A key nuclear question that government shrugs off as a waste of time

The British government is now firmly committed to helping the private sector build several new nuclear power stations. It has issued a ‘Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation’ and given precise instructions to the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) on the issues it should consider when examining prospects for named potential sites. These instructions are lengthy and detailed — including questions such as amenity, cultural heritage and landscape value — but rather unlikely to cause any major upset, especially as the great bulk of named sites already have nuclear histories.

But there is one conspicuous absence from the list of IPC responsibilities. Government has specifically told the IPC that it ‘need not consider’ the question of whether or not ‘effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations’ as it is ‘satisfied that effective arrangements will exist’.

This sits slightly oddly with the fact that government is also consulting on the same question. However, the rather definite instruction to the IPC suggests that government is somewhat unlikely to change its ‘preliminary view’ (this subtly different language being employed in the consultation section of the multiple documentation) that satisfactory waste arrangements will exist.

In another subtle linguistic shift, government, which previously talked of whether satisfactory arrangements ‘exist or will exist’ now, with welcome attention to reality, only uses the future tense.

So how reasonable is it to suppose that satisfactory waste management arrangements will exist, with the corollary that waste will not prove to be an issue as we move towards specific nuclear investment proposals?

There are two questions to consider: national policy towards legacy waste and new build waste, and some important site-specific considerations.

National issues

The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) in 2006 recommended that legacy waste — waste to which the UK is already committed as a result of past decisions — should best be disposed, eventually, in a geological repository.

CoRWM also made clear that while technical issues surrounding waste from new-build would be similar to those affecting the legacy, the political, social and ethical questions would be different. Specifically, while there was a need only to find ‘least-worst’ solutions for legacy waste the calculus is different for new-build, where choice exists. The choice could be to opt for non-nuclear technologies if political social or ethical considerations — in all of which waste is deeply implicated — pointed that way.

Government readily accepted the legacy waste recommendation. But all subsequent official discussion about new-build waste has talked only of the technical similarities between managing legacy and new-build waste, and has ignored the wider political questions. Ignoring the CoRWM distinction between the two waste categories, government has insisted that geological disposal will be a satisfactory end-point for new-build waste.

While an earlier white paper did acknowledge that ethical argument might play a role, it said that ethical considerations ‘did not rule out’ new nuclear power — government has never discussed the ethical issues at all. There is still a need for debate about the deliberate decision to create more waste in much wider terms than the technical — this debate would not necessarily preclude new nuclear construction, but it is important that arguments on both sides of the issue are publicly aired and resolved.

As for the issue of whether satisfactory waste arrangements ‘will exist’, a functioning geological repository is still a very long way off. Expressions of interest in hosting a repository have come from the Sellafield area but the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the responsible agency, believes that the earliest a repository is likely to be available is 2040.

Asking people in the current consultation whether or not they believe that satisfactory waste arrangements will exist is therefore asking for a rather highly developed capacity to forecast the long-term future. The only credible answer is that no-one really has any idea.

Local issues

In the probable (but regrettable) absence of the wider national and essentially political debate about the waste-related issues surrounding new-build, waste issues will in practice be aired at local planning inquiries.

Through the National Policy Statement process and its instructions to the IPC, government expects that the local planning inquiries into individual proposals for new build will deal in purely local, site-related issues. This may be a vain hope: in the late 1980s the Hinkley Point public inquiry into a (never built) reactor was expressly charged with dealing only in local issues and ended up taking just as long — over two years — as the earlier Sizewell inquiry, which had been supposed to resolve the national level issues once and for all.

But even if future inquiries do succeed in covering only the local issues, waste has now squarely become local. Operators of future nuclear stations are being required to develop long-term on-site storage for spent fuel — over 99 per cent of the radioactivity produced by reactors. This is in contrast to the past practice at virtually all nuclear sites, where spent fuel was always shipped to Sellafield for reprocessing after a short cooling period. But government assumes (correctly) that in future private sector operators will find reprocessing uneconomic and in the absence of any other national facilities for higher-activity waste, spent fuel will need to be stored on-site. The surprise to many people is the length of the period over which this storage will be needed at local sites — 160 years or thereabouts.

Why is this so elongated a time-scale? The logic has two parts.

First there is timeline that starts with a repository opening by 2040, disposing of legacy intermediate-level waste till 2075. Then legacy high-level waste will go in until 2130 and only then would new-build spent fuel start to be disposed.

Second there is the expectation that fuel in future would have a higher ‘burn-up’ of the fissile uranium, making the fuel much hotter in radioactivity terms than current fuel, and necessitating a longer cooling period on site before it can be treated for disposal. So even if a repository did become available for new-build waste earlier than currently expected, disposal would be many decades into the future.

So, partly because of the history of poor past management of waste in the UK, new-build wastes will have to be stored on site for around 160 years into the future, and maybe longer — given the lack of certainty that a centralised repository will be built.

This could be a very large issue for local planning inquiries. Local residents will now be asked not only to accept a new reactor, they will also be asked to accept that they will become host to a very long-term radioactive waste storage site.

This is a radically new situation. Even at Sizewell B, the one place currently storing spent fuel on site, there was an expectation that sooner or later spent fuel would go to Sellafield. No such expectation will exist for future sites. The waste issue, apparently resolved by government’s instruction to the IPC and its conflation of legacy waste with new-build waste, may yet prove to be the most serious problem to resolve before new reactors can be built.