RE: Remember when1 Apr 2022 12:52
According to the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the estimated cost of cleaning up the waste from 20th-century nuclear power plants currently stands at £131bn. What’s more, this figure does not include the construction of a geological disposal facility (GDF), a vast underground storage space for waste which was first suggested nearly 50 years ago but which has yet to even find a viable location.
Westminster’s Nuclear All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) published a roadmap calling for 15GW of new nuclear generation by 2035 and 30GW by 2050, comprised of both large-scale plants of the Hinkley C-scale alongside small modular reactors (SMRs) being developed by a Rolls-Royce-led consortium.
According to the NDA, the spent fuel from this coming generation of plants will not be cool enough to be moved to a GDF – if one is ever built – for 140 years, further adding to the UK’s nuclear waste disposal problem. So not only is the UK struggling to deal with its existing waste on a mass scale, in seeking to meet its future energy demands and enable the net zero transition, it will create enormous amounts of high-level waste for which there is currently no strategy to deal with.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/the-engineer-poll-nuclear-waste-disposal/