Nuclear waste: the 270-tonne legacy that won’t go away
Olivia Boyd
Governments want to bury their nuclear waste deep underground, but finding a place to dig the hole is proving tricky.
Image by Koeberg Alert Alliance
Rebecca Harms was 18 when she started campaigning for solutions to nuclear waste-storage in Germany. The Green Party MEP is now nearing her 56th birthday, but the country isn’t any closer to burying its radioactive waste. Last year – after decades of on-off drilling at the site of an old salt dome in north Germany and more than a billion euros of public money spent – the federal government announced it was starting from scratch with its search for a suitable site for a “deep geological repository” in which to store spent fuel.
Germany is not alone. “None of the countries which started to use nuclear fission for power production 50 years ago have an acceptable solution for nuclear waste and final storage. None,” Harms says wearily, speaking on the telephone from Brussels. Though she is firmly against nuclear power, Harms is strongly in favour of building a geological repository in Germany; essentially a giant cavern in the bedrock, in which the country’s high-level radioactive waste can be sealed away while its isotopes decay over hundreds of thousands of years (in fact, regulations dictate that the repositories guarantee safety for up to a million years). “I’ve been working on this for decades and I’m convinced it is the best way,” she says.
Many others agree. Several countries are planning to build deep repositories of their own. But their plans keep hitting bumps. This month, confidence in the UK’s scheme was undermined when the three councils in the running to host the waste got cold feet and postponed a decision to allow test drilling at the last minute. And in 2010, the US Energy Department pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada – after spending more than US$12 billion building it – on grounds opposition to the project had made it unworkable.
