The United Kingdom as of April 1, 2016, held 4.6 million cubic meters of radioactive waste and expects to produce at least another 170,000 cubic meters through the year 2125, according to the government’s latest accounting.
The current and future stockpile of 4.77 million cubic meters, covering all wastes after packaging, does not include 1 cubic meters that has been disposed of to date, says the report released Monday. It also does not cover waste that might be produced from future nuclear power plants.
The inventory is released every three years, and the new figure has risen by roughly 50,000 cubic meters (about 1 percent) of waste from 2013, the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy said in the report.
The waste was primarily produced by the nation’s nuclear power industry through production of nuclear fuel, reactor operations, spent fuel reprocessing, and site decommissioning. The lesser contributors are spent fuel reprocessing at the Sellafield site in Cumbria, nuclear weapons production and nuclear-powered submarine operations, and medical diagnosis and treatment activities.
Only 1,500 cubic meters of the total amount of forecast material (again, after packaging) is high-level waste, but it represents more than 95 percent of the radioactivity. The great majority of the volume is very low-level waste, at 2.72 million cubic meters; then 1.6 million cubic meters of low-level waste; and 449,000 cubic meters of intermediate-level waste.
The existing waste primarily consists of nuclear reactors, reprocessing facilities, and components of other current nuclear sites. It will require processing as these facilities continue to close and are decommissioned and remediated over the next century, according to the report.
Future waste production projections account for closure of today’s operational nuclear power sites from 2023 to 2035; fuel reprocessing through 2020; the 2020 shuttering of the European Torus fusion experiment; defense-related waste through 2110; and medical and industrial waste up to 2080.
