TL: GREENPEACE BRIEFING -RADIOACTIVE WASTE - THE PROBLEM WITH NO SOLUTION SO: Greenpeace International, (GP) DT: 1998 "The total radioactive waste of all nuclear power plants in the world can be kept and dumped in one truck" - Turkish Minister for the Environment, Oct 1997. It must be a very big truck! Nuclear power stations create massive amounts of radioactive waste. Some are extremely long-lived and must be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates t hat a 1000 megawatt nuclear reactor creates the following amount of radioactive waste every year: 27 tonnes of high-level waste 300 tonnes of intermediate-level waste 450 tonnes of low-level waste1. This does not take into account the radioactive gases and liquids that are discharged into the environment as part of the reactor's routine operation. No country has yet found an acceptable method of dealing with radioactive waste. Indeed, some of the countries which are now trying to export nuclear reactors to Turkey have encountered enormous technical, financial and social problems trying to deal with their radioactive waste. In Canada, it is estimated that the 20 nuclear reactors owned by Ontario Hydro will produce 77,000 tons of radioactive waste during their lifetimes2. In March 1998, the Canadian Government announced that its plans to bury this waste, and the waste created by Canada's other two reactors, would not go ahead due to lack of public acceptance of the plan. France's plans to build a repository for it's high-level waste has run into vigorous community opposition. Local communities at proposed sites initiated court action to try and prevent the repository being sited near their communities. The reactors currently operating in the United States will produce about 86,800 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel3 in their lifetimes. The only proposed disposal facility is at Yucca mountain in Nevada. It is millions of dollars over budget, years behind schedule, and has still not been approved. Attempts in Germany to move radioactive waste to repositories at Gorleben and Ahaus have ignited massive public protests, with thousands of citizens blocking roads and tearing up railway lines to prevent the transports getting through. Guarding the transports has involved the largest security operations in Germany since WWII. When a nuclear reactor reaches the end of its lifetime it must itself be treated as radioactive waste and decommissioned. It has been estimated that for a Pressurised Water Reactor such as Turkey is considering, about 60% of the low-level radioactive waste that is produced over the reactor's lifetime can come from decommissioning4. ---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES: 1) IAEA, Choosing the nuclear option, factors to be considered, 1998. 2) Nucleonics Week, 19.3.98. 3) IEER, High-level dollars, low-level sense, 1992. 4) ibid