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Managing waste in Australia
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| Managing Radioactive Waste |
Australia has well-developed usage of radioisotopes in medicine, research and industry. Many of these isotopes are produced by ANSTO in Sydney then used at hospitals, industrial sites and laboratories around the country.
Each year Australia produces about 45 cubic metres of radioactive wastes arising from these uses and from the manufacture of the isotopes - about 40 m3 low-level wastes (LLW) and 5 m3 intermediate-level wastes (ILW).
These wastes are now stored at over a hundred sites around Australia. This is not considered a desirable long-term strategy and planning has been underway for a number of years for a centralised repository.
There has also been consideration of the need to locate a secure storage facility for long-lived intermediate-level wastes including those which will be returned to Australia following the reprocessing of used fuel originally from Lucas Heights.
Low-level wastes and short-lived intermediate-level wastes will be disposed of in a shallow, engineered repository designed to ensure that radioactive material is contained and allowed to decay safely to background levels.
There is a total of about 3820 cubic metres (m3) of existing low-level waste awaiting proper disposal, though annual production is small (the 40 cubic metres would be three truckloads). Over half of the present material is lightly-contaminated soil from CSIRO mineral processing research.
Long-lived intermediate-level wastes will be stored above ground in an engineered facility designed to hold them secure for an extended period and to shield their radiation until a geological repository is eventually justified and established, or alternative arrangements made.
There is about 500 cubic metres of industrial radioactive waste at various locations awaiting disposal. Future annual production will be about 5 cubic metres from all sources including States & Territories, Commonwealth agencies and from radiopharmaceutical production, plus the returned material from reprocessing spent ANSTO research reactor fuel in Europe. This will be conditioned by vitrification or embedding in cement, and some 32 cubic metres of it is expected to return to Australia from 2011.
Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism publish this data on the amount of radioactive waste in Australia, dated 18 July 2012.
Radioactive Waste Transport in Australia
Globally more than 20,000 containers of spent fuel and high-level waste have been shipped safely over a total distance exceeding 30 million kilometres. During the transport of these and other radioactive substances - whether for research, medicine or nuclear - there had never been a harmful radioactive release.
The spent fuel produced yearly from all the world's reactors would fit inside a two-storey structure built on a basketball court.
Are there stable geological locations that could safely isolate nuclear waste from the biosphere? If you doubt this, remember that trillions and trillions of litres of natural gas have remained underground - in the same place - for many millions of years. In comparison, the quantity of nuclear waste requiring permanent storage is minuscule. And far from being a volatile gas or liquid, it is a solid and stable ceramic.
Nature had provided a good example of nuclear waste 'storage'. About two billion years ago, in what is now Gabon in Africa, a rich natural uranium deposit produced a spontaneous series of large nuclear reactions. Since then, despite thousands of centuries of tropical rain and subsurface water, the long-lived 'waste' from those 'reactors' has migrated less than 10 metres.
Radiation scientists, geologists and engineers have produced detailed plans for safe underground storage of nuclear waste. A stable geological formation constitutes a highly reliable barrier. Extra layers of protection come including the ceramic fuel itself and robust containers built for high-longevity.
Geological repositories are designed to ensure that harmful radiation would not reach the surface even with severe earthquakes or the passage of time. Waste can be retrieved if new technologies offer ways to reuse the material or hasten radioactive decay.
Inquiry into the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management
The Australian Senate is holding an inquiry into radioactive waste management.