Maralinga tipped for the site of Premier Jay Weatherill’s nuclear waste site fantasy

Planning 500 years ahead makes nuclear storage a difficult road, AFR, Simon Evans 20 Feb 16, It’s the first 500 years that bring the biggest worries about radioactivity when it comes to spent nuclear fuel rods.

After that, most of the radioactive elements have decayed, but they still need to be isolated from the environment in a deep underground nuclear storage facility for many hundreds of thousands of years. Everything in the nuclear waste industry has an enormously long outlook, including the promise of a $257 billion pay-day for South Australia . Correct, billion. That is if it’s able to traverse a difficult political road and build a sophisticated nuclear waste facility 500 metres below ground to operate over a projected 120-year commercial life……….

DEEP-BELOW-GROUND STORAGE

The engineering required for the deep-below-ground facility is quite something. The repository 450 to 500 metres below ground would have tunnels into which special canisters containing spent fuel rods are buried permanently. The fuel rods are first placed in purpose-built canisters, which are then packed into a thick copper overlay, which itself is put into a bentonite buffer, a thick absorbent layer of specially engineered clay-like soil. The whole package is then buried in bedrock 500 metres below the earth’s surface……..

political considerations collide with the economics of the proposed plant. He says the $33 billion cost of the underground facility is so vast it would need to be shared between the state and federal government, which also needs to change legislation to allow it to proceed. Federal Resources and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg gave cautious support to the plan if a political and community consensus can be developed……..

One submission to the royal commission by a private company called SA Nuclear Energy Systems has proposed the Maralinga atomic bomb test sites about 850km north-west of Adelaide as a good spot for an underground facility. Maralinga was used by Britain to test atomic bombs in the late 1950s, with the site later becoming embroiled in controversy because of the long-term health effects on the Aboriginal owners of the land and on military personnel who had been present. http://www.afr.com/business/energy/nuclear-energy/planning-500-years-ahead-makes-nuclear-storage-a-difficult-road-20160216-gmvchl#ixzz40e9J9qEw

February 20, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | NUCLEAR ROYAL COMMISSION 2016, South Australia

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