from Sunday Herald, 11 June 2006
A leaking nuclear waste dump could expose future generations to radiation levels up to 1,000 times higher than safety targets, according to the government's radioactive waste agency, Nirex.
Documents obtained by the Sunday Herald reveal that people hundreds of thousands of years in the future face an increased risk of cancer because their drinking water could be contaminated by radioactive waste buried today.
As well as posing an acute ethical dilemma, the revelation may cause immediate political difficulties for the First Minister, Jack McConnell. He is scheduled to make his first official visit to a nuclear power station at Torness in East Lothian tomorrow.
Although the visit has not been publicised by the Scottish Executive, it has already attracted criticism because it comes amidst fierce arguments over the future of nuclear power. The Executive's current policy is not to support further nuclear development "while waste management issues remain unresolved".
The high radiation doses that Nirex says could result from a waste repository deep underground in the UK have shocked experts and campaigners. And they have prompted the government's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) to reassess the risks.
In April CoRWM published its draft recommendation in favour of deep disposal, but now it is re-examining the potential health effects of future leaks. "I've got doubts about what future generations will find acceptable," said Pete Wilkinson, a member of CoRWM.
"There are still outstanding issues that we've got to resolve and one of them is the radiation impact of a natural or catastrophic failure of a repository," he added. CoRWM's final report, which won't recommend any specific sites for dumps, is due next month.
Nirex provided its estimates of future radiation doses in response to detailed questions from CoRWM. Its responses were released to the Sunday Herald on request, and are now available on the Nirex website.
Nirex puts the peak radiation dose from waste escaping from a deep repository within the next million years at ten milliSieverts a year. That is ten times higher than the international safety limit for members of the public.
Crucially, it is between 500 and 1000 times above the target doses recommended by regulatory agencies in Britain, Sweden and Japan. This makes it a "show stopper" for the whole idea of deep disposal, according to Max Wallis, a campaigner with the Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance.
"It's fundamental that we safeguard our environment for our grandchildren and the planet for generations into the distant future," he said. "A nuclear dump that could expose future residents to radiation levels far higher than are legal today is quite out of order."
Pete Roche, a former government radiation adviser and consultant to Greenpeace, said we should be aiming to greatly reduce the risk. "I'm staggered by these high doses that we could inflict on future generations," he said.
Although no site has been chosen for a waste repository the UK, Nirex has suggested that the area around the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria would be "suitable". If a separate site is needed for Scotland, Dounreay in Caithness is the favourite.
Those most at risk would be local farmers drinking water from a well "that intercepts the calculated plume of groundwater contaminated by radionuclides from the repository", Nirex said. They would be exposed to radium-226, chlorine-36, iodine-129 and uranium-238.
The maximum radiation dose they would receive "equates to the dose currently received by people living in areas of relatively high natural radiation background in the UK", Nirex added. It stressed that the risks were very low.
But that is disputed by the Green MSP, Chris Ballance. "The prospect of dumping massive levels of radioactivity into the environment of future generations would be grossly irresponsible and the antithesis of sustainable development," he said.
"We hope that Jack McConnell will take the opportunity during his visit to Torness to say to the workers that, although there are likely to be many jobs there in the short to medium term, the real opportunity for long term employment is in alternative sources of power."
Download a copy of the Nirex's responses to CoRWM here (doc).
My phrase "show stopper" referred to CoRWM’s “show”, because that claims a deep "geological" dump is an "available" solution to nuke wastes. How can it be "available" when it could transgress the ICRP 1 mSv/yr by ten times and cannot be shown to meet the UK’s 0.3 mSv/yr maximum from any nuclear facility? Indeed, assessments that give 3 orders of magnitude worse than the Swedish 0.015 mSv/yr criterion show there’s a long, long way to go before a scientist could say geological disposal is potentially “available”.
Posted by: Max Wallis | 12 June 2006 at 11:44 PM
It would be interesting to compare the risks to current and future generations from radioactive waste stored in a deep repository to those from shallow land fills containing chemical wastes with an infinite half life or from the longer term effects of mans use of fossil fuels on the environment.
Posted by: Fred Dawson | 11 June 2006 at 10:17 PM