Britain will eventually have to bury its growing pile of nuclear waste deep underground but urgently needs somewhere to safely stash it in the meantime, a government-commissioned study said Monday. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) called for a nationwide search for a suitable site for an underground dump capable of storing the estimated total 470,000 cubic metres of waste created by the UK s 23 nuclear power plants.

"The UK has been creating radioactive waste for 50 years without any clear idea of what to do with it," CoRWM chairman Gordon MacKerron said in a statement. Local communities interested in hosting the radioactive waste dump must be in a geologically-suitable area and should be offered incentives, the CoRWM said.

Scientists broadly welcomed the report recommendations but pointed out that underground storage had long been the only practical solution to the nuclear waste problem. "Engineers have known for 50 years that deep geological disposal must be the way ahead," Ian Fells of Newcastle Universitys energy department said.

Last month the government came out in favour of building new nuclear reactors. But the question of how to safely dispose of existing waste still hangs over any new nuclear build. Charles Curtis of nuclear waste disposal company Nirex said government action on the issue was long overdue. "This is a major step forward in dealing with a problem that has effectively been avoided by successive administrations," he said of the report. "Deep disposal must be the only truly long-term solution... The UK is in a stable part of the Earths crust such that it should not be difficult, technically, to identify a viable solution here."

Finland
Scientists said the British government should look to Scandinavia for guidance on nuclear waste sites. Finland, which is the only European Union country with concrete plans to build another nuclear power plant, has already started building a store for spent nuclear fuel deep in the Finnish bedrock. Finland has only four reactors and until 1996 sent its spent fuel back to Russia, so its storage needs are comparatively small.

And because it could take decades to find and build an underground storage site, Britain desperately needs "robust" interim storage capable of safely storing the waste for at least 100 years, the CoRWM said. Finland s solution for interim storage has been to keep spent fuel bundles in water pools at existing nuclear power plants until the permanent storage site is ready.

All but one of the UK s 23 nuclear reactors are to be closed down by 2023 but the government sees new nuclear build as key to cutting carbon emissions and reducing its dependency on energy imports. The CoRWM was appointed in 2003 by the British government to look at the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
(Por Daniel Fineren, Planet Ark, 01/08/2006)