MANCHESTER, England — Transparency will be the focus as the U.K. government tries to avoid failing for a third time to build a geologic disposal facility (GDF) for high-level radioactive waste, an official with the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said Tuesday.
“There’s quite a lot of trust that needs to be built in the communities, and that is what we’re working on now, as well as our engagement strategy to take that forward,” Natalyn Ala, GDF siting director for NDA subsidiary Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) Ltd., said here at the 2016 Nuclear Decommissioning Conference Europe. “Trust does not happen right away.”
Ala outlined progress of the GDF project during a scheduled appearance at the conference. The siting project, restarted in 2014 after two misfires, is now expected to be complete by 2040.
The U.K. most recently failed to site a repository in 2013, after the central government pursued two locations in Cumbria — home to the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing site and regarded as the U.K. nuclear industry’s epicenter. Locals in the two districts, Copeland and Allerdale, claimed the central government was withholding information during the siting process.
“We’re trying to be more up front with what we do now,” Ala said.
RWM plans to solicit interest from potential hosts in 2017 for the planned repository that would be located 200 to 1,000 meters underground, where hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of nuclear waste could be stored for about 100,000 years. After narrowing the list of potential host sites, RWM plans to move forward with two willing communities for deep borehole field tests.
A 2014 white paper, which designated RWM as the site’s developer, lays out a broad timeline for the process: national geological screening, community engagement, and land-use development are expected to take two years. Additional community engagement, site investigation, and facility design and planning are expected to take anywhere from 15 to 20 years. Construction, operation, and closure would last an additional 100 years.
The two potential host communities would receive up to £2.5 million per year for participation in the tests, in addition to construction costs. The U.K. has three types of rock that could be feasible for the project: granite, clay, and salt. The borehole tests, which would involve drilling into area rock formations, would allow RWM to determine which methods and sites are feasible for actual storage of nuclear waste.
Ala was asked how RWM will avoid the same situation it fell into in 2013. She responded that a consultation from that year, which produced the 2014 white paper, provided lessons learned from the previous attempt. She then described how the potential host communities in Cumbria felt they didn’t have enough information up front.
“For example, geology, they felt that government at the time seemed to be a bit secretive and they were withholding information back when they knew more information than they were leading on. We’re trying to be more up front with what we do now,” she said.
An audience member suggested that Copeland, which volunteered itself in the last cycle, is the perfect location, given its relationship to Sellafield. The Cumbria County Council ultimately sided with opponents to the project in January 2013, vetoing the search for a potential site in Cumbria. Ala described the siting effort as a national process, and said RWM is not targeting any particular community.
“If Copeland comes forward in 2017, then we’ll speak to them,” she said. “If other communities come forward, we’ll speak to them, as well. … One thing we don’t want to end up doing is putting all our eggs in one basket, and talking to one community, and for them to back out again. So we need to have this balance of talking to communities around the country, and try to measure their level of engagement and seriousness to press going forward.”
