Antinuclear

What happens to nuclear waste under Peter Dutton’s Coalition plan to build seven nuclear power reactors?

ABC Illawarra / By Nick McLaren, 21 Jun 2024

In short: Debate on Australia’s nuclear future will need to include clear information on the transportation and storage of nuclear waste.

Currently Australia doesn’t have a national storage facility, so low and medium level waste is kept at more than 100 locations around the country.

What’s next? As Australia debates nuclear power in the lead-up to the federal election, more answers will be needed about where to store radioactive waste and for how long.

…………………………………………………………………..”Each year Australia produces about 45 cubic metres of radioactive waste arising from these [research reactor medical and industrial”] uses and from the manufacture of the isotopes.”

This amounts to about 40 square metres of low-level waste and 5 square metres of intermediate waste, while the UK and France by comparison each produce about 25,000 cubic metres of low-level waste annually.

But of greater concern is the intermediate and high-level waste that will be produced by the seven nuclear reactors the Coalition plans to get up and running in Australia by 2050.

Peter Dutton in announcing the Coalition’s nuclear plan this week used a previously heard line that one standard-sized reactor produces just a handful of nuclear waste each year.

“If you look at a 450 megawatt reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year,” Mr Dutton said.

…………………..Simon Holmes a Court said the Coke can comment greatly underestimates the amount reactors generate.

“Even the small modular reactors would be 2,000 times as much, and that is just high-level radioactive waste alone,” he said.

“It is a lot more than he says ……………………………….

The waste storage site will be needed for waste from the AUKUS submarines regardless of the Coalition’s nuclear energy plans.

The AUKUS deal is bipartisan, so any change of government is unlikely to scuttle it.

Griffith University emeritus professor and energy specialist Ian Lowe told The Conversation that Australia will have to manage high-level radioactive waste when the submarines are decommissioned in 30 years time.

“So, when our first three subs are at the end of their lives – which, according to Defence Minister Richard Marles, will be in about 30 years time – we will have 600 kilograms of so-called ‘spent fuel’ and potentially tonnes of irradiated material from the reactor and its protective walls,” he said.

“Because the fuel is weapons-grade material, it will need military-scale security,” he said.

Currently Australia’s intermediate level nuclear waste generated at the Lucas Height reactor is taken overseas for processing then returned to Australia for storage.

Remaining unused uranium is removed from the fuel rods with the leftover radioactive waste broken up and mixed with molten glass, then solidified in steel canisters.

The last time this happened, in March 2022, it involved a shipment of radioactive waste brought back to Lucas Heights via a high security operation at Port Kembla in Wollongong.

“Four of those canisters, each containing 500 kilograms of vitrified waste that is radiologically equivalent to 114 rods sent to the UK in a shipment in 1996, were received back from the UK,” according to a statement from Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

It was logistically a major operation carried out in relative secrecy in the middle of the night with confirmation only occurring afterwards.

Such shipments only tend to occur about once every 10 years, but this all could start to change if and when Australia moves towards embracing a larger role for nuclear. m https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-21/what-happens-nuclear-waste-coalition-plan-/104003454

June 25, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | wastes