As Gordon Brown grapples with the question of whether to push the nuclear button and give the green light to a fleet of new reactors in the UK, we keep on hearing from those rum coves in the industry about how they now have a solution, or more accurately a "management strategy", for dealing with all the tonnes of lethal radioactive waste nuclear reactors produce. This state-of-the-art solution comes in the shape of the rather grandly titled "deep geological repository". To you and me this roughly translates as "a deep hole in the ground", a massive underground dump wherein our toxic legacy will be buried, back filled and then it's goodnight Vienna.
But, as with a great many things in this debate, things are not quite as they seem...
Even putting aside the fact that Sellafield, the prime site for the UK's nuclear waste dump, is probably not even geologically suitable to house one, the model repository that the UK is looking to emulate has suddenly run into rather choppy waters. For the last few years our friends over the pond have been busily preparing a waste dump at a place called Yucca Mountain, a vast and eerily beautiful tract of hilly desert in Nevada that is home to the odd rattlesnake and a few vagrant coyotes.
The whole project will cost around $60bn and could store up to 70,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste once it opens in 2017. It has been held in the highest esteem by the UK for some time, so much so that the government sees it as the blueprint for our own waste dump.
It's a bit of bad news, then, that Yucca Mountain is in fact probably a rather bad place to build a repository for nuclear waste after all. According to a recent story, it's emerged that the dump is, in fact, located on a seismic fault line. Earthquake central, if you will. Now this really oughtn't be that surprising, given Nevada is the 3rd most geologically unstable state in the USA, but it's thrown construction plans a little out of kilter. Unsurprising really, given that even the thought of a huge earthquake tearing apart 70-odd thousand tonnes of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel is enough to make Radioactive Man blanche.
As the report notes, "the most expensive public works project in the US" is now "in disarray". The chief of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects was a little agog with the US Department of Energy's apparent inability to spot this particular fly in their nuclear ointment. "It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he said with a straight face. Now even US-Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is talking about "what the available scientific evidence makes clear: Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store spent fuel from our nation’s nuclear reactors."
I dread to think what poor Yucca Mountain Johnny makes of it all.
The simple fact is that there is no safe solution to dealing with radioactive waste because it can remain harmful for hundreds of thousands of years. Burying it deep underground knowing that could in all likelihood leak back into the environment isn’t a very responsible answer to a legacy that we have to deal with now. The least worst environmental option is the store the nuclear waste that we've already produced on-site, in a secure and robust facility where it can be monitored or retrieved if necessary. And then make a decision not produce any more of the stuff.
Leaving an environmental time-bomb underground for future generations is not the answer, especially when the plans for waste dumps around the world are so criminally cack-handed.
