Sensible questions about nuclear waste
I WAS recently reading an article ‘How do we tell future generations about highly radioactive nuclear waste repositories?’ (phys.org) which asked some sensible questions about nuclear waste.
Despite many countries creating nuclear waste from their nuclear power industry, only Finland and Sweden have recently started along the path of creating a waste dump, a supposedly final resting place for the high-level nuclear waste, referred to as a GDF (Geological Disposal Facility).
Looking into the future is very difficult and there is inconsistency regarding variable time frames, give or take hundreds of thousands of years the waste will definitely be a threat to life for thousands of generations we can be sure. Who will be around then? Will humans still walk the earth? And will they care about the safety of the most hazardous substance we have ever created? How many people care today? Will that care increase or decrease in the thousands of generations to come?
A conversation I had with some local Bridgwater people about Hinkley point and its nuclear waste: “That will all go up to Sellafield won’t it?”, “No” I said, “the Hinkley C waste, hotter than anything else ever made here, will be too radioactively hot to travel to Sellafield. In any case, they are full up in Cumberland, they don’t know what to do with the waste they have already. Forty percent of the DESNZ (Dept of Energy Security and Net Zero) budget is spent on trying to manage Sellafield. HPC waste will stay at Hinkley for the first 10 years in a pond and then who knows? With sea levels rising and storm surges, flooding and extreme weather events (recently seen at Watchet), it could be another nuclear disaster waiting to happen in our Somerset home, decisions being made, should I say, by non-local people. Hinkley will be The Sellafield of the South.”
Even if we assume the future humans will care, how will we communicate the details to them? Language and communication methods change over a relatively short time. Will they understand our current symbols and words and will they know enough nuclear physics to be able to tackle the sure to be degraded containment in the waste dumps?
Iron, copper, clay, concrete or rock, all of the materials currently known to us will deteriorate and release the hazardous waste into the environment in relatively short time. Should the work on containment materials have happened before the nuclear waste monster was created? I would say yes, of course! Switching on a nuclear power station and starting from that moment the creation of the toxic waste, is completely unethical.
There is no solution to the waste and hasn’t been for over 60 years of nuclear industry so far. In such a few number of years we have unleashed the most deadly substance known in this planet’s history.
Jo Smoldon Bridgwater, Somerset