It is fashionable these days to talk about how nuclear power is making a comeback in a world characterised by roaring power demand alongside concerns regarding climate change. For its proponents, nuclear power is a solution to both of these problems. These proponents might want to read this article in the BBC about nuclear waste. The article says: “Nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that will keep it safely buried for millennia?”
We recommend that you read the article not least to see the pictures of the underground storage facilities for nuclear waste. These are some of the largest structures ever built by man: “How do you go about designing, building and operating structures that take decades to plan and even longer to build, that operate over centuries and must survive for 100,000 years, and that contain some of the most dangerous materials on the planet?…
Geological disposal facilities for nuclear waste are, or will be, some of the largest underground structures humanity has ever built. They are planned, in development, about to start construction or about to open in the UK, France, Sweden, Finland and around 20 other countries.”
These facilities for storing nuclear waste underground are called Geological Disposal Facilities or GDFs. The Scandinavians have played a pioneering role in creating these structures which take 20-40 years to build and go live!
“GDFs are epically large, expensive and controversial underground structures designed to contain the most radioactive and long-lived waste produced by the nuclear industry. Currently stored on the surface in facilities such as that at Sellafield in the UK, and at La Hague in France, this waste can include components of nuclear reactors, graphite from reactor cores, spent fuel and the liquid byproduct from the reprocessing of spent fuel from nuclear reactors.
On a computer screen, the plan for any GDF like this looks like a huge, multi-level nuclear shelter. But the process of designing, constructing and operating such a facility occurs on a timescale that is suitably pharaonic. Like the workers who built the pyramids, many of the engineers working on these monumental structures will never see their work completed.
“The licensing for one of these high-level waste disposal facilities takes over 20 to 30 years – we haven’t seen any country taking less time,” says Jacques Delay, my guide and a scientist at the facility in France, “and then the operation will last for around 100 years before it is sealed.” After that, there will be hundreds of years of monitoring of the site….
Finland was the first country in the world to build a deep geological disposal facility for spent fuel, and it has now conducted the first stage of the trial disposal of the fuel. In Sweden, construction of a GDF is about to start at Forsmark, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, and a similar facility, Ciego, is expected to be built in France relatively soon. In Britain a possible site for such storage has yet to be chosen.”
More than funding or technology, the critical success factor behind a GDF is geology: “In countries across Europe, engineers such as Shelton pore over the available geological data for a potential location to see if the rocks buried around 500m to 1km (1,650 to 3,300ft) down are suitable to confine nuclear waste for more than 100,000 years. Rocks like granite and clay are the best for this. But there may be simply not enough data to make a safe decision.
A promising site may turn out to be too close to vital aquifers that supply fresh water to local communities, or to the side of a valley, which in 10,000 years’ time may mean it’s at risk from an advancing glacier, and the hunt has to start again.
It is easier in some countries than others to find a site. “The Swedish [and Finnish] bedrock is in terms of seismic activity very stable,” says Anna Porelius, communications director at SKB, the organisation which manages Sweden’s nuclear waste. “It has been a continuous entity… for more than 900 million years. In addition, no new fracture zones form anymore.””
Even after a site is found, engineers have to resolve all sorts of ‘never before asked’ questions. For example, how do you transfer the nuclear waste down into the GDF: “Lifts can seem an attractive way to haul the waste down to its final resting place around 500m (1650ft) underground, but that raises alarming scenarios of a container stuck in a lift or lifts plummeting to the bottom of a shaft. A ramp with a slope of around 12% may be safer because systems can be put into place to stop a sledge running out of control. It may be best to build both…
French engineers have built a funicular for a 4km (2.5 mile) ramp to prove the safety features needed to stop a runaway container. They have also shown how a robot like Boston Dynamics’ autonomous robot dogs could “without any human intervention be used to move waste canisters knocked out of place by an unexpected event like an earthquake,” says Delay.
The engineers have, he adds, even developed a robot to “recover a cannister from a corroded cell” by crawling along the long, narrow, claustrophobic tunnels that will contain high-level nuclear waste. Its job will be to clear any blockage and pull the cylindrical waste containers to safety.
In Sweden, plans are further advanced. According to Porelius: “Sometime during the 2080s the repository will comprise something like 60km (37 miles) of tunnels with room for more than 6,000 copper canisters of spent nuclear fuel… The deposition of the nuclear waste will be done by custom-designed machines that can be remotely operated with great precision.”
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