What are the issues facing waste disposal?
There are many issues facing radioactive waste disposal at the present time. One of the principal concerns at the moment is that there are large quantities of waste around the world currently in storage, waiting for someone to take a decision about what to do with them. This is certainly true in the UK, where the refusal of planning permission for an underground laboratory at Sellafield in Cumbria threw the UK’s deep disposal plans into chaos. From a personal perspective, I think that a big issue is the communication of the issues to the general public. To non-experts, the issues must seem very confusing, and unfortunately the safety analyses of disposal facilities and the results of those analyses are technically complex and challenging to understand – even for experts! Many people, perhaps understandably, equate all talk of radioactivity with what happened at Chernobyl and atom bombs. Convincing folk that this is not the case is a major challenge.
