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Deeper underground

With towns rejecting nuclear waste storage, European alternative sought

April 9th, 2008 issue

SÚRAO's design for its nuclear waste repository
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High-level nuclear waste is currently stored at the Dukovany nuclear power plant in south Moravia.
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Vítězslav Duda has been charged with an unenviable task.
As managing director of the government’s Nuclear Waste Repository Authority (SÚRAO), Duda is responsible for staking out a viable location for an underground facility to store the country’s growing stock of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Currently stored onsite at the country’s two nuclear power plants, the waste should find a permanent home by 2065, when the government expects storage facilities to start running out of room.
Following the example of other countries that rely on nuclear energy, SÚRAO has plans for a deep geological nuclear waste repository, where spent fuel could be stored in chambers deep underground.
The initial geological research was straightforward enough, Duda said, and by 2003 the sturdy granite massif that underlies much of the country had allowed SÚRAO scientists to pinpoint six eligible locations for the 500-meter (1,640-foot) dig.
Yet, when talking up the government’s plans to the mayors of the potential host municipalities, Duda slammed into a wall of resistance from locals, which postponed further negotiations for the following six years.
“We are trying to convince the municipalities, but it’s not going too well. The repository is still regarded as a danger and a threat,” he said. “People typically want things to stay as they are. They would probably react negatively to a new supermarket in their area, let alone a nuclear waste repository.”
As a number of the chosen municipalities have voiced their disapproval to SÚRAO’s plans through public referendums, Industry and Trade Minister Martin Říman recently offered up an alternative solution to the country’s nuclear waste conundrum.
Instead of following the European Union’s current consensus, which leaves each member state responsible for its own nuclear waste disposal, Říman said it may be possible to pool the waste into several deep geological waste repositories serving the entire EU.
“It’s exactly the type of problem the EU should engage itself in,” he told the radio station Frekvence 1 last month. “I consider it nonsense and ... a waste of economic resources for each [nuclear waste producing state] to spend billions on building its own repository. Two or three would suffice for the whole of Europe.”
Říman said that he plans to raise this alternative on an official level in May, when Prague plays host to the European Nuclear Energy Forum.
While wary of their political feasibility, Duda and other nuclear experts agree that a small number of repositories would be all that Europe needs.
Constructing two or three storage sites would be analogous to the situation in the United States, Duda said, where plans are under way to store spent fuel from a proportional amount of nuclear plants at a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
In addition, technological advancement in the use of sophisticated reactors to recycle spent fuel is expected to slow future production of nuclear waste, said Phil Metcalf, head of the radioactive waste and spent fuel repository unit at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Even with the way things are now, you’re not talking about a massive amount of matter,” he added. “A power plant typically produces 50 to 100 tons of spent fuel [per year], which is not a lot in terms of volume.”
Even if Říman’s new EU-embracing view takes hold, it may still be too early for the selected Czech towns to breathe a sigh of relief. According to Říman, the abundance of geologically favorable territory makes the country an ideal candidate for hosting a potential European repository.
“It could very well happen that one of those two or three repositories ends up in the Czech Republic,” he said.
As Duda points out, finding a country willing to host a repository site will not be easy. While several member states, including Poland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the Baltic states may express interest in a joint repository, few would agree to build it on their own land.
“When it comes to these types of sensitive questions, Europe’s integration efforts have not advanced far enough to unite the interests of individual nations,” Duda said, adding that the situation was further complicated by laws prohibiting the importation of nuclear waste, which have been adopted by virtually all EU states.
People power
Whatever course of action the government decides to take, the success of the country’s nuclear waste disposal program depends on public approval, Metcalf said. Although the staunch opposition of the six towns may seem like an insurmountable obstacle, the experience of countries like Sweden and Finland, where repository projects are already under way, suggest public acceptance is a matter of time.
“In Finland, there was a lot of communication with the communities until they started to feel comfortable,” Metcalf said. “This seems to be the recipe for success.”
From an ecological perspective, most experts agree that deep geological repositories pose little risk. Confined by layers of casing made of durable materials such as copper, the spent fuel is stacked into solid rock tunnels deep underground, where it gradually loses radioactivity.
“In the course of 10,000 to 100,000 years, the levels of radioactivity become comparable to original uranium,” Metcalf said. “We’ve been storing spent fuel for 50 years and there’s been no sort of real problem.”
Bound by a clause in the government’s official agenda, which lists “transparent communication with municipalities” as a requirement for future repository negotiations, the Industry and Trade Ministry and SÚRAO continue to court their mayors, sending them on informational excursions to Swedish research facilities and offering substantial financial incentives to the towns.
“We’re not in pre-1989 times anymore, when the state didn’t care about citizens’ opinions or damaging the environment,” said Industry and Trade Ministry spokesman Tomáš Bartovský. “The times are different. Citizens have the right to halt the construction of state projects, but a fear that the state will bulldoze their opinions lingers on. That is not the case.”


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