Nuclear industries around the world have struggled to explain and win support for the repository concept. 

It is likely that some of the problem is just that NIMBYs employ misunderstandings about nuclear to fearmonger in order to trick people into supporting their cause. One example is the way people “downstream” of the Canadian repository are being stirred up.  There is not much that can be done about that other than continuing efforts to arm people with the facts.

But I believe that a lot of the problem is self-inflicted and arises from the way the nuclear industry leads people to believe we have to build a repository because used fuel is so dangerous and so long-lived that we have no choice. We imply that it is something we don’t want to do but have to do. In other words, it is a distressed purchase.  No one likes a distressed purchase.

Told correctly however, the story could be one of a caring industry taking an innovative and effective voluntary step towards long term sustainability.  Instead of a distressed purchase it should be seen as a blueprint for many other industries.

So what can we do to make this change in the narrative?

The problem as I see it is that as an industry we differentiate used nuclear fuel from any other waste material, making it seem unlike anything people are familiar with. This creates two problems.  The first is that people don’t feel comfortable with things that are different, especially if they do not understand them.  Differentiation, as a result, often causes fear.  The second is that it prevents the public from making a direct and helpful comparison with the way mankind deals with its other toxic wastes.

A large part of that differentiation comes from an unhelpful obsession with radioactive decay and timescales.  This leads people in the industry to say things like “we have to keep it safe for hundreds of thousands of years”, or “it must be isolated for a million years”. 

There appear to be two sources of the 100,000 year or million-year concept.  One is that regulators have to pick a time in the future at which to assess whether the repository is doing its job or not.  It creates a target for scientists and engineers to do their calculations and brings some solidity to the review.  The second is that after about a million years the radioactivity in the repository will be about the same as the radioactivity that would have been in the ore that was used to make the fuel.

The regulatory date is largely arbitrary as can be seen by the fact that different countries have chosen different times.  Importantly, the assessment does not prove that it is safe for up to 100,000 (or a million) years and then may become unsafe.  Nor does it say it could be unsafe for a 100,000 (or a million) years and then will be safe thereafter. 

It’s not clear to me why we use the second argument regarding decay to some equivalence.  Some link it to creating a rationale for the date selection by the regulator, and some people believe that it has some PR benefit as it appears to imply radioactivity ceases to be a problem after a while. 

My belief is that far from having a PR benefit, it is a huge PR disaster, because it draws attention to the timescale issue.  It is without doubt a centre piece of the anti-nuclear campaigns. 

And we don’t need to do it. For one thing the explanation of the equivalence is so complex it’s impossible for the public to understand.  I am not even sure that I understand it and may well have described it incorrectly here. But more importantly it’s almost entirely irrelevant, natural uranium ore is toxic anyway and the regulator would not allow the industry to make it and dump it indiscriminately in te way nature did.

So, let’s be clear, used nuclear fuel isn’t hazardous for 100,000 years.  It isn’t hazardous for a million years.  It is hazardous forever because it doesn’t stop being hazardous when the radioactivity decays away. And the purpose of a repository is not to keep used fuel safe for 100,000 years.  It is not to keep it safe for a million years.  It is to ensure that it is always safe.  Forever.

The choice of a date by the regulator has little if anything to do with radioactive decay and an awful lot to do with just picking some time in the future to focus the assessment on.  It has to be far enough away to indicate long-term performance but no so far away that the calculations are meaningless. Decay does not appear in the equation, at least not in the first order.

Surely, you say, never ever is a harder sell than 100,000 or a million years, but actually, it’s probably not. Bizarrely, while people, understand that eternity is different, they use their lived experience to project a future in a million years’ time that looks the same as it does today.  I regularly see people in social media discussions express concerns that the rivers and lakes of North West Ontario (NWO) could be polluted by material leaching out of the DGR in a million years’ time. It’s an idea that blissfully ignores the fact that NWO will likely have experienced a couple of ice ages,  the tectonic plates will have moved and, in all probability, it will be an ocean.

The Canadian Nuclear Society