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What to do with Britain’s radioactive waste?

   December 14, 2025 by Ian Fairlea,  beyondnuclearinternational .

“………………………………………………………………………………… Radioactive nuclear waste is produced by all nuclear activities. For example, uranium mining produces a great deal of waste in the form of ore spoil like all mining. Since uranium is radioactive, so are its ore wastes. So also are all the processes of refining the ore, enriching the uranium, turning it into fuel for reactors, transportation, burning it in nuclear power stations, processing the used fuel, and its handling and storage. They all create more nuclear waste.

The reason is that everything that comes into contact with radioactive materials, including the containers in which they are stored or moved and even the buildings in which they are handled, become contaminated with radioactivity or are activated by radiation

All radioactive waste is dangerous to human life as exposure to it can cause leukaemia and other cancers. It is usually categorised as low, intermediate or high-level waste. As the radioactivity level increases, so does the danger. Extremely high levels of radioactivity can kill anyone coming into contact with it – or just getting too close to it – within a matter of days or weeks.

Radioactive materials slowly lose their radioactivity and so can become in theory safe to handle but in most cases this is a very slow process. Plutonium-239, for instance, has a half-life of over 24,000 years which means it will remain lethal for over 240,000 years. Other radio-isotopes remain radioactive for millions or even billions of years.

The safe, long-term storage of nuclear waste is a problem that is reaching crisis point for both the civil nuclear industry and for the military.

During the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, the development of the British atomic bomb was seen as a matter of urgency. Dealing with the mess caused by the production, operating and even testing of nuclear weapons was something to be worried about later, if at all.

For example, the Ministry of Defence does not really have a proper solution for dealing with the highly radioactive hulls of decommissioned nuclear submarines, apart from storing them for many decades. As a result, 19 nuclear-powered retired submarines are still waiting to be dismantled, with more expected each year. Yet Britain goes on building these submarines.

This callous disregard for the future has spilled over to the nuclear power industry. For example, at Dounreay, in the north of Scotland, nuclear waste and scrap from the experimental reactor and reprocessing plants were simply tipped down a disused shaft for over 20 years. No proper records of what was dumped were kept and eventually, in 1977, an explosion showered the area with radioactive debris. In April 1998, it was finally announced that excavation and safe removal of the debris had cost £355 million.

The problems of long term, secure storage of nuclear waste are unsolved and growing more acute year by year. Earlier attempts by the nuclear industry to get rid of it by dumping it in the sea were stopped by environmental direct action, trades union protests and now by law.

All details concerning military nuclear waste are regarded as official secrets. However, large and growing quantities of radioactive waste exist at the Rosyth and Devonport dockyards and in particular at the Aldermaston and Burghfield Atomic Weapons Establishments.

One feature of Aldermaston and Sellafield in particular is that they are old sites, and have grown up in an unplanned, haphazard way. New buildings are fitted in between old, sometimes abandoned, buildings. Some areas and buildings are sealed off and polluted by radioactivity. Local streams, and in the case of Sellafield the sea shore, are polluted. The demolition of old radioactive buildings is a delicate, slow and dangerous process. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the amount of nuclear waste can only be estimated.

Civil intermediate level solid waste is mainly stored at Sellafield awaiting a decision on a national storage facility.

Military intermediate level solid waste is stored where it is created: dockyards, AWE plants etc. Both civil and military high level solid waste is generally moved to Sellafield for temporary storage.

The major problems are with the long-term storage of intermediate and in particular high-level wastes. Since these are very dangerous and very long-lived, any storage facility has to be very secure (i.e. well-guarded) and safer over a longer period – some tens of thousands of years – than anything yet designed and built by humanity.

Because of this very long time scale, it can never be sealed up and forgotten. Containers corrode with time. There are earth movements. Water seeps through rocks. The waste will have to be stored in such a form that it cannot be stolen and misused and in such a way that it can be inspected and if necessary retrieved and moved.

Plans to dig a trial deep storage facility under the Sellafield site were thrown out in 1997. Geological evidence suggested that the local rock is too fissured and liable to be affected by water seepage.

This threw all the nuclear industry’s plans into confusion. Instead of having a storage site ready by 2010, the date has been put back more or less indefinitely. No alternative site has even been identified.

Apart from the technical, geological problems, few communities seek a huge, long-term nuclear waste storage site in their neighbourhood. Indeed the original choice of Sellafield was as much political as technical. With most local jobs depending on nuclear industry already, there would have been less local opposition than elsewhere.

Nuclear waste is a problem that the nuclear industry has failed to consider seriously for over sixty years but one that can no longer be put off for future generations to cope with.

The effects of any nuclear accidents, such as those at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, are also very long-lasting and will affect future generations. The problems of nuclear waste are nowhere near solution. The history of the nuclear industry does not inspire confidence………………………………………………………. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/12/14/does-britain-really-need-nuclear-power/

December 15, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, UK, wastes