What to do with nuclear waste? How do we store it safely in the long term? The answer to that question has eluded the nuclear industry for sixty years. Some isotopes in the waste produced by nuclear reactors are dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. But we have yet to come up with a way of storing them safely to protect ourselves and future generations.

Many are looking to Sweden and the storage method its scientists are currently working on. The project hopes to store high-level nuclear waste 500 metres underground for 100,000 years (plutonium, unfortunately, is still dangerous after 250,000 years). The waste will be sealed in copper-coated containers and then buried in bentonite clay. And there is will sit, it is hoped, for a hundred millennia.

But there’s a problem. The thickness of the copper surrounding the waste is planned to be five centimetres thick. There have been many doubts about this solution and now scientists at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have just released a paper saying that this protection isn’t enough to stop the copper from corroding, the containers rupturing and them leaking their contents.

One of the scientists says that in the worst case, the containers may only last 1,000 years. According to the paper, the copper would need to be one metre thick to stay safe for 100,000 years. That’s a lot of copper – the storage containers each weigh 25 tonnes.

This research needs to be evaluated and followed up. We’ll be watching closely. But if these findings are corroborated, the current best hope for long term nuclear storage – as it currently stands – will have been found to be a failure. Nuclear waste remains a puzzle without a solution.

Posted by Justin at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meet Swedish energy giant Vattenfall. The nuclear industry attracts serial incompetents like a big, ugly and dirty cake attracts big, stupid flies. And they don’t come much bigger and stupider than Vattenfall.

This week has seen big trouble for the company. Two serious incidents at its Ringhals nuclear reactor in southern Sweden have seen the company threatened with ‘special supervision’ measures with would put safety procedures under increased scrutiny.

One of the incidents involved the failure of an automatic safety system designed to prevent the release of radioactive material. To make matters worse almost sixty other incidents have been reported at the reactor this year alone. Ringhals employees have also tested positive for drugs or alcohol.

(Vattenfall are also the operators of Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear reactors, one of which came perilously close to a meltdown in 2006, narrowly avoiding causing the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.)

To add to Vattenfall’s woes, the company has had to fire the plant manager of its Krummel reactor in Germany. The reactor had only been running for two weeks - after a fire in a transformer in 2007 closed the plant for two year - when a short circuit in another transformer caused the reactor to shut down once again. It is expected to be out of action for several months. In fact, the clock is ticking for the disaster-prone company in more ways than one…

Peter Harry Carstensen, State Premier of Schleswig Holstein - where the Krummel plant is located - said he would grant Vattenfall "one last chance" to get on top of the problems at the reactor.

"If there is one more incident like this, I will see to it that this power station is shut down," the Christian Democratic politician told Vattenfall head Tuomo Hatakka in Kiel on Tuesday.

He should have listened to Greenpeace Germany. This week the group staged another action at the Krummel reactor, welding shut five of the site’s entry gates and posting signs saying ‘Nuclear power plant Krümmel is closed because of the unreliability of Vattenfall’.

Finally the Swedish government are now asking questions. It is demanding ‘that state-owned power utility Vattenfall provide an account of its work on nuclear safety after problems at one of its plants in Germany and security concerns at another in Sweden’. The answer better be good.

Posted by Justin at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)