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No room at the dump: NFLA fears Johnson’s nuclear ambitions will lead to need for second unwanted underground facility

Like the standing joke about buses turning up late and in pairs, the
Nuclear Free Local Authorities fear that Boris Johnson’s commitment to
treble Britain’s nuclear generating capacity by 2050 will create so much
new toxic nuclear waste that the government will want to build a second
underground nuclear dump in the next two decades.

A large, and much maligned, element in last week’s UK Energy Security Strategy was the
pledge to build up to eight new large nuclear power stations over the next
three decades, generating 24 gigawatts of electricity, and the UK could run
out of room to store the resultant radioactive waste if the Prime
Minister’s plan becomes reality.

Professor Claire Corkhill is Chair in
Nuclear Material Degradation and EPSRC Early Career Research Fellow and
Reader at the University of Sheffield, and a member of the Committee on
Radioactive waste Management (CORWM) which advises the government.
Professor Corkhill has publicly commented that existing plans for the dump
will only provide sufficient capacity to take the legacy waste from 70
years of operations and waste from up to 16 gigawatts of nuclear new build,
and has expressed concern about ‘rushing to expand nuclear power until
the implementation of radioactive waste policy [i.e. the GDF] has
progressed further’.

 NFLA 13th April 2022

April 16, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes