These developments are being closely monitored from Britain, which also intends to build a GDF, although repeated attempts to find a suitable site have been hampered by political intransigence, as well as fierce opposition from local protesters and environmentalists.Ĭurrent efforts to find a site and a population willing to host it now follow a “consent-based” approach, with the government agency Nuclear Waste Services establishing partnerships with local communities to involve them in the process.Īs an incentive, these communities will be offered a £1m investment in local initiatives when they sign up, with this figure increasing to £2.5m if deep drilling is undertaken.įour such partnerships have been established since this process began in 2018. Work on a similar project across the Baltic Sea in Finland started in 2015. The project is expected to cost about 19 billion Swedish kroner (1.5 billion pounds $1.8 billion) and create 1,500 jobs, although construction will take decades. The humid conditions in Oskarshamn are perfect for testing nuclear waste containers, says Ylva StenqvistĮarlier this year, the Swedish government approved plans for a true geological disposal facility (GDF) to be built in Forsmark, some 150km north of Stockholm. “So we deliberately chose this location to speed up some of the experiments, really put our materials and our methods under stress and see how they hold up in this pretty aggressive environment.” “Because if we conduct our experiments in a really dry area, we have to wait forever for any results. “This side was chosen because it’s quite wet,” she explains. But according to Ylva Stenqvist, project manager at the country’s nuclear power plant operator, SKB, it’s perfect for testing. Such a humid environment would not be suitable for a real repository. The bedrock here is rugged and flows through salt water – ancient brine that has migrated far up from the Baltic Sea over thousands of years. It is used for experiments studying how waste can be packaged and buried, and how the materials used might degrade over time. Hundreds of meters below the surface, a network of huge man-made caves has been dug into the rock. Much of the research was carried out at the Aspo Hard Rock Laboratory, a facility built near Oskarshamn in the south of the country. Sweden has experimented with storing nuclear waste underground at the Aspo Hard Rock Laboratory This is a process known as geological disposal, and the country’s scientists have spent decades studying various ways it might be carried out. It plans to bury its waste deep underground in rocks and leave it there forever. Sweden has already drawn its own conclusions. “So the surface of the earth and human civilizations are changing much faster than the rate at which the radioactivity in this spent nuclear fuel can decay.” The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. “The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years. “We cannot rely on institutional control for periods much longer than a few centuries,” says Prof. “After about 1,000 years, about 10% of the original radioactivity remains, which will slowly decay over about 100,000 years.” ‘Spent fuel is highly radioactive and this radioactivity takes a long time to decay,’ explains Prof Neil Hyatt, senior scientific adviser to the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services. The question of what to do with it afterwards has occupied many governments, including the British one, for years.Įven after around 60 years of commercial and military programmes, the UK stockpile of the most hazardous high-level waste is a few thousand tonnes, although there will also be several hundred thousand tonnes of intermediate-level waste that will also need to be treated. Nuclear waste must be cooled before it can be shipped to other storage sites Intense radioactivity generates a lot of heat, and this type of material needs to be chilled for a long time before it can be removed for storage.
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