nuclear waste

Chapelcross nuclear power station, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, opened in 1959, and was built at the same time as the Calder Hall plant at Sellafield in West Cumbria, England. Its four carbon-dioxide-cooled reactors were once used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, and are currently used to produce tritium. Accidents in the handling of nuclear waste at Chapelcross, and concern about the transportation of nuclear waste in the UK, led to public protests at the plant in 1999.

The radioactive and toxic by-products of the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industries. Nuclear waste may have an active life of several thousand years. Reactor waste is of three types: high-level spent fuel, or the residue when nuclear fuel has been removed from a reactor and reprocessed; intermediate, which may be long-or short-lived; and low-level, but bulky, waste from reactors, which has only short-lived radioactivity. Disposal, by burial on land or at sea, has raised problems of safety, environmental pollution, and security.

The issue of nuclear waste is becoming the central controversy threatening the future of generating electricity by nuclear energy. The dumping of nuclear waste at sea officially stopped in 1983, when a moratorium was agreed by the members of the London Dumping Convention (a United Nations body that controls disposal of wastes at sea). Covertly, the USSR continued dumping, and deposited thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste and numerous faulty reactors in the sea during 1964-86. Russia has no way of treating nuclear waste and in 1993 announced its intention of continuing to dump it in the sea, in violation of international conventions, until 1997.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) settled a 10-year suit in December 1998 that will give the public access to its files concerning the disposal of radioactive and hazardous waste at nuclear arms plants and laboratories. The settlement requires the Department to establish a $6.25 million fund for environmental groups to hire experts who would monitor the cleanups. The DOE also agreed to create an Internet site detailing the cleanup plans and progress.