Radioactive waste to be put in £18bn hole

Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

Radioactive waste from a new generation of British nuclear power stations will be buried deep underground in a storage facility that could cost up to £18 billion to build, under plans to be announced by the Government today.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, will give the formal green light to a plan to construct a “deep geological repository” for permanent disposal of the 200 tonnes of high-level waste produced annually by the ten new reactors planned for Britain.
Each reactor will produce about 20 tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel per year, which will remain lethal for up to 100,000 years.
The store will also provide a permanent place for the stockpile of about 5,000 canisters of high-level nuclear waste from the country’s past civil and military nuclear programmes, which are housed in a temporary facility at the Sellafield plant in West Cumbria.

The Government’s announcement today that it is satisfied with the arrangements it has created for handling Britain’s nuclear waste stockpile will form part of a series of six National Policy Statements on British energy policy designed to fast-track big energy projects — including nuclear power stations, giant wind farms and clean coal plants — through the planning system.
The projects are all considered essential to maintaining the security of Britain’s energy supply while meeting the Government’s goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
Mr Miliband has said that the planning rules are essential. “We can’t build a 21st-century energy supply with a 20th-century planning system,” he said.
Britain generates 15 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy but wants to increase this to at least 25 per cent by 2025. An increase of 55 per cent in total energy demand is expected by 2050, and all of this will need to come from low-carbon sources.
The announcement today will also include a list of 11 likely sites for new nuclear power stations — including Hinkley Point in Somerset, Sizewell in Suffolk and Wylfa in Angelsey, as well as possible greenfield sites where plants may be built in future. One proposed site for a new reactor where an existing nuclear station exists, Dungeness in Kent, may be rejected because of its low- lying location, which leaves it under threat from rising sea levels. But a site for the nuclear waste store, which is expected to take decades to build, is unlikely to be chosen for many years.
The Government wants a community to volunteer to host it in exchange for a package of jobs and benefits, but so far only one has expressed an interest — West Cumbria.
The so-called National Policy Statements are part of a strategy to strip local authorities of the power of approving big energy projects. A new organisation — the Infrastructure Planning Commission — will instead take decisions. Its aim is to cut the time required to win planning approval from seven years to one year.
Greenpeace said that the Government “still has no environmentally acceptable solution to the problem of dealing with radioactive wastes”.
Additional policy statements will be made today on fossil fuels, renewables, gas supply and electricity networks.