Antinuclear

Hosting nuclear waste – a liability in the long run, and a dangerous one

Wasting Australia’s future, Green Left , November 20, 2015 By Jim Green“………Profits from nuclear waste?

It is no secret that the driving force behind the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission is the idea that the state could make billions from storing or disposing of high-level nuclear waste from power reactors around the world.

Accepting nuclear waste might be profitable. Or it might not. Most likely, it would be profitable in the short-term and a liability in the long-term.

Proponents are talking up the billions that might be made by making Australia the world’s nuclear waste dump, but they have said little about costs. Since the volume of waste would presumably be large, the cost of a deep underground repository for high-level nuclear waste would likely be in the tens of billions of dollars. Plans for a high-level waste repository in Japan may be comparable: the estimated cost is ¥3500 billion (A$40.8 billion).

The US wasted $10 billion on the plan for a deep geological repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada before abandoning the project. In 2008 the US Department of Energy estimated that the cost of construction and operation of Yucca Mountain over a 150 year period would be US$96 billion (A$135 billion).

The waste would need to be monitored and problems addressed for millennia: it takes about 300,000 years for the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel to fall to that of the original uranium ore. The annual cost of monitoring waste might be modest; the costs over millennia would be anything but.

Explosion in deep underground repository

The idea that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of in a deep underground repository has been shot to pieces by an explosion in the world’s only deep underground repository for nuclear waste: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the US state of New Mexico.

In February last year, radiation leaks were detected and 23 workers were subjected to low-level internal radiation exposure. The cause was later determined to be a chemical explosion that compromised one of the radioactive waste barrels stored underground, followed by a failure of the filtration system that was meant to ensure radiation in underground caverns did not reach the outside environment. The total cost to fix up the mess will approach $1 billion, and WIPP will be shut for at least four years.

Robert Alvarez, a former assistant to the US energy secretary, noted that a safety analysis conducted before WIPP opened predicted that one radiation release accident might occur every 200,000 years. But WIPP has been open for just 15 years and it is on track for more than 13,000 radiation release accidents over a 200,000 year period.

Fires at radioactive waste dumps

Just nine days before the explosion at WIPP, another accident took place at the same repository. A truck carrying salt caught fire, consuming the driver’s compartment and the truck’s front tyres. Six workers were treated at the nearest hospital for smoke inhalation and another seven were treated at the site. A report by the US Department of Energy said the root cause of the fire was the contractor’s “failure to adequately recognize and mitigate the hazard regarding a fire in the underground”.

Two other fires have recently threatened nuclear waste dumps in the US. A smouldering underground landfill fire, burning since 2010, has come within 400 metres of a nuclear dump in Missouri and on October 24 a faulty switch started a grass fire which came within 70 metres of the nuclear waste before it was doused.

On October 18, a fire broke out at a radioactive waste dump in Nevada. The site has 22 low-level radioactive waste storage trenches. A video supplied by the private operator shows bursts of smoke and dirt flying from several explosions. County officials and law enforcement agencies declared an emergency. A state fire inspector surveyed the site following the fire and found “heavily corroded” 55-gallon drums in and around one of the nuclear waste trenches. Two waste drums were found outside the fence line.

Maralinga fiasco

Is there any reason to believe that Australia would manage nuclear waste any more responsibly than the US? No. Is there any reason to believe that things might be worse in Australia? Yes. The US has a wealth of nuclear expertise at its disposal: Australia has comparatively little.

Moreover, Australia has its own troubled history of dealing with long-lived nuclear waste. In the late-1990s, the Australian government carried out a clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site. It was done on the cheap and many tonnes of plutonium-contaminated debris remain buried in shallow, unlined pits in totally unsuitable geology.

A number of scientists with inside knowledge of the Maralinga project publicly noted their concerns. Nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson said of the “clean up”: “What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn’t be adopted on white-fellas land”.

US scientist Dale Timmons said the government’s technical report was littered with “gross misinformation”. Geoff Williams, an officer with the Commonwealth nuclear regulator ARPANSA, said the “clean up” was beset by a “host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups”. Nuclear physicist Peter Johnston said there were “very large expenditures and significant hazards resulting from the deficient management of the project”.

Barely a decade after the Maralinga “clean-up”, a survey revealed that 19 of the 85 contaminated debris pits have been subject to erosion or subsidence.

Australia’s track record feeds back into the economic debate. Some — perhaps many — countries would surely think twice about entrusting nuclear waste to a country that has proved it is not up to the task [Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth and editor of the World Information Service on Energy’s Nuclear Monitor newsletter.]   www.greenleft.org.au/node/60702

November 25, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, wastes