Nuclear Waste Politics

An Incrementalist Perspective

Matthew Cotton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317665014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The question of what to do with radioactive waste has dogged political administrations of nuclear-powered electricity-producing nations since the inception of the technology in the 1950s. As the issue rises to the forefront of current energy and environmental policy debates, a critical policy analysis of radioactive waste management in the UK provides important insights for the future.

Nuclear Waste Politics sets out a detailed historical and social scientific analysis of radioactive waste management and disposal in the UK from the 1950s up to the present day; drawing international comparisons with Sweden, Finland, Canada and the US. A theoretical framework is presented for analysing nuclear politics: blending literatures on technology policy, environmental ethics and the geography and politics of scale. The book proffers a new theory of "ethical incrementalism" and practical policy suggestions to facilitate a fair and efficient siting process for radioactive waste management facilities. The book argues that a move away from centralised, high capital investment national siting towards a regional approach using deep borehole disposal, could resolve many of the problems that the high stakes, inflexible "megaproject" approach has caused across the world.

This book is an important resource for academics and researchers in the areas of environmental management, energy policy, and science and technology studies.

1 The problem of radioactive wastes

Introduction

What should we do with nuclear waste? Or perhaps more accurately: where should we put it? It is this second question that has dogged the political administrations of all nuclear-powered electricity-producing nations since the inception of the technology in the 1950s and 1960s. In this book, I look specifically at the case of nuclear waste (though I use the alternative term ‘radioactive waste’) in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). In the UK, alongside other advanced industrial economies with nuclear capabilities, the safe long-term management and eventual disposal of radioactive wastes has risen to the forefront of environmental and energy policy debates. The current consensus amongst scientific and technical communities, is that the safest way to dispose of radioactive wastes is underground, in what is referred to as a geological disposal facility (GDF). A GDF is (usually) an engineered underground repository, built roughly 500 m below the surface. In the UK, a GDF is a multi-barrier solution. It involves packaging up wastes, placing them within a built facility that prevents water intrusion within a mined repository, all within ‘host’ rock that is geologically stable over long time frames. Such a facility is designed to ensure that wastes remain sealed away for tens of thousands of years, until the radioactivity contained within has decayed to a point where it no longer poses a threat to human and non-human health. Though there is an apparent technical consensus that this can provide a safe solution, a political consensus on exactly where a GDF should be situated is not so easy to reach. The historical experience of GDF siting in countries such as the United States of America, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the United Kingdom makes it clear that social and ethical acceptability remain the cornerstone of site selection. It is a prerequisite for radioactive waste policy-making in democratic societies; and the inability to gain social and ethical acceptability has proven to be the Achilles’ heel for most efforts to choose a GDF site for the last 50 years (Blowers & Sundqvist, 2010; Metlay, 2016).

To understand why social acceptability is so hard to come by, we need to understand a bit more about what radioactive waste is and why it is politically important. In technical terms, radioactive waste refers to a range of different materials. It covers both sources of radionuclides and the materials that they contaminate (so wastes can be potentially any materials that have come into direct contact with a radioactive medium). It is the radioactive nature of the material that is significant. In simple terms, radioactivity is a process by which unstable atomic nuclei release energy in the form of particles or waves. This is of concern from an environmental and public health perspective, because ionising radiation is potentially dangerous. Depending upon the amount of radiation exposure and its route into the body, ionising radiation can potentially damage the DNA of living organisms. In humans, genetic damage can lead (in acute cases) to potentially fatal radiation sickness, and over the longer term, to excess cancers and deaths across affected populations. Radioactive waste is, therefore, one potentially dangerous source of radiation in the natural environment (though it is by no means the only, or indeed the biggest source of ionising radiation for most people). The radioactive wastes produced by nuclear electricity production, by the decommissioning of nuclear facilities, by medical and manufacturing processes, and by government agencies concerned with nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear submarines, remain some of the most politically contentious subjects in environmental management. This is primarily due to the risks that they pose to human and animal life.

The overwhelming majority of wastes, both in terms of physical quantities and total radioactivity, are produced by the operations of the nuclear fuel cycle. A basic flow diagram overview of the nuclear fuel cycle is shown in Figure 1.1. It’s important to note that wastes are produced at multiple stages of this fuel cycle, and are managed in very different ways.¹

The most potent wastes are produced by nuclear fission within a reactor. This occurs when low-enriched or natural uranium undergoes a fission chain reaction, where the uranium atom is bombarded with neutrons, splitting it into smaller atoms. The total mass of the fission products is smaller than that of the original uranium atom, with the lost mass released at heat. In a commercial nuclear reactor, the heat from this reaction is used to produce steam, which drives turbines in the production of electricity. This latter aspect is essentially identical to that of fossil-fuelled electricity production, it is only the heat source that differs. This stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is significant because wastes are produced both during the commercial fission process and in the reprocessing of the spent (used) nuclear fuel components. When uranium is used in the processes of nuclear fission for power generation, what is produced at the other end is what are termed fission products,² spent fuel and fuel debris. Fission products are a category of materials that incorporate a variety of radioactive isotopes. In the fission of uranium in a civil nuclear reactor, these elements include plutonium: a highly radiotoxic product that could potentially be used in nuclear weapon manufacture, and hence poses a national security risk. Eventually, the concentration of chain-reacting isotopes drops to the point where the fuel is considered ‘spent’. The spent fuel is both heat-producing and highly radioactive, but so too are the materials that clad the fuel assembly, the reactor components and other contaminated items. This latter material is termed fuel debris. It primarily consists of the radioactive contamination of non-radioactive materials in contact with the fuel rods (such as the metal cladding around them).³ It is notable that under different political conditions these materials are classified either as waste or as a resource. Notable differences exist between the United Kingdom and United States for example: in the UK spent fuel has been reprocessed in the manufacturing facility called the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (or THORP),⁴ whereas in the United States or Sweden, spent fuel is treated as a waste product and therefore as an industry or taxpayer liability. Plutonium remains a problem material for the UK. The UK currently stores the largest ‘separated’ civil plutonium stockpile in the world. It is currently stored in powder form in steel and aluminium cans kept in reinforced concrete buildings above ground at the Sellafield nuclear site in the northwest of England. Plutonium could potentially be chemically immobilised (the two most likely materials are glass or ceramic; Donald, Metcalfe, & Taylor, 1997; Lee, Ojovan, Stennett, & Hyatt, 2013), and then stored in a GDF, either alongside spent fuel or other wastes (or indeed separately). Alternatively, it could be used in new nuclear reactors, either alone or in mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel assemblies. This has been the government’s preferred strategy, though it has never been achieved in practice (see in particular Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2011). As such, plutonium exists in a sort of political limbo, neither classified as waste nor resource, and so remains a contentious and unresolved facet of nuclear policy.

Figure 1.1 Nuclear fuel cycle.

Source: author.

Global nuclear power and radioactive wastes

When understanding the radioactive waste problem, it is important to establish the global nuclear industry context. In 2012, the generation of electricity from nuclear power constituted 10.9 per cent of global production (NEI, 2016a) across 450 reactors, producing a total of more than 390,000 Megawatts (MWe) of electricity (IAEA, 2016). Thirteen countries currently rely on at least a quarter of their electricity from nuclear sources, with the leader (by percentage of total generation) France operating at over 76 per cent (NEI, 2016a). As of the end of 2016, the largest producer by total capacity is the United States of America with 99 reactors and 99,868 MWe; and the smallest is Armenia, with one reactor and 375 MWe of total production (IAEA, 2016). The United Kingdom sits in the ‘Top 10’ by total generation, with 15 currently operating reactors and 8,918 MWe of current capacity, though its reactor fleet is ageing and its share of total electricity production from nuclear power has consistently dropped as reactors built in the 1970s are deactivated and decommissioned. The oldest currently operating reactors, Hinkley Point B1 and B2, became operational in 1976. The newest currently operating reactor is Torness 2 in Dunbar (NEI, 2016b), on the east coast of Scotland.

From this global industry, collectively, every year about 10,000 m³ (a total weight of roughly 12,000 tonnes) of higher activity (radioactive and heat producing) wastes is produced. In addition, the materials in contact with the spent fuel such as the fuel cladding are highly radioactive (considered intermediate level waste – ILW). Other contaminated materials form the bulk of the radioactive wastes (these include tailings, but also contaminated clothing and building materials, for example). Every year, nuclear powered electricity generation results in roughly 200,000 m³ of what are termed lower activity wastes (low- and intermediate-level radioactive wastes, LLW [low level waste] and ILW, respectively). We can compare the radioactive waste production volumes to other waste types to give a sense of comparison. For example, in the OECD there are some 300 million tonnes of toxic chemical wastes, compared with approximately 81,000 m³ of conditioned radioactive wastes (WNA, 2016). When compared with municipal solid waste (MSW), the figures are closer to 1.3 billion tonnes per year, and are expected to nearly double to approximately 2.2 billion tonnes per year by 2025 (Hoornweg & Bhada-Tata, 2012). The significance of these comparative volumes of radioactive waste will be discussed throughout this book, as different actors use different comparisons to discursively ‘scale up or scale down’ the relative problems that radioactive wastes present to society.

What is clear is that we can, for the most part, construe the current generation of radioactive wastes as an industrial problem. Wastes arise from a range of activities including medical, industrial and defence-related uses of nuclear materials, though in the UK it is the electricity generating nuclear industry that is now by far the largest producer, both in terms of waste volume and total radioactivity. Though the industry is one of the most tightly regulated in the world, the radiotoxic legacy of wastes stretches back to the first nuclear power generation of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the construction of the infrastructure required to contain wastes over trans-generational time frames is a slow, protracted and also a deeply contested process. For many within the global nuclear industry, this problem is construed as a political rather than technical one: that radioactive waste disposal lacks political will and a socially acceptable solution, rather than a safe design for geological disposal. It is this political dimension to the waste problem that will be examined within this book, though I wish to emphasise at this point that the science and technology of waste management is not so neatly separated from the politics of site selection as it might first appear.

Deep geological disposal and its alternatives

For the highest activity wastes, the industry ‘gold standard’ is commonly understood to be, what is referred to as, deep geological disposal. As Feiveson, Mian, Ramana, and von Hippel (2011) argue: ‘there is general agreement that placing spent nuclear fuel in repositories hundreds of meters below the surface would be safer than indefinite storage of spent fuel on the surface’. As mentioned in the introduction, geological disposal typically involves isolating radioactive wastes within a multi-barrier system. The first barrier is the waste form itself. For example, high-activity wastes can be vitrified (converted to a chemically stable glass form before storage and eventual disposal). The second barrier is the packaging of the waste – this might be steel drums or in some cases copper canisters that are potentially more resistant to corrosion over long periods of time. The third, is an engineered barrier (or buffer) which is commonly designed to be water resistant and protect the waste packages, and prevent further migration of radionuclides in the case of a package leak. The engineered feature of the facility is emplaced within a stable geological formation at a depth below 300 m, so the rock itself forms the fourth barrier between radionuclides and the biosphere on the surface.

The geophysical basis for deep geological disposal has its roots in what are termed ‘natural analogues’. One specific example is the natural nuclear fission reactor, examples of which are found in Oklo in Gabon. A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit, which has spontaneously undergone a chain reaction. In 1972 French physicist Francis Perrin discovered the conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist. Oklo contains 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place nearly 1.7 billion years ago. These nuclear reactions ran for a few hundred thousand years, but importantly, the radionuclides resulting from the fission reactions were contained within the host rock (Cowan, 1976). This example is important, because it demonstrated that under specific conditions radionuclides could be successfully contained from the biosphere over the periods of time necessary to ensure environmental protection.

The aim of a geological disposal facility is to provide long-term isolation and the containment of wastes in a way that doesn’t require future maintenance. This includes trying to not only protect the integrity of the waste form, its packaging and the repository infrastructure from natural forces such as water intrusion, but also to try and prevent human intrusion either from intentional activity (such as trying to get hold of wastes for what we currently presume would be nefarious purposes such as the theft of plutonium for weapon-making purposes), or from accidental breach of waste containment from surface drilling for mineral resources or fossil fuels. It is important to understand that disposal of waste in engineered facilities must remain safe for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. This presents a significant challenge, however, which is both geophysical and political. In geological terms, a storage space for wastes hundreds of metres below the surface must be able to withstand the pressures of future glaciations (for example). Glaciation during an ice age involves thick sheets of ice resting on top of the surface, the weight of which may deform the rock below, creating internal strains upon the engineered repository. Others are more political. When thinking of tens of thousands of years, or indeed millions of years, we are trying to imagine a period of time that extends beyond any previous period of human history (Rosa, 1993). We can trace certain analogues between geological disposal of radioactive wastes, and other purportedly eternal forms of engineered barriers. What comes to mind is the Great Pyramids of Giza: tombs for ancient pharaohs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The problem of radioactive wastes
• 2 Inflexible technologies and incrementalism
• 3 Nuclear power and the problem of radioactive waste
• 4 Nirex and the search for a site
• 5 Health, environmental risks and the social construction of radioactive waste
• 6 The participatory–deliberative turn
• 7 Managing radioactive waste safely
• 8 Partnership, volunteerism and ethical incrementalism
• 9 What next for nuclear waste?
• Index