Like the U.S. Department of Energy, the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is in the market for local communities open to hosting an underground disposal facility for radioactive waste.
“Our mission goes beyond existing sites,” David Peattie, CEO of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said in a recent annual report for 2021-2022. The NDA is chiefly responsible for remediating 17 nuclear sites, including the United Kingdom’s first nuclear power stations.
“We’re also responsible for identifying a suitable site and a willing host community for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF),” the chief executive said in the report published this month.
Four communities are being considered “and a significant amount of technical work and stakeholder engagement is underway,” Peattie said in the 250-page document.
“It will take years of detailed assessments before a final siting decision is taken, with the latest planning assumption that the GDF will be available for ILW [intermediate-level waste] from around 2050-2060 and high level waste and spent fuel from 2075,” Peattie added.
The NDA formed geologic disposal working groups in 2021, with provisions to provide financial incentives to communities willing to host an underground waste site. The incentive would amount to £2.5 million, roughly equivalent to U.S. $3 million per year “if site investigations progress to the point of deep borehole drilling,” according to the report.
The NDA hopes construction of an underground disposal facility can start as early as 2035 and be completed around 2045, according to the report. “Safe interim storage of wastes at Sellafield” and other nuclear sites will continue until such time that waste transfers are made to the Geological Disposal Facility, according to the report.
Last July, NDA became the owner of the UK’s Low Level Waste Repository in west Cumbria, “providing safe, permanent disposal for a range of radioactive wastes,” according to the report.