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CoRWM considers geological disposal to be the best available approach for the long-term management of waste material compared with the risks associated with other management methods.
Prof Ian Fells CBE FREng FRSE, Emeritus Professor of Energy Conversion at Newcastle University, said:
“The Government has to decide, without delay, on the site for a repository and get the planning process under way. There have been years of procrastination, any more delay would be disastrous.”
Dr Paul Danielsen, Institute of Physics, said:
“In considering the issues relating to managing radioactive waste, it is fundamental to separate those dealing with pre-existing radioactive waste from issues involved in the construction of new nuclear plants. Even if a decision were made not to construct new nuclear plants, the need to manage nuclear waste produced as a consequence of past and current electricity generation and plant decommissioning will remain. New nuclear plants will generate significantly lower amounts of waste. A fleet of 10 new reactors would be enough to maintain the UK’s share of nuclear electricity at around 25% and such a fleet, operated for their full design lifetime of 60 years, would add less than 10% to the volume of waste which already exists. The new waste would also be easier to deal with than much of the legacy waste. The UK should not use the challenge of dealing with some of the more difficult legacy wastes as a basis to delay the decision for a new nuclear build programme.”
Prof Peter Styles, President of the Geological Society of London, said:
“The Geological Society, and probably most of the geological community strongly welcome the CoRWM recommendation. Changes in the security situation and appreciation of the possible changes in sea-level which global environmental change may bring, certainly over geological timescales, make long-term surface storage of radioactive waste a much less attractive solution than it might once have seemed.
“Many of our European neighbours have already come to this conclusion and are well down the road to identifying sites in a variety of geological environments; some are already preparing repositories and are happy to share expertise with us. The Earth successfully ‘traps’ naturally occurring radioactive deposits of Uranium and also the fission products of a naturally occurring nuclear reactor which occurred nearly 2 Billion years ago at Oklo in Gabon. A well-chosen, well engineered repository will isolate radioactive materials from the geological environment for timescales over which the decay process will have reduced them to levels which are a tiny fraction of their present activity and then geological containment will keep them from the human environment for periods with geological timescales.”
Dr Richard Shaw, Principal Scientific Officer at the British Geological Survey, said:
“Deep geological disposal is the preferred method for the long-term management and eventual disposal of high activity and long-lived radioactive waste adopted by many countries, including Finland and Sweden, and offers a safe option for the management of these wastes in the UK now and into the future. The majority of earth scientists believe that geological disposal in a well-chosen geological environment is the right means of dealing with these wastes. The geological options for a safe radioactive waste repository in the UK are varied and in total represent a sufficiently high proportion of the UK land mass so as not to be prohibitively restrictive.”