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It is never easy to describe the length of a piece of string or the size of a hole. But when it comes to nuclear waste, one man, an economist in a field of scientists, has come up with an easily understandable and utterly depressing little trick.
“Think of a football pitch full of double-decker buses,” says Chris Murray. “Then stack those buses five high. That gives you some idea of the volume of long-lived nuclear waste we will have to deal with.”
Murray, a softly spoken 59-year-old Scot, is the chief executive of Nirex, the body charged with finding a long-term solution to the prickly problem of nuclear waste disposal. His has to be one of the most unenviable — and, so far, thankless — jobs in Britain. But he loves it.
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He has been with Nirex since 1991, when, as a company wholly owned by the nuclear industry, it was treated with suspicion at best, loathing at worst. In April last year the Government freed Nirex from the industry and allowed it to speak its mind (even though it is funded 50-50 by the Departments of Trade and Environment). Yet until now Murray has kept a low profile.
Today, however, Nirex publishes its three-yearly inventory on Britain’s levels of nuclear waste, and Murray sees it as a chance to push for his solution to the nation’s radioactive time bomb — a cavernous repository up to 1,000m (3,280ft) beneath the Earth’s surface; not a new idea but one into which he hopes to breathe new life.
“By 2005 we had safely packaged only 8 per cent of a legacy of radioactive waste that goes back to the Second World War,” he says. “That is a national disgrace. We have a responsibility to deal with it now, and we can. Or we risk passing it on to a new generation.”
A year ago it would have been inconceivable to hear anyone at Nirex expressing such a view out loud. But Nirex has changed and Murray is anxious to make us realise that this is everyone’s problem, a problem that can be solved only with effort and consent.
We meet at Nirex’s offices in St James’s Square, near Piccadilly. Murray is relaxed but has a can-do air about him in crisp white shirt and braces. He is about to set down his agenda for dealing with the nation’s nuclear waste, but first we look at the numbers and the problem.
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In the 1940s Britain began producing plutonium for military purposes at Windscale in Cumbria. In the 1950s the first nuclear reactors at Calder Hall, also in Cumbria, began generating energy, and over the next two decades a further nine Magnox reactors and 14 advanced gas-cooled reactors came online at locations from Hinckley Point and Dungeness in the South to Hunterston and Torness in the North. All of these operations produced waste that was radioactive — from liquid slurry to metal cladding and everything that came into contact with them. Most of that waste is still stored where it was produced. It will give off radiation for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nirex will not release exact figures until MPs have seen them later today, but they are expected to show that by the end of the life of all Britain’s nuclear facilities, submarines, etc, in about 50 years, we will have to deal with 289,000 tonnes of intermediate nuclear waste, the most prodigious and problematic type. (There will be only 1,608 tonnes of high-level waste.) When mixed with concrete for storage, the total figure is just short of 500,000 tonnes.
This waste is at 37 sites up and down the country — three more than the last time the inventory was published three years ago.
The explanation for one of these is simple: Sellafield and Calder Hall used to be classified as one site; now they are two.
The other two are Ministry of Defence sites in Derby and Barrow. What these sites contain — and why they have not been declared before now — will become clear with the publication of the 10,000-page inventory.
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Low-level waste comes from numerous sources and is only mildly radioactive. It might include soil, building rubble, plastics or paper that have not been in proximity to high levels of radiation. Brief exposure to such waste would be unlikely to have a serious adverse effect on health. All low-level waste is dealt with at Drigg, four miles south of Sellafield.
Levels of radiation from intermediate waste exceed those from low-level by-products but do not give off the heat that high-level waste does. Sources include nuclear fuel casings, reactor cores and other materials involved in the energy-generation process or the maintenance of the nuclear deterrent. Exposure to these increases the likelihood of cancers, depending on the length of time of exposure.
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High-level waste comes only from nuclear reprocessing at Sellafield, mostly from the nitric acid used to dissolve spent fuel rods. These give off heat. Exposure can, depending on the length of time, cause tissue damage and death within days.
But back to Murray and his vision for the future. “It is an ethical issue,” he says. “The research that we have done over many years, with the research carried out by our sister organisations around the world, has led us to the conclusion that long-lived radioactive waste is best dealt with in a repository that is in good bedrock 500 to 1,000m below the surface.”
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Waste, often stored at the moment in rusting and decaying pits, silos and cooling baths, would be compacted, surrounded by concrete or glass and sealed in stainless steel barrels. The barrels would be stored in bigger containers backfilled with more cement in rows of caverns 300m long, 16m high and 16m wide, hewn out of solid rock.
When Nirex last tried to convince the Government to build a deep repository and identified Sellafield in Cumbria as its favoured site, it was knocked back in the dying days of the last Conservative Government.
“We were shocked,” Murray says. “Afterwards the community told us that we had been arrogant, secretive, we had not listened to people’s concerns, let alone addressed them, and we had treated people badly. And they were just the polite comments.
“We had been concentrating on a scientific solution and had not put enough emphasis on people’s need to be an integral part of the process. We have learnt from that.”
As a result, Nirex is awash with buzzwords such as “ethics” and “transparency”. It must first convince the independent Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) that its plans are the most viable. CoRWM will then report to the Government in July before a final decision is taken.
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That, according to Murray, will be just the beginning. “The next step would not be in deciding where the site would be — it would be in establishing how that decision should be taken. And to do that we would invite anyone with an interest to help the UK to make that choice. But it must all be done with openness and consent. That includes the right of any community to veto the project.”
This sounds like pie in the sky, but he says that such discussions in Finland and Sweden have made progress in deciding where and how to site their waste repositories.
“We believe that most people are prepared to make collective decisions if they are involved in the process,” says Murray.
“I make no criticism of this Government. If anything, by freeing up Nirex and establishing CoRWM and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (responsible for dealing with the physical dismantling of nuclear sites), it has already made progress.”
Murray admits that there is still much to be done, but there are signs that the Government may be prepared to grasp the nettle.
An hour after our interview ended, Malcolm Wickes, the Energy Minister, stood up in the House of Commons and said this: “The failure of governments and parliaments to tackle the waste issue for several decades is a national disgrace and we must reach sensible conclusions to settle that national account.”
Sound familiar?
THE WASTE PRODUCERS