The wasteland
oger ighfie isair1thfi is set to lead the way on decommissioning
I was working in Pluto, a 1950s-generation research reactor in Harwell, Oxfordshire, when the issue of nuclear waste got personal. The alarm sounded to signal that refuelling was under way and so I walked as far from the core as I could and took refuge next to an innocent-looking pipe. Moments later, my radiation monitor gave a loud beep. The pipe I had chosen to shelter next In was the one into which the operators dropped highlyradioactive spent fuel rods.
The rod that set off my alarm eventually ended up in Dounreay, Caithness, where it was reprocessed. More than two decades later, the radioactive waste that scrambled my DN A remains pail of the nation's mounting pile of atomic detritus, a millstone around the neck of the nuclear industry.
For as long as I can remember, the anti-nuclear movement has complained — quite rightly — that the big problem with nuclear power is how to clean up the mess. If this question could be convincingly settled, it would be of profound significance. The economics of nuclear generation would be transparent. One of the most prevalent safety fears would be settled, helping to soothe some of that nuclear angst. And we might actually launch an informed discussion about the future of the ugly kid of the energy, family and whether it should be used to slow climate change.
On the day that Mr Blair told us his fears about this environmental challenge, one 'so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it alters radically human existence'. I found myself in a poky office in the Department of Trade and Industry mulling over the fate of vintage British nuclear plants, including the one where I once worked.
Before me sat the government's shiny new 'Nuclear Eraser', Sir Anthony Cleaver. The former IBM UK chairman, mem her of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority is now at the helm of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (\l)A). His job is to clean up 20 sites managed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAFA, slogan: 'Restoring our environment') and British Nuclear Fuels. With funding of £2 billion annually, the Authority will spend the next century or so deleting some of the best known bits of Britain's nuclear history. That includes Dounreay, famous for the waste shall that exploded in 1977 and the distinctive dome of its fast reactor (now listed by Historic Scotland); Sellafield, the nation's best known nuclear leak farm and former home of Windscale, site of the West's worst nuclear accident—the 1957 fire. And, of course, there is Calder Hall, which hecanw the world's first fully commercial nuclear power station when the Queen declared it open in 1956.
The nuclear industry has come a long way from its glory days, when atom-drunk pundits told us how nuclear electricity would be too cheap to meter. artificial suns would ripen crops and we would all drive atomic-powered 'Nucleon' cars. These days the talk is of nuclear risk and how to make it 'as low as reasonably practicable'. The amount of money spent on preventing each death in industry has been boosted from XI million to £2 million for radiation-induced deaths. In recent years, the industry has even pondered how to tell a post-apocalyptic aboriginal to steer clear of an ancient radioactive site with signs, symbols, even superstitions.
Unlike the days when Dounreay's dodgy waste shaft was filled with God knows what, much thought is now given to what is stored and how. Sir Anthony volunteers that the clean-up programme will cost 'tens of billions', but if history is anything to go by, it will he much more than he thinks, have been told that the programme's price tug will be at least £48 billion. 'Our job is to very clearly make it less,' he
protests. 'We'd jolly well better do it.' The NDA hopes to do this by making the clean-up commercial. Contracts will at first remain with BNEL and UKAEA but, over time, could be placed with third parties following competitive tenders. By the end of 2008, 'We are supposed to have completed half those sites.'
But what to do with all that nuclear waste? The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management is due to report at 2006. Will they have a plan? Sir Anthony gets defensive. 'I have just been told that they will report.' Like Inc. he thinks that the biggest problems remain more political than technical. There is no doubt that engineers, technologists and scientists will dream up deep geological ways to dispose of the waste. But this government looks unlikely to decide what to do with it given its historical links with the anti-nuclear movement, all-pervasive nimbyisin and the way politicians have fudged the nuclear waste issue for half a century.
But the nuclear industry should riot get despondent. Environmentalists like to distort debates about technologies by comparing the threat they pose with a zero-risk utopia. That makes nuclear look bad. Compared with the dominant source of man-made energy on the planet, however, the picture changes. Indeed, nuclear is lieginning to look qiiite radiant given the emerging realisat ion of what will come from burning too much coal, oil and gas.
While it is possible to detect a single decaying radioactive atom, scientists are still puzzling over the ways that vast quantities of carbon are cycled through the atmosphere, oceans, bogs, soils and food chains. When set alongside decades of work on nuclear waste disposal, 'carbon abatement technologies' to capture and store earl on dioxide look immature. Ironically, coal-fired power plants throughout the world are the major sources of the radioactive materials — uranium and thorium — released into the environment.
The risks posed by Iiissil-fuel generation appear much bigger and less well understood than those posed by nuclear. In his speech on climate change, Mr Blair said that the 2003 European heat wave, which resulted in 26,000 premature deaths and cost $13.5 billion, was iiilluenced by glolial warming. His chief scientist, Sir David King, argues that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. Global-warming sceptics are right to point out that we don't yet grasp the complexity of the Earth's climate system. let alone the influence of the Sun and various natural influences and ct-cles. Our computer mod els are not good enough to predict the scale and impact of future change with much confidence. But that change is under way is accepted by the vast majority of climate boffins and our inability to work out the full implications seems more won-ying than any future Chernobyl catastrophe.
Britain's pioneering nuclear sites are now fading away. Cidcheth near Warrington, where radioactive material was once handled, was demolished in the early 1990s and is now a. housing estate. The Winfrith site in Dorset, which housed nine reactors in its heyday, will be cleaned up by 2020 — 30 years earlier than planned — and 125 acres have already been sold off to be turned into a technology centre. The UK.AF,A has decommissioned a total of 14 research reactors and, by as early as 2025, the one where I once worked should have disappeared.
The demise of these dirty old sites is something to celebrate. Britain led the way in nuclear generation. Now it leads the way in showing how to clear up the mess. We are close to finding out how much it really costs to make carbon-free electricity from nuclear plants. Fingers crossed we may even be close to working out what to do with all that waste. It has been a long time coming, but we are also close to knowing whether Britain should allow a new generation of nuclear plants to bloom. Given the rapid expansion of electricity demand in developing countries, nuclear generation will be no miracle cure.. But it could help.
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