Nuclear waste - Search starts for area willing to host highly radioactive UK waste
[ https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... uk-geology ]
Right geology and local consent are key in consultation due to be launched this week
Adam Vaughan, The Guardian, January 21, 2018
The government is expected this week to begin a nationwide search for a community willing to host an underground nuclear waste dump to store highly radioactive material for thousands of years.
Britain has been trying for years to secure a site with the right geology and local communities which would volunteer to host a £12bn] geological disposal facility (GDF), as a long-term solution for the most dangerous waste from nuclear power stations.
The last effort hit a brick wall in 2013 when Cumbria county council, the only local authority still in the running as a host for the dump, rejected it.
Now, ministers are to relaunch their mission to win over a community to host the GDF. The task has taken on heightened importance now that a nuclear power plant is under construction in Somerset, with plans to build four others.
Radioactive Waste Management, the government body tasked with building the facility hundreds of metres underground, said it had made significant progress since 2014 in “developing the offer” to interested communities.
The energy minister Richard Harrington has said construction of the GDF would create 1,000 jobs and running it would create 600 more.
Consultations on the planning process and how the government will work with communities will be launched this week, said two sources close to the process. “I hope to God they get it right this time,” said one. “The mess they made in the past can’t be repeated. It’s outrageous it became a victim of local politics last time.”
In January 2013, Cumbria council’s cabinet voted against preliminary work starting on the facility, with the Conservative council leader citing concerns about the local geology. The decision came five months before local elections.
After the failures of 2013, a 2014 white paper set out the government’s new plans, which are still based on gaining the consent of a community.
Experts said success in finding a site would hinge on suitable geology and acceptance by the public.
Prof Neil Hyatt, who heads the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Sheffield, said: “It’s having the right geology coupled with community acceptance. The geological setting needs to be able to isolate the radioactive waste from the surface for the required timescale, which is hundreds of thousands of years.”
A national geological screening report has been undertaken to identify the most favourable parts of the country, but Hyatt said further information was needed.
Ann McCall, the geological disposal facility siting and engagement director of Radioactive Waste Management, told a conference in December that building the GDF was “mission critical” to store the UK’s radioactive waste, which the country has “an awful lot of”.
She said the agency would soon launch a campaign website to increase awareness and engagement with the public, adding: “It’s not possible to foist a solution on a community.”
The facility would be sited in England or Wales, as Scotland prefers a ground-level store. High-level waste, the most radioactive material, would not be moved there for many decades.
Nuclear waste is currently stored at about 30 sites, but predominantly at ground level at Sellafield in Cumbria.
The project is expected to cost £12bn, spread over a century. The government will bear 55% of the cost, owners of new-build plants such as EDF another 35%, and the final 10% will be covered by a liability fund set aside by previous nuclear operators.
The price tag could go up or down depending on how much waste the facility needs to store, said Hyatt. “There is a lot of uncertainty around costs.” Other nuclear countries, such as Finland, have already started building underground stores.
One senior industry figure said: “Lots of other countries would just get on and do this. They’ve got to do something. They can’t keep ducking this.”
NUKE WASTE (UK): Search for dump begins . . .
2 posts
• Page 1 of 1
NUKE WASTE (UK): Search for dump begins . . .
by Oscar » Fri Jan 26, 2018 3:40 pm
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Re: NUKE WASTE (UK): Search for dump begins . . .
by Oscar » Tue Jan 30, 2018 5:30 pm
UK set to end outsourcing of nuclear clean-up (***Numerous LINKS) (Dr. Gordon Edwards' BACKGROUND follows . . . )
[ https://www.ft.com/content/b83c5ada-b01 ... 21c713abf4 ]
Decommissioning atomic reactors set to be brought in house after contract collapses
Andrew Ward and Gill Plimmer, Financial Times, October 15, 2017
Decommissioning Britain’s first generation of atomic reactors is likely to be brought back “in-house” by the UK nuclear clean-up agency after the collapse of a £6.2 billion outsourcing contract that exposed “fundamental failures” at the organisation.
Ministers have been considering whether the work, involving 12 Magnox nuclear plants and research sites, should be offered to another private contractor or run directly by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
A final decision has not yet been made but industry figures with knowledge of the process said the most likely outcome was for the NDA to create a new subsidiary to take control of the Magnox clean-up programme. Such an outcome would bring an end to an embarrassing episode in which Greg Clark, business secretary, in March cancelled a deal with Cavendish Fluor Partnership, a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US, at a cost of £122m to British taxpayers.
A report by the National Audit Office last week said the bungling of one of the largest contracts awarded by the UK government raised “serious questions” about the NDA’s “ability to manage large, complex procurements”.
Those criticism were echoed on Thursday in a separate report commissioned by the government. Interim findings revealed a catalogue of human errors and systemic failings that allowed the losing bidders, US groups Energy Solutions and Bechtel, to win a High Court ruling that the procurement was flawed.
MORE: [ https://www.ft.com/content/b83c5ada-b01 ... 21c713abf4 ]
= = = = = = =
Background: January 30, 2018
----- Forwarded message from Gordon Edwards <ccnr@web.ca> -----
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 16:15:58 -0500
From: Gordon Edwards <ccnr@web.ca>
Subject: FINANCIAL TIMES: UK set to end outsourcing of radioactive clean-up
Background: January 30, 2018
The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is responsible for dealing with Britain's legacy of radioactive waste, site decontamination, and nuclear facility decommissioning, associated with civilian and military nuclear programs, dating back to the late 1940s. See [ https://www.gov.uk/government/organisat ... rity/about ]
Five years ago Ole Hendrickson and Gordon Edwards, along with Brennain Lloyd and Theresa McClenaghan, attended a Canadian Nuclear Society Conference held in Toronto. At that time the UK NDA head honcho that the cost of “cleaning up” the radioactive mess in Britain was estimated at about 70 billion pounds. Now, according to the Financial Times article below, that estimated cost has more than doubled, to about 164 billion pounds [equivalent to $288 billion Canadian].
NDA, with a staff of about 200, has signed contracts with private companies having over 18,000 employees to carry out the work in the UK. In that sense, the role of NDA is quite similar to the role of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), with a staff of about 40 (down from 3400 a few years ago).
AECL has contracted with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), run by a consortium of five multinational corporations, to deal with the federal government’s many radioactive legacies: the Chalk River Laboratories on the Ottawa River, Eldorado Nuclear’s massive radioactive contamination at Port Hope on Lake Ontario, the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment on the Winnipeg River, the Douglas Point reactor on the shore of Lake Huron, the Gentilly-1 reactor at Bécancour on the St.Lawrence River, and the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) reactor at Rolphton, Ontario.
As the attached article outlines, two of the NDA's contracts for nuclear waste management have been abruptly terminated in the last two years, one worth 6.2 billion pounds and the other worth 9 billion pounds for a total of 17.2 billion pounds [equivalent to about $30 billion Canadian].
The smaller cancelled NDA contract had to do with decommissioning the government’s fleet of dual-purpose (civilian/military) Magnox reactors. These graphite-moderated and gas-cooled nuclear reactors were designed to produce byproduct electricity as well as plutonium for nuclear weapons. The last of 26 Magnox reactors in the UK was shut down in 2015. North Korea developed its own version of the Magnox reactor and has used the plutonium produced from that reactor design for its nuclear weapons program.
The larger cancelled NDA contract had to do with the Sellafield military/civilian site, originally called Windscale. This is where Britain extracted plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel for both military and civilian purposes. Britain’s pre-eminence in this field grew out of work done in a secret Montreal Laboratory, on the slopes of Mount Royal (Université de Montréal) from 1942 to 1944, leading to the decision made in Washington DC in 1944 to establish Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Canada as part of the military program to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
British scientists at Chalk River extracted plutonium from the NRX reactor's spent fuel and sent it to Britain just months before the UK detonated its first atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands off Australia (1952). When Canada gave a copy of the NRX reactor to India in the name of “Third World Development”, India used it to produce plutonium for their first A-Bomb, detonated in 1974 under the name “Smiling Buddha”. See [ http://ccnr.org/chronology.html and http://ccnr.org/canada_britain.html ].
All of the pilot plant work for the massive Windscale reprocessing plant in Northern England was carried out at Chalk River. There were also two “reprocessing plants” built at Chalk River to extract two artificial fissile materials, plutonium and uranium-233 (elements not found in nature). The same process was later adapted to produce medical isotopes. Since reprocessing requires dissolving highly radioactive spent fuel in boiling nitric acid, Chalk River produced 21 tanks of high-level liquid radioactive wastes.
The Harper government decided to copy Britain’s failing GoCo model (government-owned, contractor-operated) to deal with Canada’s legacy of radioactive waste and nuclear decommissioning, currently estimated by the Auditor General of Canada to cost more than $7.9 billion. In the two most recent fiscal years, almost two billion dollars of taxpayer’s money has been funnelled into the coffers of the corporations that constitute the CNL consortium: SNC-Lavalin (banned for 10 years by the World Bank for unethical behaviour), CH2M (found guilty in 2015 of fraud at the US Hanford Nuclear site), Fluor (one of the cancelled contractors mentioned in the article below), Rolls-Royce Nuclear, and Atkins. See [ http://ccnr.org/CCNR_CNL_2017.pdf ].
The profit-oriented CNL consortium has radically altered the previous plans of AECL to adopt quicker, cheaper, less protective measures for “clearing the decks” of radioactive waste on Canadian government sites so as to embark on a program of expanding the nuclear industry’s prospects internationally using federal land and federal money. CNL wants to host a new generation of “Small Modular Reactors” on Canadian soil, with governmental subsidies, while spending billions of Canadian taxpayers’ dollars and pocketing lavish profits. All this without accepting any long-term responsibility for the wastes, the sites, or the appropriateness of the unprecedented approaches adopted in the interests of expediency. See [ http://ccnr.org#crl ]. And [ http://ccnr.org/CCNR_WR1_Supp_2017.pdf ].
All of this is being done in the context of a federal policy vacuum, as the Canadian government has not consulted with First Nations or other Canadians to develop a policy laying down principles that most be followed in any approach to the long-term management of post-fission radioactive wastes other than irradiated nuclear fuel, for which there is a policy in place.
See [ http://ccnr.org/Trudeau_pack_5_e.pdf ].
Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
http://www.ccnr.org
[ https://www.ft.com/content/b83c5ada-b01 ... 21c713abf4 ]
Decommissioning atomic reactors set to be brought in house after contract collapses
Andrew Ward and Gill Plimmer, Financial Times, October 15, 2017
Decommissioning Britain’s first generation of atomic reactors is likely to be brought back “in-house” by the UK nuclear clean-up agency after the collapse of a £6.2 billion outsourcing contract that exposed “fundamental failures” at the organisation.
Ministers have been considering whether the work, involving 12 Magnox nuclear plants and research sites, should be offered to another private contractor or run directly by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
A final decision has not yet been made but industry figures with knowledge of the process said the most likely outcome was for the NDA to create a new subsidiary to take control of the Magnox clean-up programme. Such an outcome would bring an end to an embarrassing episode in which Greg Clark, business secretary, in March cancelled a deal with Cavendish Fluor Partnership, a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US, at a cost of £122m to British taxpayers.
A report by the National Audit Office last week said the bungling of one of the largest contracts awarded by the UK government raised “serious questions” about the NDA’s “ability to manage large, complex procurements”.
Those criticism were echoed on Thursday in a separate report commissioned by the government. Interim findings revealed a catalogue of human errors and systemic failings that allowed the losing bidders, US groups Energy Solutions and Bechtel, to win a High Court ruling that the procurement was flawed.
MORE: [ https://www.ft.com/content/b83c5ada-b01 ... 21c713abf4 ]
= = = = = = =
Background: January 30, 2018
----- Forwarded message from Gordon Edwards <ccnr@web.ca> -----
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 16:15:58 -0500
From: Gordon Edwards <ccnr@web.ca>
Subject: FINANCIAL TIMES: UK set to end outsourcing of radioactive clean-up
Background: January 30, 2018
The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is responsible for dealing with Britain's legacy of radioactive waste, site decontamination, and nuclear facility decommissioning, associated with civilian and military nuclear programs, dating back to the late 1940s. See [ https://www.gov.uk/government/organisat ... rity/about ]
Five years ago Ole Hendrickson and Gordon Edwards, along with Brennain Lloyd and Theresa McClenaghan, attended a Canadian Nuclear Society Conference held in Toronto. At that time the UK NDA head honcho that the cost of “cleaning up” the radioactive mess in Britain was estimated at about 70 billion pounds. Now, according to the Financial Times article below, that estimated cost has more than doubled, to about 164 billion pounds [equivalent to $288 billion Canadian].
NDA, with a staff of about 200, has signed contracts with private companies having over 18,000 employees to carry out the work in the UK. In that sense, the role of NDA is quite similar to the role of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), with a staff of about 40 (down from 3400 a few years ago).
AECL has contracted with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), run by a consortium of five multinational corporations, to deal with the federal government’s many radioactive legacies: the Chalk River Laboratories on the Ottawa River, Eldorado Nuclear’s massive radioactive contamination at Port Hope on Lake Ontario, the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment on the Winnipeg River, the Douglas Point reactor on the shore of Lake Huron, the Gentilly-1 reactor at Bécancour on the St.Lawrence River, and the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) reactor at Rolphton, Ontario.
As the attached article outlines, two of the NDA's contracts for nuclear waste management have been abruptly terminated in the last two years, one worth 6.2 billion pounds and the other worth 9 billion pounds for a total of 17.2 billion pounds [equivalent to about $30 billion Canadian].
The smaller cancelled NDA contract had to do with decommissioning the government’s fleet of dual-purpose (civilian/military) Magnox reactors. These graphite-moderated and gas-cooled nuclear reactors were designed to produce byproduct electricity as well as plutonium for nuclear weapons. The last of 26 Magnox reactors in the UK was shut down in 2015. North Korea developed its own version of the Magnox reactor and has used the plutonium produced from that reactor design for its nuclear weapons program.
The larger cancelled NDA contract had to do with the Sellafield military/civilian site, originally called Windscale. This is where Britain extracted plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel for both military and civilian purposes. Britain’s pre-eminence in this field grew out of work done in a secret Montreal Laboratory, on the slopes of Mount Royal (Université de Montréal) from 1942 to 1944, leading to the decision made in Washington DC in 1944 to establish Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Canada as part of the military program to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
British scientists at Chalk River extracted plutonium from the NRX reactor's spent fuel and sent it to Britain just months before the UK detonated its first atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands off Australia (1952). When Canada gave a copy of the NRX reactor to India in the name of “Third World Development”, India used it to produce plutonium for their first A-Bomb, detonated in 1974 under the name “Smiling Buddha”. See [ http://ccnr.org/chronology.html and http://ccnr.org/canada_britain.html ].
All of the pilot plant work for the massive Windscale reprocessing plant in Northern England was carried out at Chalk River. There were also two “reprocessing plants” built at Chalk River to extract two artificial fissile materials, plutonium and uranium-233 (elements not found in nature). The same process was later adapted to produce medical isotopes. Since reprocessing requires dissolving highly radioactive spent fuel in boiling nitric acid, Chalk River produced 21 tanks of high-level liquid radioactive wastes.
The Harper government decided to copy Britain’s failing GoCo model (government-owned, contractor-operated) to deal with Canada’s legacy of radioactive waste and nuclear decommissioning, currently estimated by the Auditor General of Canada to cost more than $7.9 billion. In the two most recent fiscal years, almost two billion dollars of taxpayer’s money has been funnelled into the coffers of the corporations that constitute the CNL consortium: SNC-Lavalin (banned for 10 years by the World Bank for unethical behaviour), CH2M (found guilty in 2015 of fraud at the US Hanford Nuclear site), Fluor (one of the cancelled contractors mentioned in the article below), Rolls-Royce Nuclear, and Atkins. See [ http://ccnr.org/CCNR_CNL_2017.pdf ].
The profit-oriented CNL consortium has radically altered the previous plans of AECL to adopt quicker, cheaper, less protective measures for “clearing the decks” of radioactive waste on Canadian government sites so as to embark on a program of expanding the nuclear industry’s prospects internationally using federal land and federal money. CNL wants to host a new generation of “Small Modular Reactors” on Canadian soil, with governmental subsidies, while spending billions of Canadian taxpayers’ dollars and pocketing lavish profits. All this without accepting any long-term responsibility for the wastes, the sites, or the appropriateness of the unprecedented approaches adopted in the interests of expediency. See [ http://ccnr.org#crl ]. And [ http://ccnr.org/CCNR_WR1_Supp_2017.pdf ].
All of this is being done in the context of a federal policy vacuum, as the Canadian government has not consulted with First Nations or other Canadians to develop a policy laying down principles that most be followed in any approach to the long-term management of post-fission radioactive wastes other than irradiated nuclear fuel, for which there is a policy in place.
See [ http://ccnr.org/Trudeau_pack_5_e.pdf ].
Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
http://www.ccnr.org
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9110
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
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