Radioactive Waste (Hansard, 13 March 1986)

§ Dr. Cunningham
asked the Secretary of State for the Environment if, pursuant to his reply of 6 March, Official Report, column 271, he will list the annual quantity of authorised discharges of uranium and other radioactive materials for each of the sites referred to since 1980.

§ Mr. Kenneth Baker
Details of the amount of radioactive waste discharged from these sites are not held centrally. However, authorisations issued under the Radioactive Substances Act 1960 specify the amounts of radioactive waste which may be discharged and I am placing copies of the relevant authorisations in the Library of the House.

§ Mr. Michael Brown
asked the Secretary of State for the Environment when he expects the final report of his Department's study into the best practicable environmental options for the management of radioactive wastes to be made public.

§ Mr. Waldegrave
The report of the study carried out under my Department's direction, to establish the best practicable environmental options (BPEO) for the management of low and intermediate level radioactive wastes, is being made available today. Copies have been placed in the Library of the House.
This report is an essential element in our proposals for increasing public understanding of and involvement in the development of our policies for managing radioactive wastes. The House of Commons Select Committee on the Environment, in its report published yesterday, laid great stress on the importance of a well-informed, open and public debate, and welcomed this study in that context.
It demonstrates that for every type of waste several storage and disposal options are practicable and safe. All the main options for the disposal and storage of low-level and intermediate level wastes were examined. A range of assumptions about future growth in nuclear power and the level of reprocessing were considered.
Costs and radiological impacts were calculated; since the BPEO is a matter of judgment of relative priorities options were evaluated using four different sets of weights. These reflect a range of views, from those who would wish to minimise costs to those who would wish to minimise risks, local impact, or the widespread dispersion of radioactivity in the environment.
The other main conclusions of the report are that:

i. long-term storage is least attractive on economic and radiological grounds. It is attractive only if an ability to retrieve wastes easily is an overriding concern;

ii. on economic and radiological grounds an optimum strategy for storage and disposal would involve early use of all disposal options, including sea disposal;

iii. the BPEO for most low-level and some short-lived intermediate level waste is near-surface disposal, as 559 soon as practicable, in appropriately designed trenches;

iv. no preference can be established between deep cavity disposal or off-shore borehole disposal for those intermediate level wastes with more alpha-emitting radionuclides than is acceptable for near-surface disposal or sea disposal;

v. the division, at the margin, between what is suitable for near-surface disposal in an engineered trench and deep disposal can only be explored in more detail when site-specific information is available;

vi. if future sea disposal operations are carried out this could be the preferred option for about 15 per cent. of the intermediate level waste expected to arise by 2030.