The vast nuclear waste dump in danger from coastal erosion
The government has been warned that the vast nuclear waste dump at Drigg is in danger from coastal erosion, but plans are afoot to dump even more radioactive materials there.
As much as fans of nuclear energy love to pretend that nuclear is a clean, modern, and efficient form of power generation, Britain’s nuclear industry is actually a chaotic and mind-blowingly expensive shambles.
the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that it’s going to cost a whopping £149 billion to clean up Sellafield and numerous other abandoned nuclear power plants across the country, but they won’t even publish a timescale for this vast clean up operation.
Other experts predict that the real cost is going to be much higher. Stephen Thomas, a professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, estimates that soaring costs will drive the bill for cleaning up the UK’s nuclear waste mountain to £260 billion.
One of the major costs would be the construction of a massive underground storage facility for the 700,000 cubic metres of highly radioactive waste that already exists, plus the waste that’s yet to be produced, yet despite the importance of long-term storage, they don’t even have a site for this enormous waste dump yet, so it’s just piling up at Sellafield and being left in rotting decommissioned plants across the country.
The longer this enormous mess is left, the harder and more expensive it’s going to be to clean up.
Then there’s the absurd financial trickery that the UK government has resorted to in order to bribe the governments of France and China into building new nuclear power stations for us (we can’t build out own because successive governments privatised away our nuclear expertise).
The deal to construct the (delayed and massively over-budget) plant at Hinckley Point C requires UK energy consumers to pay double the market rate for the energy it produces for 35 years, which could end up costing the British public £30 billion.
The British public pay over the odds for electricity for decades, the governments of France and China plus a load of private subcontractors reap the profits, and the UK is left to carry the cost of the waste disposal. It’s no wonder that the former Tory energy secretary David Howell described it as "one of the worst deals ever"!
Aside from the existing 700,000 cubic metres of highly radioactive waste that needs dealing with, and the rip-off cost of new nuclear, there’s also the problem of the million cubic metres of haphazardly stored waste that’s been dumped at Drigg in Cumbria.
To put a million cubic metres into context, if it was stacked on an area the size of a football pitch, it would be 156 metres high, making it as tall as Barclays Tower in London!
The government has been repeatedly warned that this vast radioactive waste dump is in danger from coastal erosion, especially if rising global temperatures cause increased storm activity, flooding, and predicted sea level rises.
The majority of the nuclear waste at Drigg isn’t radioactive enough to kill you immediately if you came into contact with it, but it would still cause an environmental disaster in the Irish Sea if thousands of tons of it get washed into the sea.
Even though they’re well aware of the threat of coastal erosion, the site at Drigg is still being used to store the majority of the UK’s low-level nuclear waste. These days it’s sealed in metal containers (similar to shipping containers) and buried, but hundreds of thousands of cubic metres were just dumped in trenches and covered in soil between the 1950s and 1980s.
Records for what’s actually in these trenches are extremely poor, and it’s known that nuclear waste producers like the Ministry of Defence have been caught trying to illegally dump much more radioactive materials there.
Despite the well-documented risk of coastal erosion, the site at Drigg is still in operation, will continue receiving waste until at least 2050, and the owners have recently been experimenting with boreholes for the disposal of much more radioactive "intermediate" nuclear waste.
Disposal of intermediate waste in near-surface boreholes in an area they’ve been told is susceptible to coastal erosion is not just a stupid idea, it’s also unlawful under current UK nuclear waste disposal regulations.
The UK government would have to change the law to allow this kind of nuclear waste dumping, but the owners obviously wouldn’t be busy drilling experimental boreholes if they weren’t confident that the government will amend the law to allow near-surface disposal, because it’s obviously much cheaper to throw the waste down a load of holes near the coast, than to make the proposed multi-£billion geologically secure safe storage facility large enough to safely store hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of intermediate waste.
If any country in the world should be aware of the risks of disposing of nuclear waste by chucking it down holes, it should be the UK.
For decades nuclear waste was dumped in a 65 metre deep shaft at Dounreay in Scotland before radioactive sulphur reacted with seawater in the hole in 1977 to cause a nuclear waste fire, which ended the practice.
Clearing up this complicated radioactive mess at Dounreay was delayed for decades until the world’s deepest nuclear clean up operation was contracted in 2020.
Locals in Cumbria have attempted to protest against the expansion of activities at Drigg, but if the government decides to cut costs by shoving nuclear waste down boreholes in an area they’ve been warned is susceptible to coastal erosion, there won’t be much locals can do to stop it, much like the rest of us are going to be forced to pay rip-off energy bills for decades to fund the state energy companies of France and China, whether we like it or not.
The nuclear waste problem is nearly universal, and another common feature is the denial of its magnitude by government and the nuclear community. There is always some excuse for inaction, and arguments minimizing the degree of the problem - or worse, dissembling about some grand new technology such as breed and burn, as though we can extricate ourselves by the same reasoning that put us in trouble in the first place. The only way to minimize our nuclear waste problem is to minimize the production of nuclear waste, and that means decommissioning all reactors based on U235 and building no new ones. There is some hope for safe, proliferation-resistant, waste minimizing nuclear power involving sub-critical, accelerator-driven reactors based on the Th232-U233 fuel cycle, but the devil is in the details.
I will be posting a semi-technica. series on nuclear power and weapons starting 5 Sep on my Substack https:stephenschiff.substack.com. Tune in if you're interested!
I always seem to be the first to comment. But this is all getting a bit overwhelming isn’t it? The absolute horrendousness (is that a word?) just beggars belief. How can a government be so bad but stay in power? I hate the Tories but really they must have done something positive over the last few years? Surely? Now it’s not just sewage pouring into in the ocean but possibly nuclear waste. God, I’m actually glad I’m getting old... I thought Thatcher was the worst thing that ever happened politically to this country but this lot have changed my mind. They are not only corrupt but abysmally inadequate too. How many months to the General Election?