4.1.6 Nuclear waste

One of the big issues with nuclear power is what do we do with the waste? There’s low, intermediate and high level waste. The waste created by Hinckley C, how will we dispose of that?

For starts, one thing to try and get across is the fact that there’s much less waste created by modern-like water reactors than there was with our historic gas-cooled reactor types. For instance the pressure vessel at Hinckley, it’s only 5 metres, just under 5 metres in diameter, so that’s tiny and we get 1600 megawatts of power out of something that’s only 15 feet in diameter.

It’s smaller than this studio we’re sitting in.

Yeah it’s smaller than this studio we’re in, so it’s an incredibly dense source of electricity for us, so the waste volumes are much, much smaller in this type of reactor than they are in more traditional gas-cooled reactors.

Where’s it going to go though?

Well the vessel itself will be decontaminated and then cut up and packaged into concrete for disposal in the ILW repository and that will eventually be built here in the UK. And most of the rest of the IWL that is created in the course of reactor operations will be packaged in concrete, in concrete containers, or concrete in steel containers, again for destination to the repository.

We do have quite a big legacy of nuclear waste though in this country, how large is the stockpile, how much is Hinckley C going to contribute to that?

Hinckley C will only contribute a tiny amount of that. If we replace the whole of the nuclear fleet in the UK, it was only going to add 10 per cent to the overall waste inventory that we already have, so Hinckley’s only going to contribute 1 to 3 per cent of that total. Most of the legacy we’ve got to remember was generated partly as a result of the military programme back in the early days of nuclear energy and in development of the early prototype reprocessing plants and the reactors themselves. And the choice of Magnox – which needs reprocessing – as a fuel for our early type of reactors. So nearly all the legacy is contributable to those early years.

So you mentioned the geological repository, but we don’t really have concrete plans for that yet, we don’t know where it’s going to be built?

That’s true. So during the course of the reactor operations, which will last up to 60 years, all the wastes generated – intermediate level waste – will be stored on site in an engineered store and LLW – that’s low-level waste – that’s created will go as it always has done from UK nuclear power stations to the national low-level site up at Drigg in Cumbria.

And what about the high-level waste, so that’s things like the spent fuel rods, they are highly radioactive, what are the plans for storing them?

Well spent fuel rods will be stored on site for the duration of the reactor operations, so they’ll be on site for 60 years in the spent fuel storage pool.