Stop the Nuclear Waste Dumping. . .

Nuclear waste is produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining and reactors to reprocessing irradiated nuclear fuel. Much of this nuclear waste will remain hazardous for thousands or even millions of years, leaving a poisonous legacy to future generations.

The global amount of spent fuel was 220,000 tonnes in the year 2000, and is growing by approximately 10,000 tonnes each year. Yet, although a variety of disposal methods have been under discussion for decades-including disposal in space-the nuclear industry has failed to come up with a solution for what to do with nuclear waste.

Most of the current proposals for dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste involve burying it underground in deep geological disposals. Whether the storage containers, the store itself, or the surrounding rocks will offer enough protection to stop radioactivity from escaping in the long term is impossible to predict.

One of the most likely mechanisms of pollution in connection with waste disposal in rock is the contamination of groundwater. Underground waters may come into contact with radioactive elements that have leached out from the waste and contaminate the drinking water of both local and distant communities.

Nuclear waste remains radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. No language has ever existed longer than a few thousand years, and no one knows if pictograms or other symbols will be interpreted correctly. There is, therefore, no reliable method to warn future generations about the existence of nuclear waste dumps.

Although dumping radioactive wastes at sea (from ships, aircraft and other man-made structures at sea) is prohibited by the London and OSPAR (Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic) conventions, routine discharges of radioactive wastes into the marine environment from the nuclear reprocessing facilities at La Hague (France), Sellafield (NW England) and Dounreay (Northern Scotland) continue, despite strong evidence of environmental damage.

Rusting barrels of nuclear waste dumped by the UK between 1950 and 1963

Radioactive wastes have been dumped at some 47 sites in the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and in the Kara Sea in the Arctic. This dumping began in the 1940s by the UK and the USA, and was followed in the 1960s by a number of European countries. Except for the disposal in the  Arctic of six submarine reactors and some damaged nuclear fuel by the former Soviet Union, which only came to light in 1992, the dumping has been largely of packaged low-level radioactive waste. Most of this was carried out at North Atlantic sites, initially under the control of individual states but latterly, since 1967, under the auspices of the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD. Following a voluntary moratorium on the disposal to the ocean of low-level radioactive waste in 1982 only the former Soviet Union continued that practice.