So are you pro-nuclear power (i.e. the construction of nuclear power plants in the UK) or do you think we need more time to find a way to deal with waste adequately before we open more plants?
No - I'm like George Monbiot, a pragmatist though. I would much sooner we shifted to proper use of renewables (not just a scattering of wind turbines and solar PV) and junked the nuclear power plants. However, given the rate of change and the stupidity of continuing to burn hydrocarbons, I am unfortunately reconciled to a new generation of NPPs.
The problem of radioactive waste is a political problem, related to finding a publically acceptable site for disposal, not essentially a technical one. When environmentalists go on about the problem of nuclear waste and that there are no existing waste repositories (although they usually use the word 'dumps' which is confusing as there are lots of radwaste dumps - Priypat river and marshes spring to mind as do the Russian subs sunk off the northern Norwegian coast, not to mention the shaft at Dounreay and the whole Hanford site in the US) it's either untrue (many countries have existing low level waste repositories like Drigg, Rokkasho in Japan, Centre de L'Aube in France, SFR in Sweden etc.) or misses the point - no repository for high-level waste (HLW - vitrified result of reprocessing of spent fuel) and spent fuel has been required as the waste is too thermally hot (as a byproduct of radioactive decay of the short-lived isotopes) to be disposed of until it's been stored for at least 40 years in most cases. Then it's not economically viable to build a repository at depths of 500 to 1000m (significant engineering challenge but completely within current technological means) and keep it open for 50 or 60 years while the waste from today and maybe the next couple of decades cools sufficiently to be disposed of.
So most countries want a repository for HLW and spent fuel ready to be operating by around 2030 or so, to operate for about 30 to 40 years (or less) to accept waste from the current generation of power plants up until about 2025 when most of them will have been or will need to be decommissioned. The Finns and the Swedes have chosen sites for spent fuel repositories and are excavating, the French have more or less chosen the site, the Germans are still thinking about it having knocked the old East German project more or less on the head (for political reasons) and the USA are going back to basics since Yucca Mountain was shut down by Obama (some technical justification - it always was a b****d project completely different in strategy from the rest of the world). The UK, like Japan, is trying a volunteering approach to finding a site as, within reason (major fault activity, active or dormant volcanoes, geothermal activity giving rise to hot springs all tend to disqualify areas), any geology is useable if you have the right engineering.
This isn't to discount the technical difficulties entirely but where there's political will, an active public debate around the issue so that everybody can be reasonably well-informed, and trust in the regulators (including that they are free of political influence as well as being honest and technically competent), then radioactive waste disposal projects can actually concentrate on those technicalities.
! They love it !!!
