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In deep, strangely clear ponds with blue light, about 40 m (130 ft) below the Swedish countryside, there are decades of high-level nuclear waste.
It’s a strangely charming and haunting sight. Row after row of long steel containers, filled with spent nuclear fuel from the country’s reactors, lie beneath the surface near Oskarshamn on Sweden’s Baltic coast.
It is highly deadly and safe.
Deadly, because it is intensely radioactive; safe, because it is under 8 m of water, a very effective barrier against radiation.
Waste can be stored in this for decades. In fact, it must be so.
Intense radioactivity generates a lot of heat and these types of curtains will need to be cooled for long periods of time before they can be stored.
However, the issue of what to do next is something that many governments, including the UK, have been grappling with for years.
The challenge is quantity.
Even after some 60 years of advertising and military programmes, the UK’s stockpile of maximum high hazardous activity waste stands at a few thousand tonnes, there are also several hundred thousand tonnes of intermediate activity waste that will also want to be treated.
The genuine thing is the time.
“Spent fuel assemblies are intensely radioactive, and this radioactivity takes a long time to disintegrate,” says Professor Neil Hyatt, lead clinical advisor at the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services.
“After about 1,000 years, there are about 10 years left of the original radioactivity, and this will slowly decay for about 100,000 years or so. “
This creates difficulties.
“We can’t rely on institutions for timescales well above a few centuries,” says Professor Hyatt.
“The Roman Empire was built about 500 years ago. The ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.
“Therefore, the Earth’s surface and human civilizations are becoming much faster than the rate at which the radioactivity of this spent nuclear fuel can decay. “
Sweden has already reached its conclusions. He plans to bury his trash in the rock deep underground and leave it there forever.
This is a procedure known as geological storage, and scientists across the country have spent decades reading other tactics.
Much of the studies were conducted at the Aspo Hard Rock Laboratory, a facility built near Oskarshamn in the south of the country.
Hundreds of meters below the surface, a network of huge synthetic caverns drilled into the rock.
It is used for experiments, examining how waste can be packaged and buried, and how the fabrics used can degrade over time.
The bedrock here is cracked and flows with salt water, an ancient brine that migrated from the Baltic Sea for thousands of years.
Such a humid environment would not be suitable for a genuine garage installation. But according to Ylva Stenqvist, assignment manager at national nuclear operator SKB, it’s best for testing.
“This site was selected because it’s wet,” he explains.
“Because if we review our experiments in a domain that is dry, we have to wait years to get any kind of result.
“So we consciously chose this position to accelerate some of the experiments, to tighten our tissues and strategies and see how they hold up in this fairly competitive environment. “
Earlier this year, Sweden approved plans for a true geological garage facility (GDF), to be built in Forsmark, about 150 km north of Stockholm.
The allocation is expected to charge around SEK 19 billion (£1. 5 billion; $1. 8 billion) and create 1,500 jobs, the structure will take decades. Work on a similar assignment, across the Baltic Sea in Finland, began in 2015.
These advances are being heavily monitored across the UK, which also intends to build a GDF, repeated attempts to locate a suitable location have been thwarted due to political intransigence, as well as intense opposition from local protesters and environmentalists.
Current efforts to locate a population willing to house it now stick to a “consent-based” approach, in which the government company Nuclear Waste Services partners with local communities to involve them in the process.
As an incentive, these communities are presented with £1 million of investment for projects when they are registered, amounting to £2. 5 million if deep drilling is carried out.
Since the start of this procedure in 2018, 4 such associations have been created.
Three are in Cumbria. They come with the part of the coast that already houses the Sellafield nuclear plant and many of its workers. The fourth, and most recent, was established in Theddlethorpe, Lincolnshire.
Scotland is not part of this procedure and the Scottish government does not lately make a deep geological arrangement.
Even in spaces where alliances have been established, opposition remains.
“We vehemently oppose the geological disposal of hot nuclear waste and heat generators,” said Marianne Birkby of the Cumbria Radiation Free Lakeland protest.
“The waste will have to remain where it can be monitored, where it can be repackaged and where it can be recovered if something goes wrong,” he insists. “In the basement, there would surely be no possibility of containment if a leak occurred. . “
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A site for a UK GDF is unlikely to be installed for at least 15 years. But some experts wonder if it will ever be built.
Among them is Dr Paul Dorfman, a research associate at the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit and chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group.
“The geological garage is a concept, not a reality,” he explains. “There is significant clinical uncertainty as to whether the fabrics that would be used can withstand the depredations of time. “
He believes the government’s enthusiasm for new nuclear plants is the reason it is pushing to build a GDF.
“If you can’t get rid of the waste, you can’t produce more, which means that nuclear USP (it’s climate-friendly, etc. ) is based entirely on the concept that you can get rid of this waste,” he says.
“The geological garage is actually, unfortunately, a nuclear vine leaf. “