Nuclear Waste – The perpetual challenge

Story by Brennain Lloyd/Special to BayToday.ca

While messages from government and industry during the three day Conference on Management, Decommissioning and Environmental Restoration for Canada's Nuclear Activities for the most part had the feel of having been crafted for homogeneity, the international theme for Day Three provided for some interesting contrasts, particularly during the morning plenary and panel discussion.

Morning plenary presentations spoke to the theme of international experience with speakers from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Sweden, the U.K and U.S. One of the most interesting juxtapositions was between the repeated messages of “we really do know how to handle this stuff” – the stuff in question being nuclear wastes of several varieties – and the observations of presenters that in doing clean up and decommissioning of older nuclear facilities, the agencies were often dealing with a grab bag of nuclear unknowns, having to retrieve and place into containment highly radioactive wastes that were sometimes of unknown origin and composition.

Strategy and Technology Director Adrian Simper from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in the U.K. described some of those situations as “slow emergencies”, where the risks associated with a particular site are intolerable, but limited information about the site hazards makes action difficult.

“They didn’t always think it through”, remarked Mr. Simper.

“In some cases, past practices for (nuclear) waste storage cause us challenges today”.

As in the U.S., the U.K. cleanup challenges are enormous and compounded by a long history and large volume of defence-related nuclear waste, and – in the case of the U.K. – waste reprocessing facilities. When nuclear fuel waste from reactors is reprocessed, it creates additional volumes of wastes and new waste forms, including liquid high level nuclear waste.While early research at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited’s research laboratory in Chalk River was of a military nature, Canada’s nuclear program in recent decades has been focused on nuclear power production and has not included nuclear fuel waste reprocessing.

Like Canada, the U.S. and Sweden, industry and government in the U.K. have a shared expectation that their waste management system will ultimately include burying high level nuclear fuel waste, or “spent fuel” as it is often referred to. The U.K. is in the very early stages of a site search, as is the nuclear industry in Canada, with a goal of having a repository ready by 2040.

Sweden is the country that supporters of nuclear waste burial – a practice that is generally referred to as geological disposal - will generally point to as an example of the country “in the lead” . Swedish nucear waste management company SKB has just submitted its license application for an underground repository to house the country’s stockpile of nuclear fuel waste, and estimates they are approximately 15 years away from operation.

Of the thirteen countries currently favoring the long term management option of burying nuclear waste – Canada, the U.K., U.S. and France are among then – Sweden is the most advanced in their process. But as Anders Strom, the director of the Nuclear Fuel Program at SKB pointed out, there are numerous uncertainties about the project, and a lot of technical and design work still needs to be done. Still on SKB’s “to-do” list is to “further strengthen the scientific basis for the safety case” and to “build and keep public confidence”. Both of these are significant challenges.

Sweden is also the country that the nuclear industry in Canada also likes to talk about, usually stressing the similarities between the two countries nuclear waste intentions: both conducted siting processes, both are pursuing nuclear waste burial, and both are proposing repositories be located in chrystalline rock (the Canadian Shield here in Canada), although the nuclear industry in Canada has added areas with sedimentary rock to their definition of suitable rock formations.

What the industry in Canada rarely mentions are the significant differences between the Swedish program and the Canadian proposal. In Sweden, for example, the repository is being developed in a community where there is also a nuclear reactor. In Canada, the expectation on the part of both the nuclear industry and the municipalities where the waste is located is that the waste will be moved away for the reactor sites. In Sweden, substantial amounts of funding are provided to two coalitions of environmental organizations to review and respond to the technical work related to the development of the proposed repository. This is certainly not the case in Canada.

Sweden also had a policy of nuclear phase-out in as a precursor to the government endorsed effort to site and develop a geological repository. Another important difference - particularly from the perspective of communities in Canada that might eventually be identified as the nuclear industry’s preferred location for a geological repository for all of Canada’s nuclear fuel wastes – is that in Sweden the local community will not make their final decision about their “willingness” until after the full environmental review has been completed. In the siting process set out by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization in Canada, communities are expected to sign a formal contract which will commit them to being “host” to the underground repository before the environmental assessment and licensing hearings have been held. The legal commitment will also be required of the community before the NWMO has made a final decision on whether they will move all of Canada’s nuclear fuel waste for centralized storage in close proximity to the intended repository before final research to verify site suitability.