UK Looks to Sweden for a Solution to Nuclear Waste

upstart writes:

UK looks to Sweden for a solution to nuclear waste:

Even after some 60 years of commercial and military programmes the UK's stockpile of the most dangerous high-level waste amounts to a few thousand tonnes, although there are also several hundred thousand tonnes of intermediate-level waste which will have to be dealt with as well.

[...] "Used fuel assemblies are intensely radioactive, and that radioactivity takes a long time to decay," explains Prof Neil Hyatt, chief scientific adviser to the UK's Nuclear Waste Services.

"After about 1,000 years, about 10% of the original radioactivity is left, and that will slowly decay away over about 100,000 years or so."

[...] "We can't rely on institutional control for timescales of much longer than a few centuries," says Prof Hyatt.

"The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.

"So the surface of the Earth and human civilisations change much more quickly than the rate at which the radioactivity in this spent nuclear fuel can decay."

Sweden has already reached its own conclusions. It plans to bury its waste in rock deep underground and leave it there for good.

This is a process known as geological disposal, and the country's scientists have spent decades studying different ways in which it could be carried out.

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