The Welsh Minister for Natural Resources, Alun Davies, has launched a call for evidence on the disposal of ‘higher-activity’ radioactive waste (HAW) in Wales as part of a policy review.

Radioactive waste background

Some HAW can remain radioactive, and thus potentially harmful to both the environment and human health, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Currently, all radioactive waste (including nuclear waste) in the UK is contained in surface-level stores across the country. Indeed, the UK’s largest nuclear processing site at Sellafield in Cumbria (where 70 per cent of the UK’s total nuclear waste either arises or is reprocessed) is scheduled to be decommissioned over the next decade, fuelling the urgency for finding suitable ways of dealing with nuclear waste, especially as a report released by the National Audit Office in November 2012 condemned the existing storage of nuclear waste at the Sellafield site as ‘outdated’.

However, to date, the UK has not implemented a final disposal solution for HAW that would ‘obviate the need for future intervention and would ensure that no harmful amounts of radioactivity are released to the environment at any point in the future’.

Despite this, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), decided that what it calls ‘geological disposal’ – burying it deep beneath the ground – is the safest way to manage HAW. But the search for a viable nuclear waste storage facility stalled last year, after councillors from Cumbria, the last remaining community to volunteer to host the site, voted against continuing the search for a site to potentially host the £12-billion underground disposal facility in the area.

Wales now ‘actively supports’ new nuclear power stations

The Welsh Government policy on HAW is currently ‘neutral’; it says it ‘neither support[s], nor oppose[s] the UK Government policy on geological disposal of higher activity radioactive waste (HAW), nor [does it] support any other disposal option’.

However, under EU regulations, Wales is required to report its policy for the safe and responsible management of radioactive waste by summer 2015, and as such, it launched a consultation on its current stance earlier this week to ‘ensure that its policy remains relevant and reflects changing circumstances’.

These ‘changing circumstances’ include the fact that the Welsh Government historically did not support the building of new power stations in Wales, but now does. Indeed, the ‘Call for Evidence: Review of Current Policy on the Disposal of Higher Activity Radioactive Waste’ document states that the Welsh Government ‘now actively supports new nuclear power stations on existing sites including e.g. the proposals for a new Wylfa Newydd power station’.

As such, the Welsh Government said it is ‘appropriate in these circumstances to consider reviewing the Welsh Government’s position on the disposal of waste that power stations such as Wylfa Newydd will produce’.

Review will ‘not necessarily result in radioactive waste being disposed of in Wales’

Despite launching the review, Davies said that no decision to change policy had yet been made and that any change would ‘not necessarily result in a disposal facility being built in Wales’ (or any other part of the UK).

Instead, the call for evidence seeks to understand the ‘views of stakeholders about the current Welsh Government policy and the options it should consider, should [it] decide to support a policy for the disposal of HAW’.

Davies said: “This call for evidence on the safe management of radioactive waste will stimulate an important debate and I would urge anyone with a view to feed into the process.

“Once the call for evidence is complete, I will make a decision on whether a full policy review is required. Any such review would be done in an open and transparent way and will involve a thorough consultation process.

"I want to reassure people that even if we did decide to review our policy for the disposal of radioactive waste this would not necessarily result in radioactive waste being disposed of in Wales or indeed any other part of the UK. Any future disposal facility would depend on a host community voluntarily coming forward."

Questions in the call for evidence include:

• ‘Should the Welsh Government review its current policy on HAW disposal?’;
• ‘If the Welsh Government reviews its current policy, should it limit its consideration of disposal options for HAW to geological disposal?’; and
• ‘If the Welsh Government should consider disposal options other than geological disposal, what should these be?’

Anyone wishing to submit evidence to the consultation must do so online or by post by24 June 2014.

Read the ‘Call for Evidence: Review of Current Policy on the Disposal of Higher Activity Radioactive Waste’ or find out more about the legacy of nuclear waste in Resource 69.