MANCHESTER — Transparency will be the focus as the government tries to avoid failing for a third time to build a Geologic Disposal Facility (GDF) for high-level 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 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 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 upfront with what we do now,” Ala said.
RWM plans to solicit interest from potential GDF hosts in 2017. The planned repository would be located 200 to 1,000 meters underground. After narrowing the list of potential host sites, RWM plans to move forward with two willing communities for deep borehole field tests. RWM has not set a definitive timeline for completing the tests.
The two 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 whether a site is suitable for actual storage of nuclear waste.
