ENERGY Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson’s announcement that the
procurement of 9.6GW of nuclear power will begin at the end of September
demonstrates the government’s commitment to its nuclear plans despite
opposition.
The opposition has almost exclusively focused on the potential
financial costs of the procurement as they relate to the build of
nuclear plants, and on the relative costs of electricity produced by
nuclear power compared to other forms of generation.
Surprisingly little has been said about the substantial additional
costs of managing the radioactive waste that will be produced by new
nuclear plants.
This waste comes in three forms, categorised according to health
risk. While low-and intermediate-level wastes present considerable
dangers to humans, the major problem of waste disposal at nuclear power
plants relates to how to effectively dispose of so-called high-level
waste, largely in the form of spent fuel rods.
These spent fuel rods contain extremely high levels of radioactivity
in the form of uranium and plutonium, which remain lethally radioactive
for tens of thousands of years. High-level waste accounts for 95% of all
radioactivity in waste produced by a nuclear power station.
Koeberg produces about 32 tonnes of spent fuel a year; over its
predicted 40-year lifetime, it will produce 1,280 tonnes of high-level
waste.
The government is looking to build between six and eight new reactors.
Assuming that only six are built, and that each produces between 25
and 30 tonnes of high-level waste a year, they will produce about 200
tonnes of high-level waste per year.
If they each operate for 40 years, about 8,000 tonnes of high-level waste will have to be managed.
An urgent question arises: what does SA intend doing with this extremely long-lived and extraordinarily dangerous waste?
Since the operation of the first commercial nuclear power station at
Windscale in England in 1956, the problem of what to do with high-level
nuclear waste has not been solved. Historically, two options have been
mooted: reprocessing and underground storage.
Initially, it was hoped that waste would be reprocessed and recycled
back into the reactors, the so-called "closed fuel cycle". Reprocessing
plants were built in a number of countries, but they have been dogged by
technical problems (some relating to serious radioactive leakages) and
have been spectacularly expensive to operate. Most have now closed down.
THE UK’s Thorp reprocessing plant, built at great cost in the 1990s,
is due to close in 2018, leaving a decommissioning nightmare estimated
to take at least 100 years to complete, at huge cost. In Japan, the
Rokkasho reprocessing plant, which was due to open in 2008 at a cost of
R100bn, has yet to open and has so far cost nearly R400bn over a 26-year
period.
France, the only country that reprocesses nuclear fuel on a
significant scale, has only been able to do so because of a huge subsidy
from the state-owned energy company, EDF.
Despite initial hopes, a large quantity of highly radioactive waste
that still needs disposing remains after processing. There are also
serious security considerations, because reprocessing high-level waste
results in the creation of separated plutonium, which could be stolen
and worked into a simple, dirty bomb. The very existence of separated
plutonium eases nuclear proliferation.
Nuclear proponents often champion so-called "fast reactors" as a
different form of reprocessing that could solve the waste problem. These
reactors are designed to burn more plutonium than they breed.
But after 50 years of research and vast expense, not one has operated
commercially due to the high costs associated with running them and the
fact that they still produce significant quantities of high-level waste
that needs disposal. Due to these chronic limitations, most have closed
down.
The Kalkar fast reactor in Germany, which cost R100bn to build, never
operated and was sold at a huge loss in 1995 and converted into an
amusement park.
The US National Academy of Sciences stated in 2008 that the
reprocessing of nuclear fuel makes nuclear energy "more expensive, more
proliferation-prone and more controversial".
In 2015 Eskom unsurprisingly confirmed that the reprocessing of
high-level nuclear waste "was not economically viable". The only other
option, aside from ludicrous suggestions such as firing it into space,
is to store the waste. But safely storing something that remains
radioactive for geologic time frames is a cold call that may not be
possible.
The US has tried, and after spending the equivalent of R1.4-trillion,
has given up. In 2002, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was identified as the
site for an underground repository for high-level waste. Despite tens of
thousands of pages of scientific research and countless investigations,
no agreement has been reached about whether it is safe to store
high-level nuclear waste underground. The site was closed in 2011 by the
Obama administration.
In Onkalo, Finland, a R75bn underground repository is being built, despite significant opposition.
Similar options are being considered in the UK, France and Sweden.
No one knows, however, if waste can be stored safely underground for tens of thousands of years.
THE National Nuclear Regulator stated in 2001 that the Vaalputs
Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility (100km southeast of Springbok in the
Northern Cape), which accepts low-and medium-level waste, "may be" a
suitable site for an underground repository for SA’s high-level waste.
However, it also noted that SA’s "limited nuclear programme" meant the
construction of such an expensive depository may not be necessary.
In 2008, legislation was passed to create the National Radioactive
Waste Disposal Institute, tasked with managing all of SA’s radioactive
waste. It was eventually constituted in 2014 and was almost immediately
caught up in a scandal involving allegations of mismanagement.
To date, the institute appears to have done absolutely nothing, but recently advertised a tender for office space.
Given Eskom’s rejection of reprocessing and the fantastic costs
associated with building an underground repository, it stores high-level
waste above ground in cooling pools and reinforced casks.
But because there is nowhere else to put the waste, Koeberg is
running out of space in its cooling ponds (due to be full by the end of
2018) and Eskom is buying more casks at R30m each to put into a new
storage building.
However, there are substantial problems and dangers with long-term
cooling pond storage and dry cask storage. As Eskom’s planning
application revealingly notes, these casks are only a "temporary,
interim" measure.
They are designed to last no more than 60 years, and then the
high-level waste will need to be moved again — and needs to be safely
contained for at least 10,000 years.
Most worrying, however, is that nuclear power station sites are not designed to store high-level nuclear waste.
The dangers of storing it on site were revealed dramatically by the
Fukushima disaster of 2011, which resulted, and continues to result in,
tonnes of highly radioactive water leaking from its damaged storage
pools.
Such storage also presents a potential target for terrorists. On-site
storage has been rejected in the US as an unsafe and inadequate
response to the problem of high-level radioactive waste.
If SA does indeed build six or eight new reactors, in the interests
of public safety and environmental health, the government will have to
find, at the very least, a 10,000-year solution to the problem of
high-level radioactive waste.
How it will do so, and where the trillions of rand needed to do that
will come from, are questions that remain entirely unanswered as the
government forges ahead with its procurement plans.
• Overy is a freelance environmental researcher.
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