ANSTO – Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation – is the predominant source of existing and future radioactive waste to be disposed and stored at Kimba.
ARWA report a five-fold increase in Low Level Waste (LLW) to be disposed at Kimba, with the existing 2 490 m3 LLW intended to increase to a total of 13 287 m3 LLW over the next 100-year period all to be dumped near Kimba.
ARWA states: “The estimated volumes of ANSTO’s future Low Level Waste and Intermediate Level Waste are substantially greater than previously reported.”
ANSTO has produced over 92% of Australia’s existing total LLW Inventory.
ANSTO intend to produce over 98% of future LLW in Australia over the next 100 years.
ANSTO are responsible for over 99.5% of the radioactivity in Australia’s total LLW inventory to be dumped at Kimba.
ARWA reports only a total of 5 (five) m3 of LLW originates from non-ANSTO and non-Commonwealth agency sources
total Hospital existing and future LLW is reported at only 3 m3
total “Research and Education” sector existing and future LLW is reported at only 2 m3
Claims that a national LLW disposal facility is needed at Kimba for hospital and medical waste are false.
ANSTO are near solely responsible for plans to more than double Australia’s total Intermediate Level Wastes (ILW) inventory
ANSTO have produced and hold 96.5% of Australia’s existing ILW packaged inventory at Lucas Heights
ANSTO propose to generate 97% of future ILW in Australia over the next 50-year period
ARWA reports Australia’s total inventory of ILW including nuclear materials, existing and future wastes over the next 50-year period, is 4 377 m3, these hazardous wastes are to be transported to Kimba for indefinite above ground storage.
Hospitals are stated to hold a total of only a single m3 of existing ILW with no future ILW arising.
Nuclear materials feature ANSTO’s nuclear fuel wastes – that were described as “highly hazardous” material by ARPANSA’s inaugural CEO John Loy in evidence to an NSW Parliamentary Inquiry.
Based on ARWA’s Report, all non-ANSTO sources produce on average only approx. 1.3 m3 per year of LLW over the next 100 years and produce approx. 1.34 m3 per year of ILW over the next 50 years.
Submission to Legal & Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the application of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Australia Friends of the Earth Australia nuclear.foe.org.au/racism nuclear.foe.org.au/waste June 2022
Article 29 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples:
Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands or territories and resources. States shall establish and implement assistance programmes for indigenous peoples for such conservation and protection, without discrimination.
States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.
States shall also take effective measures to ensure, as needed, that programmes for monitoring, maintaining and restoring the health of indigenous peoples, as developed and implemented by the peoples affected by such materials, are duly implemented. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-
SUMMARY SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATIONS
Friends of the Earth Australia welcomes the opportunity to provide a submission to this inquiry and would be happy to appear at a public hearing.
This submission argues that successive Australian federal governments have repeatedly breached the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in relation to nuclear waste management plans, and that the National Radioactive Waste Management Act contains multiple indefensible clauses designed to disempower Aboriginal Traditional Owners
The recommendations are as follows:
The Committee should recommend revocation of the Morrison Coalition Government’s declaration of a site near Kimba in SA for a national nuclear waste dump. The opposition of Barngarla Traditional Owners is unanimous. It would be unconscionable for the Labor Government to do anything other than to revoke the declaration and abandon the former government’s plan for a nuclear dump on Barngarla Country.
The Committee should recommend that the federal Albanese Labor Government adopt South Australian Labor policy whereby traditional owners have a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites.
The National Radioactive Waste Management Act is racist through and through, it breaches the UNDRIP on multiple counts, and the Act must be amended or repealed and replaced.
THE PROPOSED NATIONAL NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP ON BARNGARLA COUNTRY IN SA The Morrison Coalition Government’s plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump on Barngarla Country on SA’s Eyre Peninsula ‒ despite the unanimous opposition of Barngarla Traditional Owners ‒ clearly violates Article 29 of the UNDRIP: “States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent”.
In a 2018 submission to the UN OHCHR United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Morrison Coalition Government claimed that “the [radioactive waste] facility will not be forced on an unwilling community, in line with Article 29(2) of the Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples].” Article 29(2) of the UN Declaration stresses free, prior and informed consent: “States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.”
The proposed Kimba dump does not have the “free, prior and informed consent” of Barngarla Traditional Owners. They are unanimous in their opposition. There is no consent. The Morrison Government excluded Barngarla Traditional Owners from a sham ‘community ballot’. So the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation (BDAC) engaged the Australian Election Company to conduct an independent ballot which revealed unanimous opposition among Traditional Owners. The ballot was ignored by the federal government. Jason Bilney, Chair of BDAC, noted: “It is a simple truth that had we, as the first people for the area, been included in the Kimba community ballot rather than unfairly denied the right to vote, then the community ballot would never have returned a yes vote.”
In April 2020, federal parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights Committee concluded that the Morrison government was violating the human rights of Barngarla people. The Committee noted the unanimous opposition of the Barngarla Traditional Owners to the proposed nuclear dump and it concluded that the National Radioactive Waste Management Amendment Bill did not sufficiently protect the rights and interests of Traditional Owners and that “there is a significant risk that the specification of this site will not fully protect the right to culture and self-determination.”
Importantly, the Human Rights Committee’s report was unanimous and was endorsed by Liberal and National Party members as well as Labor members. However the Morrison Coalition Government ignored the Human Rights Committee’s report and continued in its efforts to dispossess and disempower Barngarla Traditional Owners.
The National Radioactive Waste Management Amendment Bill was the Morrison Government’s attempt to amend federal legislation to prevent Barngarla Traditional Owners from launching a legal challenge against the nomination of the dump site. Thankfully, the attempt to prevent a legal challenge failed due to opposition from Labor and cross-bench Senators.
Barngarla Traditional Owners have launched a legal challenge in the Federal Court against the Morrison Government’s declaration of the Napandee site, near Kimba, for a national nuclear waste dump. It would be unconscionable for the incoming Labor Government to engage in a legal fight in order to allow the government to ignore and override the unanimous opposition of Barngarla Traditional Owners to the proposed nuclear dump.
The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation states: “It remains shocking and saddening that in the 21st Century, First Nations people would have to fight for the right to vote in Australia and that the Federal Government would deliberately remove judicial oversight of its actions in circumstances where the Human Rights Committee, a bipartisan committee no less, has considered the process to locate the NRWMF flawed.”
A 22 June 2021 joint statement by Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation and No Radioactive Waste on Agricultural Land in Kimba or SA group states:2
“The Government has completely and utterly miscarried the site selection process. There are many examples of this. No proper heritage assessment of the site was ever undertaken, and they have marginalised the voices of the farming community throughout the entire process. However, the most obvious and appalling example of this failed process was when the Government allowed the gerrymandering of the Kimba “community ballot”, in order to manipulate the vote. The simple fact remains that even though the Barngarla hold native title land closer to the proposed facility than the town of Kimba, the First Peoples for the area were not allowed to vote. They prevented Barngarla persons from voting, because native title land is not rateable. Further, they did not allow many farmers to vote, even
though they were within 50km of the proposed facility, because they were not in the Council area. They targeted us, because they knew that if they had a fair vote which included us, then the vote would return a “no” from the community.” BDAC has written to Prime Minister Albanese calling on the Labor government to scrap Morrison’s plans for a nuclear waste dump in SA.3 The letter states: “Although we appreciate all that Labor have done in opposition, the Barngarla people unequivocally make it clear that we request that the new Labor minister revoke the declaration or consent to the orders quashing the declaration. We call for this to occur at the earliest opportunity possible.”
The BDAC letter further states: “Sadly, the former Government at every turn tried to silence us in this process, as the Government did not allow us access to the land to undertake a proper heritage survey, tried to remove our right to judicial review, sought to legislate the location directly, abandoned their commitment to ensure that the facility had broad community support, altered the proposal to include military waste inconsistently with the treaty and tried, through various affiliated organisations, to interfere with our ability to bring judicial review including having parties costs orders against us as a means to blocking the Barngarla people from going to Court.
“Despite this, we stood tall, and we have brought these legal proceedings. They were brought against Minister Pitt, but because you have won the election, the matter now becomes your Governments to deal with.
“Although we appreciate the right to bring these proceedings and all that Labor have done in Opposition, the Barngarla people unequivocally make it clear that we request that the new Labor Minister revoke the declaration or consent to the orders quashing the declaration. We call for this to occur at the earliest opportunity possible in the new Labor Government, because we do not want to fight against your Government in Court which would not only take a number of years, but result in spending our vulnerable community’s resources protecting our people against the contemptuous behaviour of the last Government; nor do we want your Government to be tarnished by these horrible failures of the former Government. … “The Uluru Statement from the Heart makes clear that our “sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown”. Again, as we said to the new Minister, our spiritual sovereignty has been violated by the former Government, and we hope and believe in your Government that you will not violate it further.”
Right of Veto The Albanese Labor Government should adopt South Australian Labor’s policy whereby traditional owners have a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites. This is of course consistent with UNDRIP principles regarding free, prior and informed consent. Susan Close, now Deputy Premier of South Australia, noted in a September 2020 media statement: “This was a dreadful process from start to finish, resulting in fractures within the local community over the dump. The SA ALP has committed to traditional owners having a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites, yet the federal government has shown no respect to the local Aboriginal people.” Likewise, in October 2021 SA Labor supported a parliamentary motion stating that in light of the opposition of the Barngarla Traditional Owners, the (since defeated) Marshall Government should oppose the federal government’s attempt to impose a national nuclear waste dump in SA and stands condemned for its failure to do so.4
Labor’s Kyam Maher spoke in favour of the parliamentary motion:5 “We have had since before the last election, and maintained the view since the election, that for a nuclear radioactive storage facility it is fundamental that traditional owners’ views are taken into account. Since Jay Weatherill was Premier we have taken the view ‒ and that has continued in this term while we are in opposition ‒ that for a nuclear radioactive dump or storage facility the traditional owners should have a right of veto, a right of refusal of such a thing on their land. That has not changed and that is why we support this motion, from that one very simple principle which we have had and which remains unchanged.” The Albanese Labor Government should respect SA legislation banning the import, transport, storage and disposal of nuclear wastes ‒ the SA Nuclear Waste Storage (Prohibition) Act 2000. The Act states: “The Objects of this Act are to protect the health, safety and welfare of the people of South Australia and to protect the environment in which they live by prohibiting the establishment of certain nuclear waste storage facilities in this State.”
The Nuclear Waste Storage (Prohibition) Act is supported by South Australians; the proposed nuclear waste dump is not. A 2018 poll found that 55% agreed that SA should stop the federal government from building a national nuclear dump in SA while 35% disagreed. A 2016 Sunday Mail-commissioned poll found that support in SA for a national dump (39.8%) was well short of a 50% majority and even further short of the Morrison Coalition Government’s own benchmark of 65% to demonstrate ‘broad community support’. A 2015 Advertiser-commissioned poll found just 15.7% support for a nuclear waste dump in SA. SA Unions, the peak body representing trade unionists in South Australia, unanimously passed a resolution in March 2022 supporting Barngarla Traditional Owners in their struggle
against the Morrison government’s proposed nuclear dump.6 SA Unions Secretary Dale Beasley said the that South Australian labour movement stood shoulder to shoulder with the Barngarla Traditional Owners: “South Australian unions are completely united in their support of the Barngarla Traditional Owners and their opposition to the proposed nuclear waste site at Kimba. … We have in South Australia a shameful legacy of imposing the impact of nuclear technology on aboriginal communities. Decades after the end of British nuclear tests around Maralinga, radioactive particles containing plutonium and uranium still contaminate the landscape. Given that history, we would have expected Steven Marshall to stand up for the Barngarla Traditional Owners. … South Australian unions join with the Traditional Owners and the South Australian Community in complete opposition to the dangerous proposal.”
Recommendations:
The Committee should recommend revocation of the Morrison Coalition Government’s declaration of a site near Kimba in SA for a national nuclear waste dump. The opposition of Barngarla Traditional Owners is unanimous. It would be unconscionable for the Labor Government to do anything other than to revoke the declaration and abandon the former government’s plan for a nuclear dump on Barngarla Country.
The Committee should recommend that the federal Albanese Labor Government adopt South Australian Labor policy whereby traditional owners have a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites.
THE NATIONAL RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT ACT The National Radioactive Waste Management Act (NRWMA) is wildly inconsistent with UNDRIP principles. The NRWMA gives the federal government the power to extinguish rights and interests in land targeted for a radioactive waste facility.7 In so doing the relevant Minister must “take into account any relevant comments by persons with a right or interest in the land” but there is no requirement to secure consent ‒ or to back off if consent is not forthcoming. Aboriginal Traditional Owners, local communities, pastoralists, business owners, local councils and State/Territory Governments are all disadvantaged and disempowered by the NRWMA. The NRWMA goes to particular lengths to disempower Traditional Owners. The nomination of a site for a radioactive waste facility is valid even if Aboriginal owners were not consulted and did not give consent. The NRWMA states that consultation should be conducted with
Traditional Owners and consent should be secured ‒ but that the nomination of a site for a radioactive waste facility is valid even in the absence of consultation or consent. Needless to say, that is in no way, shape or form compliant with UNDRIP clauses regarding free, prior and informed consent. The NRWMA has sections which nullify State or Territory laws that protect the archaeological or heritage values of land or objects, including those which relate to Indigenous traditions. The Act curtails the application of Commonwealth laws including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 in the important site-selection stage. The Native Title Act 1993 is expressly overridden in relation to land acquisition for a radioactive waste facility.
The NRWMA has been criticised in both Senate Inquiries and a Federal Court challenge to an earlier federal government attempt to impose a national radioactive waste facility at Muckaty in the Northern Territory. The NRWMA needs to be radically amended or replaced with legislation that gives local communities and Traditional Owners the right to say ‘no’ to nuclear waste dumps. Sadly, the only recent attempt to amend the NRWMA was the Morrison Coalition Government’s attempt to strip ever more rights from Traditional Owners, by removing the right for judicial review. Thankfully, that attempt to further weaken the legislation failed. Recommendation:
The National Radioactive Waste Management Act is racist through and through, it breaches the UNDRIP on multiple counts, and the Act must be amended or repealed and replaced.
In fact, the knock-out arguments against the nuclear industry today are reactors’ cost and deployment time. The greatest barriers to this claimed renaissance—and it is primarily talk, not investment—is its inability to deliver affordable power on time and on budget.
Small nuclear reactors (SMRs) -both slower to deploy than conventional reactors and more expensive per kilowatt capacity. “overall, SMRs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options.”
Even given Europe’s energy crisis, the case against nuclear power has never been so conclusive—and so important.
BERLIN—Amid a confluence of crises—the Ukraine war, an energy crisis, and climate breakdown—nuclear energy is experiencing a renaissance, at least in the rhetoric of politicians and pundits across Europe, North America, and beyond. After all, it’s tempting to propose these generators of low-carbon energy as a panacea to this daunting phalanx of calamities.
But in fact, the case against nuclear power and for genuinely renewable energies has never been so conclusive—and so important. In early March, Russia captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine—the largest in Europe with six reactors, each the size of the one that melted down in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster—and transformed it into an army base from which it fires artillery at Ukrainian positions.
Although this weaponizing of nuclear reactors had long been recognized as a threat, the vulnerability of nuclear power plants in conflict zones is now center stage in Europe. The battlefield in this case is controlled by an unpredictable autocrat who has threatened that he’ll use every means at his disposal to destroy Ukraine. At the Zaporizhzhia station, the Russian military has taken the Ukrainian nuclear engineers hostage, and is working them at gunpoint. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned in August that there’s a “real risk of nuclear disaster” unless the fighting stops. Russia could sabotage a power plant like Zaporizhzhia and attempt to shift the blame onto Ukraine. A nuclear weapon strike would be a crime against humanity, but a disaster at nuclear plant could blur responsibility and complicate the international response. Nuclear plants, where military-scale security is nonexistent, are sitting ducks for acts of terrorism and wartime targeting.
At the same time, the world’s nuclear power champion, France, has punctured the myth that nuclear power is a round-the-clock energy source that can operate without back-up reserves—a favorite trope of wind and solar power skeptics. Nowhere in Europe today is the energy crisis more acute than in France, where for much of this year, between a third and over half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors have been shut down either because weather-warmed rivers cannot cool their systems or on account of corrosion damage, hairline cracks, staff shortages, and pending maintenance work on their geriatric hardware. The outages have forced France to rely on Germany for electricity imports—culled in large part from the wind and solar farms that supply almost half of Germany’s electricity. In August, France’s power prices hit €1,100 per megawatt-hour, more than 10 times the 2021 price, smashing records across the continent………………………………………
Critics’ original concern with nuclear power, namely its safety, remains paramount. The two most catastrophic meltdowns, in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union and the Fukushima site in Japan, in 2011, had horrific repercussions that still haunt those regions. But these mega disasters are only the most well known. According to IAEA, there have been 33 serious incidents at nuclear power stations worldwide since 1952—two in France and six in the United States.
These accident numbers don’t include the toxic fallout from lax disposal and storage of nuclear waste.
Between 1945 and 1993, 13 countries, including the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union, heaved barrels of nuclear waste into their seas—a total of 200,000 tons—presuming the vast ocean waters would dissolve and dilute it. Those casks still lie there today.
This sad chapter belongs to the 80-year-old saga of nuclear waste. Currently, there’s over a quarter-million metric tons of spent fuel rods sitting above ground, usually in cooling pools at both closed-down and operative nuclear plants, waiting like Samuel Beckett’s protagonists Vladimir and Estragon for a definitive solution that will never come.
In northern Europe, the Finns claim that they’ve solved it by digging 100 tunnels 1,400 feet into the bedrock of an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Bothnia. Underway now for decades, this $3.4 billion undertaking, the first permanent repository in the world, will eventually hold all of Finland’s spent nuclear refuse—less than 1 percent of the world’s accumulated radioactive remnants—until about 2100. This highly radioactive mass will, its operators promise, remain catacombed for 100,000 years. (Since nuclear waste is lethal for up to 300,000 years, these sites are a time-bomb for whoever or whatever is inhabiting the planet then, assuming geological conditions allow it to lie peacefully for that long.) In light of Finland’s small volume of radioactive waste, the full lifetime price tag of nearly $8 billion dollars is significantly more per ton than the estimated $34.9 billion, $19.8 billion, and $96 billion that the France, Germany, and the United States respectively will shell out for nuclear waste management, according to the World Nuclear Waste Report 2019.
Most countries don’t have barren islands far from groundwater sources, so they have to make do, like Switzerland did in September when it announced that it intends to excavate a geological storage repository near the German border, closer to German towns in Baden Württemberg than Swiss ones. Germany’s borderland communities are vigorously contesting the choice, which will probably be abandoned by the Swiss. Nearly all proposed sites end up scratched for the obvious reason that nobody wants to live next to a nuclear waste dump.
“Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to create a place where we can bury extremely nasty nuclear waste forever,” Denis Florin of Lavoisier Conseil, an energy-focused management consultancy in Paris, told the Financial Times earlier this year. “We cannot go on using nuclear without being adult about the waste, without accepting we need to find a permanent solution.”
The inherent danger of nuclear power is often relativized by advocates as the bitter pill we must choke down in light of its other advantages. In fact, the knock-out arguments against the nuclear industry today are reactors’ cost and deployment time. The greatest barriers to this claimed renaissance—and it is primarily talk, not investment—is its inability to deliver affordable power on time and on budget.
Nuclear energy is such a colossal expense—into the tens of billions of dollars, like the $30 billion Vogtle units in Waynesboro, Ga.—that few private investors will touch them, even with prodigious government bankrolling.
The UK government finally found a taker for its Hinkley Point C station in 2016 when it offered lavish subsidies to the French energy firm EDF. But even that deal becomes less sweet the higher construction costs spiral and the longer EDF postpones its opening beyond 2025. So catastrophic are the cost overruns of EDF’s projects worldwide that the company could no longer service its €43 billion debt and this year agreed to full nationalization. But experts say this alone won’t solve any of the fundamental problems at Hinkley C or the Flamanville plant in Normandy, which is 10 years behind schedule, with costs fives times in excess of the original budget. Cost overruns are one reason that one in eight new reactor projects that start construction are abandoned.
While safety concerns drive up the cost of nuclear plant insurance, the price of renewables is predicted to sink by 50 percent or more by 2030. Study after study attests that wind and solar cost a fraction of the price of nuclear power: at least three to eight times the bang for the buck in terms of energy generation and climate protection, at a time when the exorbitant cost of energy is causing recessions and street protests across Europe. It is because solar photovoltaic and wind power are the cheapest bulk power source in most of the world that renewables, grids, and storage now account for more than 80 percent of power sector investment. In 2021, companies, governments, and households invested 15 times as much in renewable energy than in nuclear. They’re simply the better buy.
NUCLEAR IS MUCH TOO SLOW
Indeed, in the face of an ever more cataclysmic climate crisis that demands solutions now—like hitting the EU’s 2030 targets of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 55 percent of 1990 levels by 2030—the build-out of nuclear is painfully, prohibitively slow. In Europe, just one nuclear reactor has been planned, commissioned, financed, constructed, and put online since 2000—that’s Finland’s Olkiluoto-3 reactors (March 2022). Europe’s flagship nuclear projects—called European Pressurized Reactors—have been dogged by delays from the start. The Olkiluoto-3 reactors in Finland, which had been scheduled to go online in 2009, still isn’t heating homes. Globally, the average construction time—which count the planning, licensing, site preparation, and arranging of finances—is about a decade.
Small-scale modular reactors (SMR), advanced with funding during the Obama administration, are supposedly the industry’s savior—the so-called next generation—although they’ve been around for decades. Purportedly quicker to build, with factory-made parts, they generate at most a 10th of the energy as a conventional reactor. Yet they are not significantly different in terms of their problems. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2022 claims that, so far, they have been both slower to deploy than conventional reactors and more expensive per kilowatt capacity. A recent study conducted by Stanford University and University of British Columbia came to the conclusion that “overall, SMRs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options.”
NUCLEAR AND RENEWABLES DON’T MIX
Finally, the last claim of nuclear supporters is that the massive baseload supply that reactors provide when they’re up and running is just what systems reliant on weather-based renewables need at down times. In fact, nuclear is the opposite of what decentralized clean energy systems require.
Renewables and nuclear energy don’t mix well in one system, explains Toby Couture of the Berlin-based think tank E3 Analytics. “What renewables need is not so-called baseload power,” he told me, “which is inflexible and unable to ramp up and down, but flexible, nimble supply provided by the likes of storage capacity, smart grids, demand management, and a growing toolbox of other mechanisms, not the large and inflexible supply of nuclear reactors.”
Couture added, “The inability of nuclear power to ramp down effectively to ‘make room’ for cheap wind and solar is one of the main reasons why France’s own domestic renewable energy development has lagged behind its peers.” According to Couture, France’s inability to flexibly accommodate wind and solar has exacerbated the continent-wide power supply crunch.
In light of the energy crisis, Germany may extend the lifetime of two of its three remaining nuclear plants for three months, in a reserve capacity beyond their scheduled end-of-year closure date. This emergency measure, a direct consequence of the previous governments’ failures, does not alter the logic against nuclear power, which even Germany’s own nuclear industry now accepts. Renewables, clean tech, and energy efficiency are easy to rollout, cost-effective, safe, and proven. Let’s concentrate on deploying these technologies at full speed to decarbonize our world before the impacts of climate change overwhelm us. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-power-europe-energy/
About plutonium and the “reprocessing” or “recycling” of used nuclear fuel. Gordon Edwards, 12 Oct 22
Plutonium is less than 1/2 of one percent of the used nuclear fuel, but it is a powerful source of energy that can be used for military or civilian purposes (nuclear bomb or nuclear reactors). To get the plutonium out of the used fuel is a very messy operation. The places where reprocessing has been done on a large scale are among the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world. Although NWMO says that plutonium use is not on their agenda, it is included, in writing, as one of their options. Today, in New Brunswick, government funding is going to Moltex Corp. to proceed with plans that require plutonium use. Chalk River is just beginning to build a billion-dollar brand new research facility that will be dealing with plutonium as a priority. A large nuclear industry mural painted on the walls of the Saskatoon Airport states that reprocessing used fuel to get the plutonium out is the last step in the “Nuclear Fuel Cycle”.
(1) Nuclear fuel can be handled with care before it goes into a nuclear reactor. But used nuclear fuel will never be handled by human hands again, at least for several centuries, because of the hundreds of newly-created radioactive materials inside each fuel bundle. These are (a) the broken pieces of uranium atoms that have been spit, (b) the newly-created “transuranic” (heavier than uranium) materials that are produced, and (c) the so-called “activation products” (non-radioactive materials that have been de-stabilized and so are now radioactive). See “Nuclear Waste 101” https://youtu.be/wD2ixadwXW8
(2) Radioactivity is not a thing, but a property of certain materials that have unstable atoms. Most atoms are stable and unchanging. Radioactive atoms are unstable. Each radioactive atom is like a tiny little time bomb, that will eventually “explode” (the industry uses the word “disintegrate”). When an atom disintegrates it gives off projectiles that can damage living cells, causing them to develop into cancers later on. These projectiles are of four kinds: alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, and neutrons. These damaging emissions are called “atomic radiation”. No one knows how to turn off radioactivity, so they remain dangerous while they exist.
(The danger lasts for tens of millions of years)
(3) Used nuclear fuel is so radioactive that it can give a lethal dose of gamma radiation and neutrons to any unshielded humans that are nearby. Even the “30-year old” used fuel that NWMO wants to transport to a “willing host community” is still far too dangerous to be handled without massive shielding and robotic equipment. The job of repackaging the used fuel bundles requires the use of shielded “hot cells” — which are specially constructed airtight rooms with thick windows (4 to 6 feet thick) and large robot arms like those used in outer space to protect the workers from being overexposed to radiation. Any damage to the outer metal coating on the fuel bundles will allow radioactive materials to escape from inside the fuel in the form of radioactive gasses, vapours, or dust. That’s why the hot cells have to be air-tight, and why these rooms themselves will eventually become radioactive waste.
(3) Nuclear proponents often point out that the used nuclear fuel – the stuff that NWMO wants to “bury” underground – still has a lot of energy potential and could be “recycled”. That’s because one of the radioactive materials in the waste, called “plutonium”, can be used to make atomic bombs or other kinds of nuclear weapons, and it can also be used as a fuel for more nuclear reactors. But to get plutonium out of the fuel bundles they have to be dissolved in some kind of acid or “molten salt”, turning the waste into a liquid form instead of a solid form. This allows radioactive gasses to escape from the fuel, and makes it much more difficult to keep all the other radioactive materials (now in liquid form) out of the environment of living things. Any plutonium extraction technology is called “reprocessing”.
4) Although NWMO says that reprocessing is not their intention, it has always been considered a possibility and has never been excluded. It is stated in all NWMO documentation that reprocessing remains an option. Once a willing host community has said “yes” to receive all of Canada’s used nuclear fuel, the government and industry can then decide that they want to get that plutonium out of the fuel before burying it. That means opening up the fuel bundles and spilling all the radioactive poisons into a gaseous or liquid medium so they can separate the plutonium (and maybe a few other things) from all the rest of the radioactive garbage. Canada has built and operated reprocessing plants in the 1940s and 1950s at Chalk River. AECL tried but failed to get the government to build a commercial-scale reprocessing plant in the late 1970s. Canada did some experimental reprocessing in Manitoba, when AECL built the “Underground Research Laboratory” to study the idea of a DGR for used nuclear fuel in the 1980s and 1990s. Read http://www.ccnr.org/AECL_plute.html .
(5) The big reprocessing centres in the world include Hanford, in Washington State; Sellafield, in Northern England; Mayak, in Russia; La Hague, in France; and Rokkasho, in Japan. There is also a shut-down commercial reprocessing plant at West Vallay, New York. These sites are all environmental foul-ups requiring extremely costly and dangerous cleanups.
(6) Newer reprocessing technologies are smaller and use different approaches – but basically, any time you are going to open uo the fuel bundles, you are “playing with fire” and it is much harder to keep all the radioactive pioisons in check once they are out of the fuel bundle.
(7) My feeling is that any “handling” or “repackaging” or “reprocessing” of used nuclear fuel should NOT be done in a remote community that does not have the economic or political “clout” to demand that things be done properly. If It is to be dine at all, this should be done back in the major population centres where the reactors are located and people living there can raise a fuss if things are not done safely.
(8) Also, my feeling is that the fuel should not be moved at all until the reactors are all shut down. The radioactive wastes can be very well packaged and carefully guarded where they are. Since NWMO will only move 30-year old used fuel, there will ALWAYS be 30 years worth of unburied waste right at the surface, right beside the reactors, ready to suffer a catastrophe of some sort, no matter HOW fast they bury the older fuel. In fact, the nuclear indusrtry does not really want to “get rid” of nuclear waste at all, but just move some of the older stuff out of the way so that they can keep on making more. The best place to take the waste is where there are no reporters or TV broadcasters or influential wealthy people to blow the whistle if things go badly. Maybe I’m a little over-suspicious, but given the history of waste management, you can’t be too careful.
9) In Germany, they buried radioactive waste in an old salt mine as a kind of DGR for a very long time. When radioactive contamination kept leaking into the ground water and the surface waters, the nuclear scientists in charge did not tell the government or the public for almost 10 years. Then, when it became clear that the environment was being severely affected, the German government decided to take all the waste OUT of the DGR – a difficult and dangerous operation that will take 15-30 years and cost over 3.7 billion euros ($5 billion Canadian equivalent.)
Any potential willing host community would be well advised to insist that all “handling” of individual fuel bundles, of any kind whatsoever, whether repackaging or reprocessing, should not be part of the plan for the willing host community to accept. But it would have to be in writing and legally enforceable.
Of course the decision is entirely up to the willing host community, not me – and hopefully, not the industry either.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Jungmin Kang, Masafumi Takubo, Frank von Hippel | September 14, 2022, On July 17, the United Kingdom ended 58 years of plutonium separation for nuclear fuel by closing its Magnox nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield. This leaves the UK with the world’s largest stock of separated power-reactor plutonium, 140 metric tons as of the end of 2020, including 22 tons separated for Japan. The UK is also second in the world only to Russia in the size of its overall inventory of separated plutonium with 119 tons, including 3.2 tons for weapons. Russia’s stock, 191 tons, is mostly “weapon-grade” separated for use in nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but the UK’s power-reactor plutonium is also weapon usable, and therefore also poses a security risk. The UK has no plan for how it will dispose of its separated plutonium. Its “prudent estimate” placeholder for the disposal cost is £10 billion ($12.6 billion).
One obvious way to get rid of separated plutonium would be to mix it with depleted uranium to make “mixed-oxide” (MOX) fuel energetically equivalent to low-enriched uranium fuel, the standard fuel of conventional reactors. Despite the bad economics, since 1976 France has routinely separated out the approximately one percent plutonium in the low-enriched uranium spent fuel discharged by its water-cooled reactors and recycled the plutonium in MOX fuel.
But both the UK and the US have had negative experiences with building their own MOX production plants.
In 2001, the UK completed a MOX plant, only to abandon it in 2011 after 10 years of failed attempts to make it operate. For its part, the US Energy Department, which owns almost 50 tons of excess Cold War plutonium, contracted with the French government-owned nuclear-fuel cycle company, Areva (now Orano), in 2008 to build a MOX fuel fabrication plant. But the United States switched to a “dilute and dispose” policy for its excess plutonium in 2017 after the estimated cost of the MOX plant grew from $2.7 billion to $17 billion.
Despite decades of failed attempts around the world to make separated plutonium an economic fuel for nuclear power plants, the United States Energy Department is once again promoting the recycling of separated plutonium in the fuel of “advanced” reactor designs that were found to be economically uncompetitive 50 years ago. At the same time, other countries—including Canada and South Korea, working in collaboration with the Energy Department’s nuclear laboratories—are also promoting plutonium separation as a “solution” to their own spent fuel disposal problems. These efforts not only gloss over the long history of failure of these nuclear technologies; they also fail to take into account the proliferation risk associated with plutonium separation—a risk that history has shown to be quite real.
Renewed advocacy for plutonium separation. As the UK finally turns its back on plutonium separation, the United States Energy Department is looking in the other direction. Within the Energy Department, one part, the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, is struggling to dispose of excess Cold War weapons plutonium, as two others—the Office of Nuclear Energy and ARPA-E (Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy)—are promoting plutonium separation……………………………………..
In fact, the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy is promoting sodium-cooled reactor designs based on the Idaho National Laboratory’s Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which was shut down in 1994 due to a lack of mission after the end of the US breeder program a decade earlier. The Energy Department’s office is now supporting research, development, and demonstration of sodium-cooled reactors by several nuclear energy startups.
Among them is Bill Gates’ Terrapower, to which the department has committed as much as $2 billion in matching funds to build a 345-megawatt-electric sodium-cooled prototype reactor—called Natrium (sodium in Latin)—in the state of Wyoming. One of Wyoming’s current senators, John Barrasso, is a leading advocate of nuclear power and could become chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources if the Republicans take control of the upper chamber in the elections this fall.
Terrapower insistsNatrium is not a plutonium breeder reactor and will be fueled “once through” with uranium enriched to just below 20 percent and its spent fuel disposed of directly in a deep geologic repository, without reprocessing. Natrium, however, is set to use, initially at least, the same type of fuel used in Idaho’s Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The Energy Department maintains that this spent fuel cannot be disposed of directly because the sodium in the fuel could burn if it contacts underground water or air. On that basis, the Idaho National Laboratory has been struggling for 25 years to treat a mere three tons of spent fuel from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II using a special reprocessing technology called “pyroprocessing.”
In pyroprocessing, the fuel is dissolved in molten salt instead of acid, and the plutonium and uranium are recovered by passing a current through the salt and plating them out on electrodes. In 2021, Terrapower stated that it plans to switch later to a fuel for Natrium that does not contain sodium but then received in March 2022 the largest of eleven Energy Department grants for research and development on new reprocessing technologies.
Liquid-sodium-cooled reactor designs date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the global nuclear power community believed conventional power reactor capacity would quickly outgrow the available supply of high-grade uranium ore. Conventional reactors are fueled primarily by chain-reacting uranium 235, which comprises only 0.7 percent by weight of natural uranium. Because of this low percentage, nuclear power advocates focused on developing plutonium “breeder” reactors that would be fueled by chain-reacting plutonium produced from the abundant but non-chain-reacting uranium 238 isotope, which constitutes 99.3 percent of natural uranium. (Liquid-sodium-cooled reactors are sometimes called “fast-neutron reactors” because they utilize fast neutrons to operate. Sodium was chosen as a coolant because it slows neutrons less than water. Fast neutrons are essential to a plutonium breeder reactor because the fission of plutonium by fast neutrons releases more excess secondary neutrons whose capture in uranium 238 makes possible the production of more plutonium than the reactor consumes.)
Large programs were launched to provide startup fuel for the breeder reactors by reprocessing spent conventional power-reactor fuel to recover its contained plutonium.
………………………………….. Only a few prototypes were built and then mostly abandoned. In 2020, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency estimated that sufficient low-cost uranium would be available to fuel existing conventional reactor capacity for more than a century.
Zombie plutonium-separation programs. Even though separated plutonium has morphed from the nuclear fuel of the future into a disposal problem, civilian plutonium separation continues in several countries, notably France, Japan, and Russia. It is also being advocated again by the offices within the US Energy Department that fund research and development on nuclear energy.
Russia still has an active breeder reactor development program, with two operating liquid sodium-cooled prototypes—only one of them plutonium fueled—plus a small, liquid, lead-cooled prototype under construction. But Russia has already separated 60 tons of power-reactor plutonium and has declared as excess above its weapons needs approximately 40 tons of weapon-grade plutonium. These 100 tons of separated plutonium would be enough to provide startup fuel for five years for six full-size breeder reactors.
China and India have breeder reactor prototypes under construction, but their breeders are suspected of being dual-purpose. In addition to their production of electric power, the weapon-grade plutonium produced in uranium “blankets” around the breeder cores is likely to be used for making additional warheads for their still-growing nuclear arsenals.
France and Japan require their nuclear utilities to pay for reprocessing their spent fuel and for recycling the recovered plutonium in MOX fuel, even though both countries have known for decades that the cost of plutonium recycling is several times more than using low-enriched uranium fuel “once through,” with the spent fuel being disposed of directly in a deep geological repository.
Claimed benefits of reprocessing. Advocates of plutonium recycling in France and Japan justify their programs with claims that it reduces uranium requirements, the volume of radioactive waste requiring disposal, and the duration of the decay heat and radiotoxicity of the spent fuel in a geologic repository. These benefits are, however, either minor or non-existent. First, France’s plutonium recycling program reduces its uranium requirements by only about 10 percent, which could be achieved at much less cost in other ways, such as by adjusting enrichment plants to extract a higher percentage of the uranium 235 isotopes in natural uranium. Second, with proper accounting, it is not at all clear that recycling produces a net reduction in the volume of radioactive waste requiring deep geological disposal. Third, the claimed heat reduction, if realized, could reduce the size of the repository by packing radioactive waste canisters more closely. But this is not significant because, with the currently used reprocessing technology, americium 241, which has a 430-year half-life and dominates the decay heat from the spent fuel during the first thousand years, remains in the reprocessed waste.
Claims of the reduced toxicity of reprocessed waste turn out to be false as well. For decades, France’s nuclear establishment has promoted continued reprocessing in part out of hope that, after its foreign reprocessing customers did not renew their contracts, it could sell its plutonium recycling technology to other countries, starting with China and the United States. But, with the notable exception of the canceled US MOX plant, these efforts so far have not materialized, and the willingness of the French government to continue funding its expensive nuclear fuel cycle strategy may be reaching its limits………………………..
Proliferation danger. Aside from the waste of taxpayer money, there is one major public-policy objection to plutonium separation: Plutonium can be used to make a nuclear weapon. The chain-reacting material in the Nagasaki bomb was six kilograms of plutonium, and the fission triggers of virtually all nuclear warheads today are powered with plutonium. Reactor-grade plutonium is weapon-usable, as well.
In the 1960s, however, blinded by enthusiasm for plutonium breeder reactors, the US Atomic Energy Commission—the Energy Department’s predecessor agency—promoted plutonium worldwide as the fuel of the future. During that period, India sent 1,000 scientists and engineers to Argonne and other US national laboratories to be educated in nuclear science and engineering. In 1964, India began to separate plutonium from the spent fuel of a heavy-water research reactor provided jointly by Canada and the United States. Ten years later, in 1974, India used some of that separated plutonium for a design test of a “peaceful nuclear explosive,” which is now a landmark in the history of nuclear weapon proliferation……………………….
False environmental claims for reprocessing. Since the 1980s, advocates of reprocessing and plutonium recycling and fast neutron reactors in the Energy Department’s Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories have promoted them primarily as a strategy to facilitate spent fuel disposal.
The George W. Bush administration, which came to power in 2001, embraced this argument because it saw the impasse over siting a spent fuel repository as an obstacle to the expansion of nuclear power in the United States. To address the proliferation issue, the Bush Administration proposed in 2006 a “Global Nuclear Energy Partnership” in which only countries that already reprocessed their spent fuel (China, France, Japan, and Russia) plus the United States would be allowed to reprocess the world’s spent fuel and extract plutonium. The recovered plutonium then would be used in the reprocessing countries to fuel advanced burner reactors (breeder reactors tweaked so that they would produce less plutonium than they consumed). These burner reactors would be sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors because the slow neutrons that sustain the chain reaction in water-cooled reactors are not effective in fissioning some of the plutonium isotopes. After Congress understood the huge costs involved, however, it refused to fund the partnership…………………………….
Plutonium and the geological disposal of spent fuel. Despite the unfavorable economics, the idea of separating and fissioning the plutonium in spent fuel has been kept alive in the United States and some other countries in part by continuing political and technical obstacles to siting spent fuel repositories. Proponents of reprocessing have managed to keep their governments’ attention on plutonium because it is a long-lived radioelement, a ferocious carcinogen—if inhaled—and has fuel value if recycled.
But detailed studies have concluded that plutonium makes a relatively small contribution to the long-term risk from a spent fuel geologic repository for spent fuel from commercial power reactors.
……………………………………………….. risk assessments are theoretical, but they are based on real-world experience with the movement of radioisotopes through the environment.
The main source of that experience is from the large quantities of fission products and plutonium lofted into the stratosphere by the fireballs of megaton-scale atmospheric nuclear tests between 1952 and 1980. During that period, the Soviet Union, the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and France injected into the stratosphere a total of about eight tons of fission products and 3.4 tons of plutonium—comparable to the quantities in a few hundred tons of spent light water reactor fuel. These radioisotopes returned to earth as global radioactive “fallout.”
…………………………………… In addition to the proliferation danger dramatized by the case of India, plutonium separation also brings with it a danger of a massive accidental radioactive release during reprocessing. The world’s worst nuclear accident before Chernobyl involved the Soviet Union’s first reprocessing plant for plutonium production, in 1957……………………………………………..
Gullible governments. Nearly half a century after India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974 with assistance provided inadvertently by Canada and the United States, both countries’ governments seem to have forgotten about the proliferation risk associated with spent fuel reprocessing. Today, advocates of fast-neutron breeder or burner reactors are pitching again the same arguments—used before the test—to gullible governments that seem unaware of the history of this issue. This ignorance has created problems for Canada’s nonproliferation policy as well as that of the United States.
In Canada, a UK startup, Moltex, has obtained financial support from federal and provincial governments by promising to “solve” Canada’s spent fuel problem. Its proposed solution is to extract the plutonium in the spent fuel of Canada’s aging CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) reactors to fuel a new generation of molten-salt-cooled reactors. The Moltex company also proposes to make Canada an export hub for its reactors and small reprocessing plants.
In South Korea, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, with support from Energy Department’s Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories, has similarly been campaigning to persuade its government that pyroprocessing spent fuel and fissioning plutonium in sodium-cooled reactors would help solve that country’s spent fuel management problem.
It is time for governments to learn again about the risks involved with plutonium separation and to fence off “no-go zones” for their nuclear energy advocates, lest they unintentionally precipitate a new round of nuclear-weapon proliferation.
Notes:
[1] Carbon 14 and iodine 129 are difficult to capture during reprocessing and therefore are routinely released into the atmosphere and ocean by France’s reprocessing plant at La Hague. Also, had the uranium 238 in the spent fuel not been mined, its decay product, radium 226, would have been released within the original uranium deposit. So, even though some reprocessing advocates join with nuclear power critics in amplifying the hazards of plutonium and other transuranic elements in underground radioactive waste repositories, they generally omit comparisons with reprocessing hazards (in the case of reprocessing advocates) or with natural uranium deposits (in the case of repository opponents). https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/some-fuels-never-learn-us-energy-department-returns-to-costly-and-risky-plutonium-separation-technologies/
Gordon Edwards, an activist and consultant with the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, accused CNL of obscuring the origin and hazardous nature of much of the waste. He said the worst of it includes cobalt-60 imported into Canada from other countries by private companies. He questioned why taxpayers should pay for its disposal. ‘‘They’re not being up front in telling people where these wastes are coming from,”
This is big business: Ottawa sends AECL more than half a billion dollars annually to pay for remediation efforts alone.
“It’s just piled right on top of a sloping hillside surrounded by wetlands, one kilometer from the Ottawa River,” “It would be hard to come up with a worse technology and site for permanent nuclear waste disposal.”
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ proposed site for disposing radioactive waste has opponents watching with apprehension. Here’s what you need to know about the Near Surface Disposal Facility
GLOBE AND MAIL, MATTHEW MCCLEARN, 6 June 22, DEEP RIVER, ONT. One glance at Building 250 confirms that its demolition will be complicated.
Workers clad in protective gear are busy removing its asbestos cladding, which has been gridded off in orange ink into alphanumerically labelled boxes. The four-story wood structure cannot simply be knocked down with a wrecking ball. Before methodical dismantling can begin, virtually every plank, floor covering and panel must be studied and characterized.
Building 250 is one element of a multi-billion-dollar headache for the federal government. It’s among the oldest buildings at Chalk River Laboratories, 200 kilometers northwest of Ottawa, which long served as Canada’s premier nuclear research facility. Today the facility’s operator, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), is addressing the resulting radioactive waste. It has already torn down 111 buildings, but Building 250 is among the most hazardous: it contained radioactive hot cells and suffered fires that spread contaminants throughout.
CNL needs a specially designated place to dispose of this hazardous detritus. This week, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission held final hearings for its environmental review of the Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF), CNL’s proposed landfill site for radioactive waste on what is now a thickly wooded hillside at Chalk River. Its decision is expected sometime around the end of this year, and no small number of opponents are watching with apprehension.
May 31, 2022 Small modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for the management and disposal of this waste. Although the analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation, management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in nuclear waste.
Abstract
Small modular reactors (SMRs; i.e., nuclear reactors that produce <300 MWelec each) have garnered attention because of claims of inherent safety features and reduced cost. However, remarkably few studies have analyzed the management and disposal of their nuclear waste streams. Here, we compare three distinct SMR designs to an 1,100-MWelec pressurized water reactor in terms of the energy-equivalent volume, (radio-)chemistry, decay heat, and fissile isotope composition of (notional) high-, intermediate-, and low-level waste streams. Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30. The excess waste volume is attributed to the use of neutron reflectors and/or of chemically reactive fuels and coolants in SMR designs. That said, volume is not the most important evaluation metric; rather, geologic repository performance is driven by the decay heat power and the (radio-)chemistry of spent nuclear fuel, for which SMRs provide no benefit.
SMRs will not reduce the generation of geochemically mobile 129I, 99Tc, and 79Se fission products, which are important dose contributors for most repository designs. In addition, SMR spent fuel will contain relatively high concentrations of fissile nuclides, which will demand novel approaches to evaluating criticality during storage and disposal. Since waste stream properties are influenced by neutron leakage, a basic physical process that is enhanced in small reactor cores, SMRs will exacerbate the challenges of nuclear waste management and disposal.
In recent years, the number of vendors promoting small modular reactor (SMR) designs, each having an electric power capacity <300 MWelec, has multiplied dramatically (1, 2). Most recently constructed reactors have electric power capacities >1,000 MWelec and utilize water as a coolant. Approximately 30 of the 70 SMR designs listed in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Advanced Reactors Information System are considered “advanced” reactors, which call for seldom-used, nonwater coolants (e.g., helium, liquid metal, or molten salt) (3). Developers promise that these technologies will reduce the financial, safety, security, and waste burdens associated with larger nuclear power plants that operate at the gigawatt scale (3). Here, we make a detailed assessment of the impact of SMRs on the management and disposal of nuclear waste relative to that generated by larger commercial reactors of traditional design.
Nuclear technology developers and advocates often employ simple metrics, such as mass or total radiotoxicity, to suggest that advanced reactors will generate “less” spent nuclear fuel (SNF) or high-level waste (HLW) than a gigawatt-scale pressurized water reactor (PWR), the prevalent type of commercial reactor today. For instance, Wigeland et al. (4) suggest that advanced reactors will reduce the mass and long-lived radioactivity of HLW by 94 and ∼80%, respectively. These bulk metrics, however, offer little insight into the resources that will be required to store, package, and dispose of HLW (5). Rather, the safety and the cost of managing a nuclear waste stream depend on its fissile, radiological, physical, and chemical properties (6). Reactor type, size, and fuel cycle each influence the properties of a nuclear waste stream, which in addition to HLW, can be in the form of low- and intermediate-level waste (LILW) (6–8). Although the costs and time line for SMR deployment are discussed in many reports, the impact that these fuel cycles will have on nuclear waste management and disposal is generally neglected (9–11).
Here, we estimate the amount and characterize the nature of SNF and LILW for three distinct SMR designs. From the specifications given in the NuScale integral pressurized water reactor (iPWR) certification application, we analyze basic principles of reactor physics relevant to estimating the volumes and composition of iPWR waste and then, apply a similar methodology to a back-end analysis of sodium- and molten salt–cooled SMRs. Through this bottom-up framework, we find that, compared with existing PWRs, SMRs will increase the volume and complexity of LILW and SNF. This increase of volume and chemical complexity will be an additional burden on waste storage, packaging, and geologic disposal. Also, SMRs offer no apparent benefit in the development of a safety case for a well-functioning geological repository.
1. SMR Neutronics and Design………………
2. Framework for Waste Comparison………….
3. SMR Waste Streams: Volumes and Characteristics………….
…………..
3.3.2. Corroded vessels from molten salt reactors.
Molten salt reactor vessel lifetimes will be limited by the corrosive, high-temperature, and radioactive in-core environment (23, 24). In particular, the chromium content of 316-type stainless steel that constitutes a PWR pressure vessel is susceptible to corrosion in halide salts (25). Nevertheless, some developers, such as ThorCon, plan to adopt this stainless steel rather than to qualify a more corrosion-resistant material for the reactor vessel (25).
Terrestrial Energy may construct their 400-MWth IMSR vessel from Hastelloy N, a nickel-based alloy that has not been code certified for commercial nuclear applications by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (26, 27). Since this nickel-based alloy suffers from helium embrittlement (27), Terrestrial Energy envisions a 7-y lifetime for their reactor vessel (28). Molten salt reactor vessels will become contaminated by salt-insoluble fission products (28) and will also become neutron-activated through exposure to a thermal neutron flux greater than 1012 neutrons/cm2-s (29). Thus, it is unlikely that a commercially viable decontamination process will enable the recycling of their alloy constituents. Terrestrial Energy’s 400-MWth SMR might generate as much as 1.0 m3/GWth-y of steel or nickel alloy in need of management and disposal as long-lived LILW (Fig. 1, Table 1, and SI Appendix, Fig. S3 and section 2) [on original]…………
4. Management and Disposal of SMR Waste
The excess volume of SMR wastes will bear chemical and physical differences from PWR waste that will impact their management and final disposal. …………………….
5. Conclusions
This analysis of three distinct SMR designs shows that, relative to a gigawatt-scale PWR, these reactors will increase the energy-equivalent volumes of SNF, long-lived LILW, and short-lived LILW by factors of up to 5.5, 30, and 35, respectively. These findings stand in contrast to the waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies. More importantly, SMR waste streams will bear significant (radio-)chemical differences from those of existing reactors. Molten salt– and sodium-cooled SMRs will use highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive. Relatively high concentrations of 239Pu and 235U in low–burnup SMR SNF will render recriticality a significant risk for these chemically unstable waste streams.
SMR waste streams that are susceptible to exothermic chemical reactions or nuclear criticality when in contact with water or other repository materials are unsuitable for direct geologic disposal. Hence, the large volumes of reactive SMR waste will need to be treated, conditioned, and appropriately packaged prior to geological disposal. These processes will introduce significant costs—and likely, radiation exposure and fissile material proliferation pathways—to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle and entail no apparent benefit for long-term safety.
Although we have analyzed only three of the dozens of proposed SMR designs, these findings are driven by the basic physical reality that, relative to a larger reactor with a similar design and fuel cycle, neutron leakage will be enhanced in the SMR core. Therefore, most SMR designs entail a significant net disadvantage for nuclear waste disposal activities. Given that SMRs are incompatible with existing nuclear waste disposal technologies and concepts, future studies should address whether safe interim storage of reactive SMR waste streams is credible in the context of a continued delay in the development of a geologic repository in the United States.
Supporting Information
Appendix 01 (PDF)
Note
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. E.J.S. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
The facility, set to begin operation in 2024, isn’t based on a foolproof concept
Finland, a nuclear energy champion, claimed it has figured out how to tackle one of the bigger issues with nuclear energy: Safely managing radioactive waste.
The country plans to store its nuclear waste in an underground facility called Onkalo. The structure, named after the Finnish word for “pit”, is a 500-meter-deep underground disposal facility designed to store used nuclear fuel permanently.
The deep geological repository is usually built in places containing a stable rock.Finland can become the first to commission a plant to permanently store spent nuclear fuel. The idea is to encase the waste in corrosion-resistant copper canisters. These will be further encapsulated in a layer of water-absorbing clay. The setup will be buried in an underground tunnel.
The facility is now equipped with 500 sensors to monitor the functioning of the entire system, according to VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, a state-owned company and one of the contributors to the project.
“Monitoring brings evidence that the repository will be keeping the outside world safe from the nuclear fuel waste,” Arto Laikari, senior scientist from VTT, said. The state-owned company’s collaborator Posiva, a Finnish nuclear waste management organisation, has submitted the operating license for the facility and is awaiting approval.
In 2023, Posiva will do a final trial run of the disposal mechanism but without radioactive material, Erika Holt, project manager from VTT, told Down To Earth. It is expected to begin operations in 2024.
Problem of disposing nuclear waste
For years, the nuclear industry has been trying to find solutions to the waste problem. They are generated at various steps during the nuclear life cycle: Mining uranium ore, producing uranium fuel and generating power in the reactor.
The waste can remain radioactive for a few hours, several months or even hundreds of thousands of years. Depending on the extent of radioactivity, nuclear wastes are categorised as low-, intermediate- and high-level waste.
About 97 per cent of the waste is either low- or intermediate-level. The remaining is high-level waste, such as used or spent uranium fuel.
A 1,000-megawatt plant creates about 30 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste every year, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Even at low levels, exposure to this waste will be harmful to people and other living organisms as long as it remains radioactive,” Ramana explained.
Global endeavours
Some nations are storing waste on-site. But it carries the risk of radioactive leakage. In the United States, for instance, spent fuel is stored in a concrete-and-steel container called a dry cask, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
India and a handful of other nations reprocess about 97-98 per cent of the spent nuclear fuel to recover plutonium and uranium, according to data from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
India also recovers other materials like caesium, strontium and ruthenium, which finds application as blood irradiators to screen transfusions, cancer treatment and eye cancer therapeutics, respectively, according to the research institute.
The remaining 1-3 per cent end up in a storage facility. India also immobilises the wastes by mixing them with glass, which is kept under surveillance in storage facilities.
But there are problems with this approach as well. Except for the plutonium and uranium, all the radioactive material present in the spent fuel is redistributed among different waste streams, Ramana said. “These enter the environment sooner or later.”
The plutonium and uranium intended for reuse in other nuclear reactors will also turn into radioactive waste, he added.
Nations like Finland, Canada, France and Sweden are also looking at deep geological repositories to tackle spent nuclear fuel wastes.
In January 2022, the Swedish government greenlit an underground repository for nuclear waste. Construction in Sweden will take at least 10 more years, Johan Swahn, director of MKG Swedish NGO Office for Nuclear Waste Review, a non-governmental environmental organisation, said.
Finland can share its experience with colleagues and partners worldwide, Holt said. “But each country and programme must have their own solutions. Worldwide, we work together to show nuclear energy (and the holistic views for responsible waste management) are viable for meeting CO2 targets,” she added.
Is the approach safe?
Experts associated with the project said that 40-years of theoretical and lab-based studies suggest that the geological repository is safe.
The bedrock provides a natural barrier to protect from radioactive release to the environment, such as water bodies and air, Holt explained.
The use of clay and copper provides a protective layer to ensure no release due to extreme conditions like earthquakes.
But Ramana argues that theoretical safety studies are not foolproof. There are significant uncertainties stemming from various long-term natural processes. These include climate change and the unpredictability of human behaviour over these long periods of time, he added.
Besides, design failure could undermine claims about safety, the expert noted. For instance, a few scientists fear that copper canisters can become corrosive and crack.
Finland’s team chose copper because it corrodes slowly. But Peter Szakálos, a chemist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is not quite sure.
In a 2007 study, Szakálos and his team observed that copper could corrode in pure, oxygen-free water. “It’s just a matter of time — anything from decades to centuries — before unalloyed copper canisters start to crack at Onkalo,” he told Science journal.
On February 14, 2014, radioactive materials such as americium and plutonium leaked out of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a deep geological long-lived radioactive waste repository, following an accident. The facility dealt solely with a special class of wastes from nuclear weapons production.
“If a failure like this happened within two decades of opening the repository, what are the odds that such failures won’t happen over the millennia that these repositories [Finland’s Onkalo] are supposed to operate safely?”
Both the Finnish project and the Swedish decision are very important for the international nuclear industry because the latter can point to these facilities to prove the nuclear waste problem is solved, Swahn said. “But it is very uncertain whether copper as a container material is a good idea.”
The projects may still fail as the understanding of how copper behaves in a repository environment is still developing, the expert added.
As Boris Johnson prepares a new push for nuclear power, the £131bn problem of how to safely dispose of vast volumes of radioactive waste created by the last British atomic energy programme remains unsolved.
The hugely expensive and dangerous legacy of the UK’s 20th-century nuclear revolution amounts to 700,000 cubic metres of toxic waste – roughly the volume of 6,000 doubledecker buses. Much of it is stored at Sellafield in Cumbria, which the Office for Nuclear Regulation says is one of the most complex and hazardous nuclear sites in the world.
As yet, there is nowhere to safely and permanently deposit this waste. Nearly 50 years ago the solution of a deep geological disposal facility (GDF) was put forward, but decades later the UK is no nearer to building one.
Experts say new nuclear facilities will only add to the problem of what to do with radioactive waste from nuclear energy and that the “back end” issue of the hazardous toxic waste from the technology must not be hidden.
An assessment by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) says spent fuel from new nuclear reactors will be of such high temperatures it would need to stay on site for 140 years before it could be removed to a GDF, if one is ever built in the UK.
“It is essential to talk about the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle when you are considering building new nuclear power stations,” said Claire Corkhill, a professor of nuclear material degradation at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, an independent body that advises the government.
Whilst we have a plan to finally and safely deal with the waste, it is less certain how this will be applied to the modern nuclear reactors that the government are planning to roll out. “These are completely different to previous reactors and we are at a very early stage of understanding how to deal with the waste.
In my personal view, I do not think we should be building any new nuclear reactors until we have a geological disposal facility available.” “The amount of legacy waste is not small in terms of nuclear waste,” said Corkhill. “It is expensive to deal with. These materials are hazardous and we are looking at an underground footprint of some 20km at a depth of 200 metres to 1,000 metres.
So regarding new nuclear sites, we need to think about whether it is possible to build a GDF big enough for all the legacy waste and the new nuclear waste.” Steve Thomas, a professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, said: “Despite 65 years of using nuclear power in Britain, we are still, at best, decades away from having facilities to safely dispose of the waste. Until we know this can be done, it is premature to embark on a major new programme of nuclear power plants.”
A government spokesperson said: “This is not an either/or situation. As the prime minister has said, nuclear will be a key part of our upcoming energy security strategy alongside renewables. We are committed to scaling up our nuclear electricity generation capacity, and building more nuclear power here in the UK, as seen through the construction of Hinkley Point C – the first new nuclear power station in a generation. Alongside this we’re developing a GDF to support the decommissioning of the UK’s older nuclear facilities.”
Despite reassurances by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that there is no imminent safety threat posed by the power isolation, it is important to understand the potential impact going forward.
When nuclear fuel is removed from the core of a reactor, it is redesignated as “spent” nuclear fuel and often treated as a waste product for disposal. But fuel will continue to dissipate heat due to radioactive decay, even after being removed from the reactor core.
It is therefore of foremost importance that the spent fuel material contained at the Chernobyl site is adequately and continuously cooled to prevent a release of radioactivity. At Chernobyl, as well as other sites, standard procedures to safely handle such material involves placing the fuel into water-filled ponds, which shield the near-field environment from radiation.
They also provide a medium for heat transfer from the fuel to the water via continuous circulation of fresh, cool water. If circulation is compromised, such as the recent power shutdowns, the fuel will continue to emit heat. This can make the surrounding coolant water evaporate – leaving nothing to soak up the radiation from the fuel. It would therefore leak out to the surroundings.
Nuclear Information 