New Scientist - March 27 1999
It's got to go
Rob Edwards
FIRE IT INTO SPACE. Sink it into polar ice. Let tectonic plates crush
it into the Earth's mantle. Over the years, scientists have suggested
some wild schemes for getting rid of nuclear waste.
So perhaps the latest plan for solving this enormous environmental
problem should come as no surprise. A series of leaked ministerial
memos from Moscow have revealed that Russia--the most radioactively
contaminated country in the world--is bidding to become an
international nuclear dump. The memos show that the country has been
secretly lobbying to import and store radioactive spent fuel from
seven leading nuclear nations.
The proposal has provoked furious opposition from environmentalists,
and not a lot of enthusiasm from the countries approached. But the
wider issue it raises can no longer be ignored: is it time to set up
international disposal sites for nuclear waste?
This idea beats the alternatives, says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear policy
analyst at Harvard University who used to advise President Clinton.
"The hazard posed by a small number of large storage facilities at
geologically stable sites would be less," he says, "than the hazard
posed by one in every tiny country--many of them seismically active."
Since the 1960s, more than 200 000 tonnes of spent fuel have been
produced by 400 reactors in 30 countries. Every year, 10 000 tonnes
is added to the pile. Some has been separated into medium and high-
level waste by reprocessing plants in Britain, France and Russia. But
most is simply stored at the reactor sites where it was produced.
Reprocessed or not, all the world's nuclear waste sits in ponds,
tanks or vaults designed to contain its deadly radioactivity for only
a few decades. At some point, all of it will require final disposal.
Underground disposal is the most likely solution. All countries with
nuclear waste problems are looking at underground disposal as "the
only viable long-term option", according to a submission by the Royal
Society to Britain's House of Lords inquiry on the issue. But so far,
every country that has tried to find a safe underground site for its
own radioactive debris has failed--notably the US at Yucca mountain
in Nevada, Germany at Gorleben near Hamburg, and Britain near the
Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria. They have found the geological
science more complex--and the political opposition more passionate--
than they had expected.
The difficulty of finding suitable sites is one reason why the idea
of international repositories has been steadily gaining ground.
Given that stable geological formations simply don't exist in every
country and that concern about the spread of nuclear weapons make
some locations unfeasible, deciding on a few safe places could make
sense.
Regional dumping
Russia is not the only country in the running. The company Pangea
Resources of Seattle announced in December that it wants to build a
20-square-kilometre store beneath the Australian outback, which has
been geologically stable for more than 100 million years. The hole
would stow 75 000 tonnes of waste from Asia and Europe. The company
is supported by British Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned company that
runs Sellafield, and Nagra, the Swiss nuclear waste agency.
An American company called US Fuel and Security in Washington DC has
been lobbying since 1993 for an international repository on Wake
Island, a US military base in the South Pacific. Swiss and German
companies years ago suggested the Gobi desert in China and an
unspecified location in South Africa. In 1997, the US nuclear weapons
laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico even suggested Sellafield as a
storage site for Western Europe.
The idea of pooling nuclear waste in regional repositories is backed
by senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency in
Vienna and the US State Department.
But if individual countries have problems finding sites, coming up
with places for regional repositories may prove even more difficult.
Take the Russian proposal, for example.
Its nuclear ministry, Minatom, is offering "worldwide services for
final disposal" of 10 000 tonnes of spent fuel from Germany,
Switzerland, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan over the next 30
years. Minatom hopes to earn $10 billion from the deals.
In a letter sent to the US Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, at
the end of last year, the head of Minatom, Yevgeny Adamov, suggested
"a poss-ible handover of spent fuel from American nuclear power
plants to Russia on the basis of a commercial agreement for its long-
term storage and later reprocessing". Minatom wants to use the money
raised from storing foreign spent fuel at the Krasnoyarsk nuclear
complex in Siberia to build a large new reprocessing plant there.
For the US, the link with reprocessing is anathema. Adamov's proposal
is absurd, says Bunn. "If he wanted to kill any chance of US support
for such a scheme, that was precisely the sort of letter he should
have written." The US opposes reprocessing because it separates
plutonium from other wastes, which means it could be used to make
bombs. Other countries have been equally lukewarm in their response
to the Russian plan. They stress that no binding commitments have
been made.
Clean-up plans
Minatom's plan would also require a change in the Russian law which
bans the storing of foreign radioactive waste on Russian soil. But
this already has the backing of Russia's main political parties and
the Russian government's nuclear research centre, the Kurchatov
Institute in Moscow.
The institute's president, Yevgeny Vel-ikhov, argues that the income
from storing foreign spent fuel could help Russia solve the problem
of management of radioactive waste in the absence of government
financing. He thinks that the money could be used to help clean up
contaminated sites like Krasnoyarsk.
Greenpeace, the environmental group that first exposed the Russian
plan, takes a different view. "Russia has an appalling environmental
record of dealing with its own nuclear waste," says Tobias
M�nchmeyer of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. "It would be a
criminal act of negligence by wealthy nations to exploit its current
economic collapse by exporting their nuclear waste to Russia."
If the Russians were to agree to forgo reprocessing, however,
attitudes might soften. Bunn supports a Japanese proposal to send 10
000 tonnes of spent fuel from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to a long-
term store at an unnamed site in the far east of Russia. The deal
would stipulate that the waste will not be reprocessed. An American
group led by Tom Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council in
Washington DC hopes to announce details in the next few weeks of
another plan for the storage of foreign spent fuel at Krasnoyarsk,
which also includes a reprocessing ban.
Everyone knows that winning public acceptance for these schemes will
be difficult. "International spent fuel storage facilities will not
be easy to establish," says Bunn. "The obvious problem is one country
being willing to be the dumping ground for other countries' nuclear
waste."
Phil Richardson, an international consultant on nuclear waste based
in Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire, points out that the nuclear
industry is caught in a trap it set itself--by producing waste which
it has never worked out how to dispose of. He is calling for an open
debate on the pros and cons of international repositories.
"The industry constantly claims to be the real environmentalist,
striving to find responsible ways of managing the mess, while the
greens claim the moral high ground and refuse to dirty their hands in
actually helping to sort the mess out," says Richardson. "The loser
of course is the planet, us, the public."
From New Scientist, 27 March 1999
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