New EU directive calls for better nuclear waste storage
A new EU directive proposal was presented on Wednesday calling for national plans to be drafted over the next few years, as the international body still has no permanent storage sites for radioactive waste.
As plans are made, exports of nuclear waste outside of the EU for long-term storage will be banned. The commission said that current sites are usable for 100 years at most, however, high-level waste created by nuclear power facilities can take nearly a million years to decompose.
Finland revealed plans to have long-term hazardous waste storage facilities operational by 2020. Sweden will follow in its neighbor’s footsteps by 2023 and France announced a target of 2025 for a long-term waste repository.
Each year, the EU creates around 7,000 cu m of high-level nuclear waste. A majority of the radioactive rubbish is comprised of spent nuclear fuel that is no longer usable. EU Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger said that safety was of the utmost importance and that if a nuclear accident were to happen in one country, it could also have devastating effects for other member states.
The Commission said that among scientists there is a broad consensus that highly-toxic waste is best disposed of underground. Nearly 200 scientists advised that spent nuclear waste be buried deep in the ground in a report published last year.
Currently, 14 of the EU’s 27 states contain nuclear power plants. France, at 58 nuclear facilities, has the largest, by far. In total, there are 143 nuclear power sites still in use within the EU, yet scientists say that infrastructure for storing the slow-decaying waste is lacking.
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