Nuclear waste is often just dumped with little thought to safe storage.
Decommissioning nuclear facilities will also create large amounts
of radioactive wastes. Many of the world's nuclear sites will
require monitoring and protection for centuries after they are
closed down.
The global volume of spent fuel was 220,000 tonnes in the year
2000, and is growing by approximately 10,000 tonnes annually.
Despite billions of dollars of investment in various disposal
options, the nuclear industry and governments have failed to come
up with a feasible and sustainable solution.
Most of the current proposals for dealing with highly radioactive
nuclear waste involve burying it in deep underground sites. Whether
the storage containers, the store itself, or the surrounding rocks
will offer enough protection to stop radioactivity from escaping in
the long term is impossible to predict.
An example of where industry plans have been exposed as flawed is
the proposed dump site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, US. After
nearly 20 years of research and billions of dollars of investment,
not one gram of spent fuel has so far been shipped to the site from
nuclear reactors across the US. Major uncertainties in the
geological suitability for waste disposal at the site remain, with
on-going investigations into manipulation of scientific data and
the threat of legal action by the State government.
In addition to high-level waste problems, there are numerous
examples of existing disposal sites containing low level waste
which are already leaking radiation into the environment. Drigg in
the UK and CSM in Le Hague, France being just two.
Currently no options have been able to demonstrate that waste will
remain isolated from the environment over the tens to hundreds of
thousands of years. There is no reliable method to warn future
generations about the existence of nuclear waste dumps.
Canadian Radioactive Waste
Canadian reactors have produced approximately 40,000 metric tonnes
of high-level radioactive waste.
After being given a mandate by the federal government to recommend
a Canadian option for the long-term management of radioactive
waste, the Nuclear Waste Management Organisation (NWMO) proposed a
plan spanning 300 years and costing $24 billion to bury Canada's
high-level radioactive waste in either Quebec, Ontario or
Saskatchewan.
The NWMO, which is controled by the nuclear industry, refused to
consider the first principle of any wise waste management programme
- elimination at source through the shutdown of nuclear
reactors.