The long future of nuclear waste
Although enthusiasm for atomic energy has waxed and waned over the decades, Bárbara Pinho finds the question of waste has yet to be solved
The millions of cubic metres of nuclear waste produced since the 1950s need handling. Because of the risk nuclear waste poses to ecosystems, industries need to manage and deposit it all safely. And although nuclear power has been around for decades, deposits to permanently store waste have not. Nuclear waste is broadly defined as waste that is contaminated with radioactivity or is radioactive itself. Countries have slightly different approaches to categorising their nuclear waste but, as a rule of thumb, one way to distinguish each type is by radioactivity and how long it will remain unsafe. Low-level waste materials are only slightly contaminated – most of the waste produced in the nuclear industry is low-level and easier to handle. Nuclear sites also produce high-level waste, albeit in much smaller quantities. Most of the radionuclides in high-level waste will decay away during the first 1000 years, while some will persist for tens of thousands to over one million years. Much long-lived nuclear ‘waste’ is spent fuel, which can be reprocessed and used again, but not all countries do this. A geological deposit (also known as GDF) is an underground site where high-level waste can be deposited for hundreds to thousands of years. While it may sound quite straightforward, making what looks like a massive hole in the ground to store nuclear waste takes an enormous amount of money, time and political work.