policy Statement does not provide details about specific geological requirements for waste disposal. The document is in public feedback mode until at least the end of August. Then Parliament might tackle preparing a follow-up draft.
The absence of a selected site bothered Member of Parliament Mark Pawsey. “Normally, where there is a major infrastructure proposal, we know where it is intended to be,” he said at Tuesday’s hearing. “This does not have that focus, so how does that change things? … We recognize that there is a need for effective long-term disposal, but what would happen if no community came forward?”
Pawsey later answered his own question: Absence of a volunteer means sustaining the temporary storage arrangements that have been in place for five decades. “We carry on forever in this limbo period.”
Nine government and nongovernment experts spoke to the House of Commons committee, mostly on the need for a geological disposal facility and the need to find a host community.
While the volunteer aspect creates hurdles to siting the repository, it is also crucial to the program, testified Philip Matthews, executive director of the nongovernmental Nuclear Legacy Advisory Forum.
“Because of the nature of the material, the great longevity of the process and so on, it is absolutely vital we have a consenting community enter the process and it is not something that is imposed on that,” he told the committee. “Certainly, it would require, in my understanding, a new policy to be enshrined for Government to proceed without a consenting community being part of it.”
Member of Parliament Peter Kyle added that any volunteering community must consider its choice’s effect on many future generations.
“You are asking a community to make a decision that is going to affect many, many generations to come within that community,” he said. “If there is one situate that has been built there and it lasts 150 years, and we know that the material itself is going to need a home for up to 1,000 years perhaps, we are asking a community to do something that is going to last a very long time.”
