When Sir Keir Starmer entered No 10 last summer, it did not take long for him to pick up where his predecessors left off on delivering more nuclear power stations with a promise to “build, baby, build”.
The Prime Minister has vowed to “fast forward on nuclear” and so far has stuck true to his word, with the Government taking up a larger stake in the Sizewell C power plant in Suffolk, while loosening planning rules to allow new small modular reactors to be built across the country.
But with the push for more nuclear power, bringing with it a steady supply of low-carbon energy, the question is inevitably asked: what do you do with all the nuclear waste?
The answer is to dig a hole nearly the size of Wembley Stadium 1km down beneath the Irish Sea, that could one day see the rise of a new “atomic priesthood” and even, some have jokingly claimed, the creation of glow in the dark cats.
The UK was once at the forefront of nuclear power development. In the 1950s and 60s, Britain was at the vanguard of nuclear reactor technology, setting the standard which other countries would follow.
At its peak in the 1990s, nuclear power was providing 25 per cent of the country’s energy needs, but now delivers barely 15 per cent. While the UK will never rival the likes of France, which derives around 70 per cent of its energy from nuclear, the Government is more than aware that to meet its policy goals of creating a net-zero grid by 2030 then nuclear will have to play a major role both now and in the future.
Keir Starmer talks to students at Suffolk New College in Ipswich, eastern England in June as the government said it will invest billions in the new Sizewell C nuclear power plant (Photo: Kin Cheung /AFP)That means building more large-scale reactors such as those being constructed in Hinkley, Somerset, and Sizewell, as well as opening up sites to new, small modular reactors, which the Government hopes could be used to power large data centres as the new era of AI takes off.
But policymakers are aware that to push ahead with this new nuclear drive, they will need to develop a stable, long-term storage facility in which to hold not just future nuclear waste, but all the nuclear waste the country has produced since the dawn of the nuclear energy age in the 1950s. This is what the proposed Geological Disposal Facility will provide. And when they say long term, they mean long term.
“The purpose of the facility is to keep the radioactivity away from humans and the environment so that it can’t cause harm for a sufficient period of time – and that’s of the order of a few hundred thousand years,” Neil Hyatt, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Nuclear Waste Services, tells The i Paper.
Half life
Radioactive material decays by releasing radiation and by doing so transforming atoms from an unstable state, to a stable one. This, for those that remember their physics GCSEs, is known as its half-life.
The length of half-lives can vary greatly, but for a material used in nuclear reactors, such as plutonium 239, each half life is 24,000 years long. Over a period of 10 half-lives, or 240,000 years, it will have decayed to Uranium 235, which is found naturally on earth.
Hinkley Point C, currently under construction in Bridgwater, Somerset, is among just two new nuclear power plants approved since the mid-90s (Photo: Ben Birchall/PA)“So, how can one possibly make a claim that something will be safe for that amount of time?” Hyatt asks. “The answer is that we choose environments in which groundwater moves very slowly if at all, where the stability has been demonstrated for millions of years in the past, and we can be confident that it will be stable for millions of years in the future.”
In other words, somewhere very deep underground.
Digging deep
According to Hyatt, the ideal place to bury nuclear waste is in rock formations where water either moves incredibly slowly, or not at all, as water is an ideal means for radioactivity to travel.
In the UK, the optimal rock type is found under the Irish Sea. “It’s of the order of 250 million years old,” Hyatt says. “So it’s Triassic in age, and it is primarily a mud stone with interbedding of salt and anhydrite layers. And we think this is a suitable rock type because we think it has this property that water moves very slowly through it by the process of diffusion.”
To get to the rock, they will have to bore between 200m and 1km below the Irish Sea, connecting a site on the surface with the vast storage facility via a tunnel.
The NWS has begun engaging with local communities that may be willing to house the entry site for the GDF, with the shortlist already whittled down to two potential candidates, South Copeland and Mid-Copeland, near Sellafield, both of which are in Cumbria.
The project is expected to cost up to £53bn to deliver, with the first storage parts of the facility not expected to open until the 2050s at the earliest.
The method of storing radioactive waste in geologically stable parts of the earth is now received wisdom, with 20 different countries looking at burying their spent radioactive fuel deep within the earth.
Finland, is already well under way with its programme and will be ready to begin storing its waste in its own granite GDF by 2030. But the UK’s storage needs are of an order of magnitude greater than that of the Finns.
“They only need one packaging solution,” Hyatt says. “Because they are only disposing of around 4,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in their GDF. The UK has varied geology, and may need to dispose of more than 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuels, plus all the rest of the intermediate and high level waste, which amounts to around 770,000 cubic metres – around two-thirds of Wembley Stadium.
“Our challenge is much greater, because we were a pioneering nuclear nation, and we need to consider different types of host rock. We developed many different reactor types when we led the world in reactor development in the 1950s.
“But now we’ve got all of those different reactor types to decommission, giving rise to different wastes. It’s those historical decisions on nuclear energy policy and how the wastes were managed that gives the UK a challenge of such different scale.”
If building a storage facility to contain enough nuclear waste that could almost fill Wembley was not a tall enough challenge, then making sure no one decides to go down to take a look thousands of years into the future is perhaps an even greater one.
While the surface site is expected to be discreet, the natural curiosity of humans means that it is more than possible that future societies may want to have a peek at what is buried beneath the earth, potentially posing a major threat to health.
Hyatt says that as the radioactive waste in the facility will be “passively safe” it will require no future human intervention, meaning there would be no real need to mark the facility. Records will be kept and passed down to future generations.
But as we are dealing with almost impossibly long timelines during which records can be lost to the sands of time, various different ideas have been put forward around the world on how best to warn future generations to keep out – ranging from the interesting to the downright bizarre.
One idea, first posited in 1981 by Thomas Sebeok, is to create an “atomic priesthood”, taking its inspiration from the Catholic Church’s capacity to preserve its message for 2,000 years. The priesthood would see the election of “priests” who preserve the knowledge of the nuclear storage site and preach of the dangers by creating various rituals and myths to be passed down to future generations.
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Read MoreAnother, more playful idea, put forward in the mid-1980s is known as the “ray cats” solution, which would see the development of genetically engineered cats that would glow when they are near radioactive material. The notion is that humans and cats have lived side by side with one another for millennia, meaning our feline friends could be used as living radiation detectors.
“It’s very much a philosophical question,” Hyatt smiles. “I suppose the first thing to think about is that the purpose of the facility is to isolate and contain the radioactive waste safely without human intervention, because the waste is passively safe, the environment is passively safe, and groundwater moves very slowly. So there is no need to mark that facility in terms of maintaining its safety.
“We will certainly record and hand down the records of the waste that went into the facility to future generations. There are different ideas as to how you might mark or signpost the GDF for future generations. We are involved in international projects to share and develop that thinking, so a well informed decision on marking the site can be taken in the future.”
For now, Hyatt and the NWS team have to find the right site, secure backing from the community and get the plans rubber stamped by the Government before submitting it for what is likely to be a lengthy planning approval process. They will no doubt hope it won’t take the average half life of a Plutonium 239 isotope to finally get permission.
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