Are we creating nuclear-energy timebombs?

Hailed as a clean and cheap energy breakthrough in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear energy was booming 30 years ago. But the new energy source fell out of favour over subsequent decades, thanks to falling fossil fuel prices and serious accidents in the US and the then Soviet Union.

But increasing EU concerns over dwindling energy resources and rising carbon dioxide emissions have turned public and political attention back to nuclear fission - and back to the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste it produces.

According to Foratom, the European nuclear energy industry association, the 25 EU member states before the accession of Romania and Bulgaria produced about 40,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste a year, or 90 cubic centimetres per person.

In comparison, says Santiago San Antonio, director-general of Foratom, the EU15 member states produce 36 million tonnes of toxic waste annually, or 100 killogrammes per person.

Even more importantly, he says, only a tiny fraction of the radioactive waste is the problematic high-level waste (HLW). HLW is the very radioactive stuff produced through the use of uranium to generate nuclear power. The rest of the nuclear waste generated is low-level waste, including old machinery and protective clothing worn within a reactor, and spent fuel.

The member states today are storing all radioactive waste in temporary storage facilities, either at nuclear plants or in a national central site. The UK and France have also developed facilities to recycle energy out of nuclear waste, leaving only the high-level core behind.

The EU25 produce just 240 cubic metres of HLW a year, or 0.5 cubic centimetres per person. But this is the waste that will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and no one is sure what to do with it.

Work is under way to find a long-term solution. The Commission in September launched a ‘sustainable nuclear energy technology platform’ to research ways of making nuclear power as environmentally sound as possible, including a solution to the HLW problem.

San Antonio is confident that emerging technologies, including nuclear fusion, which could produce far less waste than fission, mean that "in the future we will see a dramatic reduction in the amount of radioactive waste generated".

For now, he says, his hopes are with the US. A site at Yucca Mountain, in the US state of Nevada, is currently being developed for the ‘deep geological storage’ of nuclear waste. This would mean burying radioactive material thousands of metres below the ground. EU member states are looking for possible deep storage sites within Europe.

None of the technological promises have so far shaken environmental opposition to nuclear. Anti-nuclear campaigns were strengthened in September when part of the Yucca Mountain storage plant had to be moved, thanks to the unexpected discovery of a seismic fault line under a section of the site.

"All we have ever seen is talk and very few concrete steps," said Daniel Meijers from Friends of the Earth Europe. "For 30 years people have been saying ‘in a few years we’ll have a definite storage solution for nuclear waste’."

"The latest estimate tends to be 2020," he added. "We just don’t believe it."

Hailed as a clean and cheap energy breakthrough in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear energy was booming 30 years ago. But the new energy source fell out of favour over subsequent decades, thanks to falling fossil fuel prices and serious accidents in the US and the then Soviet Union.