Published in Physics World, 1 Mar 2013
The UK government will have to look elsewhere to store its mounting nuclear waste after plans were rejected to assess sites in Cumbria for a £12bn underground nuclear-waste repository. On 30 January seven of the 10 members of Cumbria County Council cabinet voted against a proposal to build an underground laboratory in the region that would have acted as a testbed for a full-scale storage. District councils in west Cumbria are now hoping that the veto – the second in 14 years – will be overruled by the government.
The UK has been generating nuclear waste since its first nuclear power station fired up in 1956. Since then the country has accumulated some 470 000 m3 of waste, which could remain dangerously radioactive for up to a million years. Most of the high- and intermediate-level waste is currently in temporary above-ground storage at the Sellafield nuclear- reprocessing site in west Cumbria. The UK government, however, would like to find a permanent place to store the waste because of fears that the storage at Sellafield is deteriorating. Indeed, last year the UK’s National Audit Office reported that Sellafield’s storage posed an “intolerable risk” to people and the environment. […]
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