Radioactive Waste: Politics and Technology (Routledge Natural Environment-Problems and Management Series)

Radioactive Waste Radioactive waste is always in the news and its safe disposal a matter of great public concern. Focu...

Author: Frans Berkhout

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Radioactive Waste

Radioactive waste is always in the news and its safe disposal a matter of great public concern. Focusing on radioactive waste management and disposal policies in three European countries—the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany—the author gives a detailed historical account of the policy process in these three countries, and draws out the implications for theory and public policy. This comparative approach underlines how profoundly different the policy process has been in different countries. By comparing the evolution of policy in three countries, Frans Berkhout clarifies fundamental questions about the formation and resolution of technical decisions under uncertainty. His analysis of nuclear strategy, the politics of nuclear power, and the shifting emphasis of government regulation redefines the issue of radwaste management and sets it at the heart of the current debate about power, the environment and society. The combination of up-to-date technological assessment with an account of the social and political implications of radwaste management makes Radioactive Waste particularly useful to students of environmental studies, geography and public administration. It will also be of interest for all those concerned about nuclear power and its future.

Routledge Natural Environment— Problems and Management Series Edited by Chris Park Department of Geography, University of Lancaster Offering a contemporary treatment of critical environmental topics, this series adapts an interdisciplinary international approach, and is an important source of information for the academic, the practitioner, and the student of environmental affairs.

The Roots of Modern Environmentalism David Pepper Environmental Policies: An International Review Chris C.Park The Permafrost Environment Stuart A.Harris The Conservation of Ecosystems and Species G.E.Jones Environmental Management and Development in Drylands Peter Beaumont Chernobyl: The Long Shadow Chris C.Park Nuclear Decommissioning and Society: Public Links to a New Technology Edited by Martin J.Pasqualetti Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World W.M.Adams Environmental Policy and Impact Assessment in Japan B.Barrett and R.Therivel

Radioactive Waste Politics and Technology

Frans Berkhout

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Frans Berkhout Disc converted by Columns Type Design and Production Services Ltd, Reading

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Berkhout, Frans Radioactive waste: politics and technology. 1. Radioactive waste materials. Management I. Title II. Series 621.4838 ISBN 0-203-41175-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-71999-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05492-3 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Berkhout, F. (Frans) Radioactive waste: politics and technology/Frans Berkhout. p. cm.—(Natural environment—problems and management series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-05492-3.—ISBN 0-415-05493-1 (pbk.) 1. Radioactive wastes—Government policy—Great Britain. 2. Radioactive wastes—Government policy—Germany (West) 3. Radioactive wastes—Government policy—Sweden. 4. Radioactive wastes—Great Britain—Management. 5. Radioactive wastes—Germany (West)—Management. 6. Radioactive wastes—Sweden—Management. I. Title. II. Series. TD898.13.G7B47 1990 363.72’89’0941–dc20 90–44713 CIP

to Diz

Epigraph

One must not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not sit down. We are here for this: to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and to hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce it and probe it, look for the opening or make it.

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, 1975

vi

Contents

List of figures and tables

ix

Managing radioactivity 1.1 Radioactive wastes and public concern 1.2 The need for the study 1.3 Methods 1.4 The nuclear-fuel cycle and radioactive wastes 1.5 The objectives of radioactive-waste management and radiation protection 1.6 The structure of the book

1 1 3 5 7 16 18

2

Time and the boundary of control 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Time and control 2.3 Hypotheticality and performance 2.4 Modelling the performance of disposal systems 2.5 Regulating risks and its social consequences 2.6 A synthesis: setting boundaries of control 2.7 Conclusion

21 21 21 26 29 33 35 44

3

The Federal Republic of Germany 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Legal and institutional framework 3.3 The historical setting of Entsorgung politics 3.4 An historical analysis of Entsorgung policy 3.5 Conclusion

47 47 48 51 53 88

4

Sweden 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The legal and institutional framework for radwaste management 4.3 The historical roots of nuclear power in Sweden

93 93

1

vii

94 96

viii

Contents

4.4 The making of Swedish radwaste policy 4.5 Conclusion

100 127

The United Kingdom 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The control of radioactive wastes 5.3 The logic of reprocessing 5.4 An historical assessment of radwaste management policy and practice 5.5 Conclusion

132 132 133 136

Industry, regulation and the state: historical themes 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The relationship between industrial and environmental regulatory goals in the nuclear-fuel cycle 6.3 Radwaste management: the evolution of policy 6.4 Conclusion

190 190

7

The construction of consent 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Legitimation and radwaste policies 7.3 The problem of legitimation 7.4 Regulation and the construction of consent 7.5 Conclusion

205 205 206 208 212 222

8

Conclusions

225

Appendix I Glossary of technical terms Appendix II Acronyms and abbreviations

231 234

Bibliography

239

Index

253

5

6

138 181

191 195 203

Figures and tables

Figures 1.1 The nuclear-fuel cycle 1.2 Principal radioactive wastes arising in the nuclear-fuel cycle 1.3 Comparison of conditioned wastes arising from Magnox, AGR and PWR reactors, assuming reprocessing 1.4 Location of power reactors in the UK, Germany and Sweden 1.5 Location of nuclear-fuel cycle facilities in the UK, the FRG and Sweden 2.1 The decay of radioactivity in PWR spent fuel 2.2 The decay of residual heat from PWR spent fuel 2.3 Toxic potential of uranium ore and high-level waste 2.4 The role of performance assessment in the development of an underground waste-disposal system and subsystems 2.5 The boundary of control 3.1 Framework for the execution of Entsorgung policy 3.2 Accumulation of spent fuel in the FRG to the year 2026 3.3 The economics of direct disposal of spent fuel compared with a reprocessing cycle 4.1 Policy-making and regulatory framework for radwastes in Sweden 4.2 Calculated doses in different scenarios: KBS-3, 1983 5.1 The institutional framework for the control of radwastes in the UK 5.2 The legal framework for the control of radwastes in the UK 5.3 Flowsheet of radwastes at the Sellafield site 5.4 Historical discharges of radioactive liquid effluents from the Windscale/Sellafield site 6.1 A graph of regulatory priorities in the UK, the FRG and Sweden 7.1 Legitimation needs in the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle ix

8 9 10 12 13 23 24 25 32 38 51 76 80 97 126 134 135 146 149 204 211

x

Figures and tables

Tables 1.1 Nuclear power in the UK, the FRG and Sweden (1988) 6 1.2 Gross accumulations of radwastes in the UK, the FRG and Sweden 14 2.1 Radioactivity of principal nuclides in light-water reactor fuel 22 6.1 Institutional differentiation in the evolution of Entsorgung policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1956–86 197 6.2 The evolution of industrial-strategic and safety-environmental goals in Entsorgung policy in the Federal Republic of Germany 197 6.3 Institutional differentiation in the evolution of policy for the back-end of the NFC in Sweden 199 6.4 The evolution of industrial-strategic, safety-environmental and military goals in policy for the back-end of the NFC in Sweden 200 6.5 Institutional differentiation in the evolution of strategy for the back-end of the NFC in the UK 201 6.6 The evolution of military-strategic, industrial and environmental goals in strategy for the back-end of the NFC in the UK 202 7.1 Principles of the control of radwastes in the UK, the FRG and Sweden 206

Chapter one

Managing radioactivity

1.1 Radioactive wastes and public concern On 31 March 1959 police in the Lanarkshire village of Wishaw traced three boys who were believed to have been contaminated with radiation while playing in an ash pit in the village. A nearby clock factory had been dumping wastes from its luminizing workshop at the pit and by chance somebody from the factory had seen the children there some days earlier. The boys were taken down to the Radiological Protection Centre at Sutton in Surrey the following day for a check-up and later pronounced to be ‘out of danger’. The Times reported that there were ‘nervous smiles all round’.1 Four days later the member for South Lanark, Mrs Judith Hart, led a debate at the Scottish Labour Party Conference which called for a strengthening of safeguards against the ‘growing danger’ of the industrial use of radioactive materials. She claimed that the few safeguards which existed were administered in a context of ‘complete chaos’, and that no fewer than eleven agencies had responsibilities for the matter without any one of them holding final authority.2 The debate had been prompted by the Wishaw incident. In the House of Commons debate about the Radioactive Substances Bill 11 months later, the Wishaw incident, and another which similarly involved the accidental contamination of children, were cited as proof of the urgent need for new legislation.3 Besides these specific cases of negligence, more general concerns also hung over the parliamentary discussions. Increased levels of atmospheric radiation in Britain caused by the atomic weapons tests in the Pacific and recent memories of the Windscale fire had brought home to the British public the reality of radiation in the environment for the first time. Moreover, a growing body of medical opinion in the 1950s had become concerned over the potentially catastrophic genetic effects of low-level radiation. The Wishaw incident shows that public opinion has been sensitive about the control of radioactive waste materials since the beginning of 1

2

Radioactive Waste

the nuclear enterprise. Public controversy around this aspect of atomic power predates the later conflicts which came to be known as ‘the nuclear controversy’.4 While the technical arguments have changed, managing radioactivity presents some basic difficulties which invite social disputes. Like all other social disputes, these questions must be addressed through a complex process of political negotiation. Conventional approaches to scientific and technical problem-solving can seldom provide acceptable and lasting resolutions. Ionizing radiations are beyond the senses. Their mere perception requires scientific knowledge, instrumentation and trained personnel. From the outset, therefore, the control of radiation demands institutional investments in expertise and regulatory effort. This regulatory regime is given an absolute responsibility to minimize the health effects induced by radiations. Regulatory authority is centralized in state bureaucracies, and their care applies across whole populations. We are all constantly being exposed to doses of ionizing radiation. The objective of radwaste management is to reduce the proportion of that dose which is caused by the use of radioactive materials. Absolute authority can be onerous and fragile, as the Wishaw incident, and many others since then, demonstrate. A small fissure in the regulatory shield can lead to the whole basis and practice of regulation being called into question. The public’s trust in centralized regulatory authority is guaranteed only so long as it is believed to be effective and functioning with integrity. The belief in institutional integrity cannot be split from the belief in its competence. Public trust depends on perceptions of who is acting in whose interest, and under whose instructions. If regulatory authorities claim superior scientific wisdom in the pursuit of sectional interests, they undermine confidence in the whole institutional framework and the scientific rationalities deployed in justifying decisions. To avoid these suspicions, agencies are forced into actively promoting their own integrity, usually by demonstrating their independence from the industry they regulate. For the large and frequently monolithic nuclear industry, historically a creature of state intervention, such demonstrations of independence may easily be regarded as disingenuous by those outside the regulatory process. The political viability of the autonomous framework of institutional control described above—a small clique of experts and technicians regulating the exposure of whole populations to an invisible toxic material, employing science and an array of other devices to secure public confidence—appears to be at odds with a basic attribute of radiation protection. Absolute protection or safety cannot be assured, and at base there is something illogical in such an effort. All doses of ionizing radiation, however small, represent a risk to health. The uncertainties inherent in radiobiology are resolved in practice by the


3

pervasive use of the risk concept, and this idea is necessarily carried over into administration of regulatory authority. Radiation-dose limits are set according to what is deemed to be a socially acceptable level of risk—usually a probability of death in any one year of between 1:100,000 and 1:1,000,000.5 But a risk to individuals is translated in the collective anonymity of populations into manifest effects on health. Broadly, it is the tension between the demands of the bearers of radiation risks for an absolute standard of protection, the probabilistic nature of scientific knowledge in this area, and the pressures to sustain investments in nuclear energy which animates the complex controversy which justifies this book. Risk is a very anodyne word. When its effects on the actions of individuals, organizations and governments are scrutinized, it turns out to hide a Pandora’s box full of complications. 1.2 The need for the study Why is a review of British radwaste policy necessary? When work on this research began in late 1985, the disposal of radioactive waste was near the top of media editors’ lists of newsworthy items. Public controversy is not always a sufficient reason for academic study, but this case seemed to be different. A succession of reversals of government policy and operational errors over the previous 4 years had cast many doubts about the management of radwaste in Britain. In December 1981, Tom King, the then Secretary for the Environment, had announced that a drilling programme connected with research into the disposal of high-level wastes was to be abandoned. Six months later an industry-sponsored body, Nirex, was set up to develop new disposal routes for low- and intermediate-level wastes. High-level wastes had been consigned to long-term storage at the Sellafield works of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, effectively postponing final decisions for at least two generations. This site, already notorious, was brought into further ill-repute by allegations of increased levels of child cancer in its vicinity and a large accidental discharge of radioactivity down its sea pipeline during November 1983. In that year the annual sea-dumping operation had been boycotted by the National Union of Seamen, and Nirex had made the first of a series of doomed proposals for new repositories. Early in 1985 a site investigation of a worked-out anhydrite mine at Billingham was curtailed. During the course of this study two further, associated, strategy reversals have befallen Nirex. In July 1986 it was decided after parliamentary pressure to redesignate a future, shallow land-burial site as being for low-level radwastes only, so contradicting the original purpose of the site-search programme which was urgently to find a disposal route for

4

Radioactive Waste

intermediate-level wastes. Just prior to the general election of May 1987, the hard-fought investigation programme was dropped altogether out of fear of electoral defeat in Tory constituencies where the sites were located. This apparent chaos required some explanation. In fact we find that crisis is a not uncommon characteristic of radwaste policy in other countries. What is distinctive about the British context is that crisis has not produced new commitments to resolving the problems of radwaste management. In Sweden and West Germany we see these commitments as originating in the politically difficult reviews of policy for the whole of the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle. This restructuring of industrial, strategic and political commitments has allowed a real dynamism to be injected into programmes for waste management and disposal. In both cases the state has been instrumental in forcing these arrangements on the nuclear industry, and has adjusted its regulatory role accordingly. Governments in the UK have never been forced to reassess British commitments with regard to the backend. I will trace this resistance to change, and hence the lack of reform of the state’s regulatory role in relation to radwaste management, to the continued importance of spent-fuel reprocessing to military and civil nuclear policy. In arguing this, I want to show that a review of back-end policy appears to be one requirement for a robust radwaste policy. Radioactive wastes cannot be regarded merely as side products or ‘externalities’ of the fuel cycle. Their control, technically as well as politically, sits right at the centre of the nuclear enterprise. Within environmental protection, technological change is closely related to developments in the political sphere. Technology policy always has to grapple with the problems of how to innovate within uncertainty. In other fields, however, innovation is usually taken to mean technical innovation, and uncertainty to mean the uncertainty of future markets and economic returns. In this context innovation is more problematic. It must encompass innovation in institutional and regulatory settings, and the bargains struck between institutions and between them and the public at large. Such uncertainties will always remain within the project of radiation protection and are inherent to the negotiation of consent for technical measures in society. Innovation in radwaste management is therefore much more explicitly a social and political process, and one involving the whole community. For this reason it can never be regarded as ‘completed’. There will always be new wells of instrumentally-based uncertainty and politically-rooted doubt. A perception of these problems in the radwaste management field has predated very similar sensitivities to other waste-management problems which are now confronting us, from toxic wastes to acid rain and vehicle


5

emissions. Although I will not consider these any further, the study has broader implications for the environmental debate. There is an absence of an accepted theoretical framework for handling these complex and many-layered issues. While it is doubtful whether a unified theory is feasible, there is an urgent need for some of the basic questions to be framed, thereby providing a foundation for a more coherent theoretical discussion. In Chapters 2 and 6 conceptual frameworks are elaborated which may have a wider application to other environmental issues. 1.3 Methods Because of the apparent complexity of the issue of radwaste policy, and the danger of seeing too much as natural rather than created, I have taken the route of comparative research. It is analytically helpful to compare experience in different countries because general and specific phenomena can be more clearly distinguished. A single country study would always find it hard to see through accepted rationales and blind spots. In this context one is quickly struck by how profoundly different the policy process has been in different countries. The basic problematique of waste management and radiological protection is the same, but the way it has been approached is quite distinctive. Such variety reinforces the basic prejudice of this study, which is to analyse deeply-rooted institutional and political factors in the make-up of radwaste policy and practice. We must be aware of the guiding hand of history. Policies accumulate through time, developing within a general ethos of regulatory action, and evolving in reaction to specific operational and political pressures. Radioactive-waste management and disposal policies in three European countries—the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Sweden—will be compared. The aim has been to write a detailed historical account of the policy process in these three countries, and to draw out the implications for theory and public policy. Research was motivated by the perception that many of the technical and socio-political problems of dealing with radioactive wastes had not been resolved, and that these had a critical bearing on the political viability of civil nuclearpower programmes. First, the book is intended as an assessment and critique of British radwaste management practice and policy. Experience in other countries has been used to shed light on Britain’s distinctive problems, but I have been aware all along about the pitfalls of drawing very specific parallels between the policy process in different countries. Material, institutional and cultural specificity must be honoured in comparative analysis, and the possibility of ‘learning’ from other countries has to be treated with

6

Radioactive Waste

caution, although not over-caution. There certainly are things that the British can learn about the Swedish and German systems. Second, it is an attempt to write about the development of Swedish and German policy in a more comprehensive and up-to-date analysis than has previously been available. This approach produces case studies which are interesting in their own right, and which have allowed for a richer theoretical discussion about research policy, technological innovation, and the broader institutional dynamics which have sustained nuclear power. What is the justification for the choice of Sweden, the Federal Republic of Germany and the UK? One of the main determinants of radwaste policy appeared at the outset to be national capability and policy towards the reprocessing of spent fuel. By choosing three countries with historically very different attitudes to reprocessing—the UK has had a capacity to reprocess since the late 1950s, West Germany sought to establish an indigenous capacity from the mid-1960s until 1989, while Sweden has, since 1977, followed a non-reprocessing fuel cycle—it has been possible to develop this intuition into a fuller analytical framework. The reasons for not choosing another reprocessor, such as France, for a comparison, were that there seemed little to learn technologically, or in terms of the political process, from that context (perhaps not an altogether fair summation), and because access to information was perceived to be more difficult there. The US was not thought suitable for this study because it had already been extensively covered in previous work.6 Third, a comparison between the UK, the FRG and Sweden can be defended on the grounds that they have very similar sized nuclear programmes so that at first sight the operational difficulties of spent-fuel and radwaste storage and disposal appeared to be of the same magnitude (see Table 1.1). Both the FRG and Sweden have more advanced programmes for radwaste management and disposal and have been the subject of particular interest in the UK. Sweden, for instance, has stood at the leading edge of repository technology since 1977. But looking at these Table 1.1 Nuclear power in the UK, the FRG and Sweden (1988)


7

cases, as for instance the UK Radioactive Waste Managemement Advisory Committee7 and the House of Commons Environment Committee8 have done, is of little use if the full historical context is not taken into account. Such assessments can too easily slip into a simplistic comparison of management and disposal technologies alone, without the underlying procedural, political and industrial factors being taken into account. I have sought to address these dimensions here. 1.4 The nuclear-fuel cycle and radioactive wastes Radioactive wastes are produced by three groups of activities: the production of nuclear electricity; the production of nuclear weapons; and, in much smaller quantities, in nuclear research, medical practice and certain industrial activities. Most of this book will deal with radwaste management associated with nuclear-power production because in terms of activities and volumes it is by far the most significant. Of the three countries studied here, only Britain has a nuclear-weapons capability, but defence wastes account for no more than 20 per cent of radwaste from civil sources. The operation of civil nuclear reactors is supported by a range of industrial activities collectively known as the nuclear-fuel cycle (NFC, see Figure 1.1). This includes uranium extraction, uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication (the ‘front-end’ of the fuel cycle); reactor operation itself; and spent-fuel storage, spent-fuel reprocessing, and other aspects of waste management (the ‘back-end’ of the fuel cycle). Decommissioning of nuclear facilities is not usually assumed to fall within the NFC. Large-scale decommissioning of commercial reactors has not yet begun to make an impact on waste-management policies in any of the three countries studied. As policies for dismantling evolve over the next decade, one of the chief considerations will be the storage and disposal of the radwastes which arise. Radioactive wastes produced by the fuel cycle are schematically represented in Figure 1.2. These wastes may be classified according to a number of different criteria depending on the function of the labelling: phase—solid, liquid or gaseous; origin—spent fuel, operational waste, decommissioning waste, etc.; general characteristics—fission products, actinides, neutron-activation products, and heat-producing or non-heat-producing; activity—the amount of radioactivity per unit volume and its type (alpha, beta or gamma); lifetime—short-lived or long-lived, depending on the half-life of the constituent radioactive elements; designation—the disposal route used for the waste.

8

Radioactive Waste

Figure 1.1 The nuclear-fuel cycle

The most frequently used definition in the UK is a hybrid of the last four criteria: low-level (LLW), 9 intermediate-level (ILW), plutoniumcontaminated material (PCM) and high-level (HLW).10 In Federal Germany a basic classification of non-heat-generating and heat-generating wastes is used. In Sweden, wastes are defined according to whether they arise in reactor operation, decommissioning or are spent fuel. All of these classifications serve mainly as simplifying devices in general discussions about strategy. Relatively small amounts of low-activity waste are produced in uranium extraction, enrichment and fuel fabrication.11 The largest proportion of radioactivity is produced during the ‘burning’ of uranium (and/or plutonium) nuclear fuel in power reactors. This radioactivity is mostly retained by the irradiated nuclear-fuel elements and is composed of plutonium, higher actinides, fission products, together with a proportion of unburnt uranium. Some activity escapes from the fuel to form a group of gaseous, liquid, semi-liquid and solid-waste streams of low- and intermediate-level activity. This may be trapped as a filter-contaminant, stored or released directly to the environment. Reactor operation also causes the neutron-activation of the concrete and metal reactor structure itself. When the facility is taken out of service, this structure will constitute radioactive waste.


9

Figure 1.2 Principal radioactive wastes arising in the nuclear-fuel cycle

After between 3 and 5 years within an operating reactor, the nuclear fuel becomes depleted and is discharged as spent fuel. This fuel is allowed to cool in water-filled fuel ponds or gas-filled silos at the reactor site. During the period of storage, shorter-lived fission products decay. Defects and ruptures in the spent-fuel cladding may cause some activity to leak into the pond water or silo gas, creating a waste stream which is discharged into the general environment, after the removal of a proportion of activity into further waste streams. Spent fuel may be formally regarded as a waste, as in Sweden, or as a resource, as in the FRG and the UK. Extracted uranium may be recycled as fuel in thermal reactors, and plutonium in both thermal and fast reactors. Extraction of these materials is achieved through the chemical ‘reprocessing’ of spent fuel. In this process the metal cladding of the fuel is first removed and the fuel is dissolved in a nitric acid solution. The uranium and plutonium are then drawn off, separately or together, by differential solvent extraction. Most non-volatile fission products remain in a highly-active, heat-generating, liquid-waste solution which goes into storage and undergoes volume reduction by evaporation. Over 90 per

10

Radioactive Waste

Figure 1.3 Comparison of conditioned wastes arising from Magnox, AGR and PWR reactors, assuming reprocessing (m3)


11

cent of total activity in the NFC is contained, in a system with reprocessing, in the HLW residues. A small proportion of fission and actinide products (less than 5 per cent) are carried away in a diluted form in mainly liquid waste streams. In terms of volume, heterogeneity and environmental impact, it is these radwastes which have caused the most important management problem for reprocessors. Purification of uranium and plutonium produces further intermediate-level and plutonium-contaminated waste arisings. Within this idealized model of the NFC there are variations in the volumes and activities of radwaste generated at any stage in different contexts. Figure 1.3 gives a general picture of radwaste arisings for the three main reactor types considered in this book, namely the Magnox, the advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) and the pressurized water reactor (PWR). The comparison is made in terms of waste volumes, since this is a more useful gauge of the scale of management than radioactivity. It shows that British gas-cooled reactors, since they require far greater inventories of fuel, also give rise to larger volumes of LLWs and ILWs in reprocessing. The locations of nuclear reactors and fuel-cycle facilities in Britain, Germany and Sweden are given in Figures 1.4 and 1.5. Of all the sites which come under consideration in this study, the spent-fuel storage and reprocessing facility at Sellafield in the UK has historically discharged the greatest amounts of radioactivity to the environment. However, the amount of activity discharged in this way accounts for rather less than 1 per cent of the total activity of radwastes produced in the United Kingdom since the mid-1950s. As a broad comparison of the magnitude of the problem of radwaste management in the UK, the FRG and Sweden, we can use two indicators. First, the gross figures for accumulations of waste in each country (see Table 1.2). These show that the UK produces by far the largest volumes of LLW, while ILWs arise in roughly the same magnitude in all three countries. Note that Swedish figures are for conditioned wastes, representing perhaps a doubling of the volume of raw wastes. British waste arisings (by volume) are totally dominated by reprocessing wastes, whereas in contrast nearly 80 per cent of radwaste in Sweden is produced at its twelve power reactors. West Germany shows a more variable profile with over 20 per cent of wastes arising in nuclearresearch centres and 10 per cent being produced by the small reprocessing plant at Karlsruhe. Second, the complexity of the management task. One of the main consequences of reprocessing is the proliferation of new waste streams, each of which must be dealt with separately as a technical and regulatory problem. Taking as a basic standard of system complexity the compound of the number of waste types and the number of NFC sites, we arrive at

12

Radioactive Waste

Figure 1.4 Location of power reactors in the UK, Germany and Sweden


13

Figure 1.5 Location of nuclear-fuel cycle facilities in the UK, FRG and Sweden

Table 1.2

Gross accumulations of radwastes in the UK, the FRG and Sweden


15

the following approximate figures: United Kingdom about 500 raw waste streams; West Germany 300 conditioned waste forms; and Sweden 24 conditioned waste forms. Waste streams are arisings of raw wastes at nuclear facilities, whereas waste forms are arisings of conditioned wastes within which some waste streams have been aggregated. These differences of classification create a slightly misleading picture. British wastes, once they are conditioned, will aggregate to a lower, but as yet uncertain, number of waste forms. Due to the history of operations in both the military and civil side of the NFC, the final figure is almost certain to remain above the German total. The German figures are inflated mainly because they have a large number of research facilities which produce volumetrically insignificant groups of waste streams. No account is taken in the figures above of wastes arising in decommissioning, high-level wastes or spent– fuel wastes. Clear analysis of these streams has not been published in any of the three countries discussed here. What the figures do clearly show is the complexity at the level of the system introduced to radwaste management by the reprocessing of spent fuel. The NFC, and for that matter any industrial process which uses or synthesizes toxic or polluting materials, exist by virtue of the technologies and regulatory regimes which surround them. Containment of hazard is intrinsic to their design, operation and siting. Some hazards are immediate (a loss-of-coolant accident), others exist only over very long time-scales (the radiotoxicity of plutonium, half-life 24,000 years). In the nuclear industry, reducing the probability of the first comes under the name of nuclear safety, reducing the risks accruing from the second falls under the heading of radiation protection. Within this continuum, a panoply of technical and administrative interventions is subsumed within radioactive-waste management. It includes everything from the direct discharge to the environment of fluid radwastes, to the storage, conditioning, packaging, transport and disposal of solid-waste forms, to an engineered repository. Above all, it is important to recognize that radwaste-management policy is concerned with the innovation, organization and operation of complex technological systems of control. When they are idealized, such technological systems are designed and oriented according to the ultimate goal of safe disposal. In the jargon this may be by ‘dilute and disperse’ or by ‘containment’ approaches. In fact, all disposal techniques will include an element of dilute and disperse in their design; the main distinction between them exists in the degree of engineered restraint imposed between the wastes and the environment. What precisely this environment will be depends on the disposal route chosen. Many gaseous wastes are discharged straight into the atmosphere, low-level liquid effluents are discharged to the sea or fresh-water bodies. For solid radwastes, land-based disposal has become the international

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Radioactive Waste

norm during the 1980s. Ocean disposal of solid wastes was practised extensively in the past, but since 1982 an international moratorium has been in force. 1.5 The objectives of radioactive-waste management and radiation protection At the simplest level, the objective of radwaste management is to ensure, for the long-term future, the protection of human beings from unacceptable harms associated with man-made ionizing radiations. A large body of scientific competence has developed around this basic objective, and this goes under the general title of radiation protection. This has three formal principles: (i) justification no practice involving the use of ionizing radiation shall be adopted unless its introduction is judged to produce a net positive benefit; (ii) optimization all exposures to ionizing radiation shall be kept as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), economic and social factors being taken into account; and (iii) dose limitation the dose to individuals shall not exceed the limits recommended by the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP).12 Of these, the principle of optimization is now regarded as paramount, although this was not always so. The hazards of exposure to radiation became apparent to the earliest pioneers in nuclear physics. Systematic scientific work on radiation effects began when clinical concern grew over the radiation effects caused to radiographers and their patients during X-ray therapy and diagnosis. In 1925 the International Congress on Radiology was set up primarily to standardize units and propose maximum doses of radiation. Twenty-five years later, and in the advent of the reseach begun after the dropping of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ICRP was established in its current form to formulate fundamental principles for radiation protection, and to review and revise these as appropriate. The Commission drew its expertise widely from a range of medical specialities. With the growth of civilian and military applications of nuclear power, and the need for these installations to be furnished with defensible operating standards, increased attention was focused within the ICRP on environmental exposure, habit surveys and dose-effect models. Two main aspects of the problem of protection were considered: acute effects and genetic damage. No concept of risk had yet been applied. An assumption held that there was a threshold level of radiation dose beneath


17

which no observable effects would be found. It was understood that it was impossible to develop nuclear weapons or nuclear power without some level of exposure of radiation to the public from this manmade source. The regulatory task was therefore to specify permissible levels of dose to individuals. These dose limits were set for workers using nuclear materials at one-tenth of the estimated ‘no-observable-effect level’13 and for individual members of the general population at one-tenth of this level. The problem of a permissible genetic dose arose later during the 1950s when it was observed that radiomutagenesis of cells could be simulated in the laboratory under very low radiation exposures. From this result it appeared that no level of permissible genetic dose could therefore be derived theoretically or experimentally. In response the ICRP decided to use, as a standard measure, levels of background radiation and an assumption was made that a dose of two times this level was unlikely to be unacceptably hazardous to the genetic health of the population at large. In its 1958 recommendations the ICRP proposed that the permissible 30-year dose to the gonads (taken to be the span of reproductive life) should be set at 50 mSv.14 In Britain an additional concept of a mean dose to individuals within the general population was also adopted, specifically in relation to the control of radioactive discharges.15 It was during this period that the first laws concerning radiation protection were passed in all the three countries in this study.16 State intervention had become inevitable, not only due to the tradition of chemical regulation but also because of the global nature of the hazard which was now apparent. Through the 1960s and early 1970s the concept of a threshold dose came under further attack with developing theories on the aetiology of cancer, including the somatic-cell-mutation theory of carcinogenesis. Microscopic cell damage, particularly in sensitive genetic material and dividing cells, could cause cancers to develop in apparently normal tissues following radiation doses well below the levels at which observable immediate effects occurred.17 Such cancers would have long latency periods and might also be associated with other environmental factors. This new knowledge had two main effects. It brought into common usage the concept of risk in the field of radiation protection; and it led to are-evaluation of regulatory measures within a quantitative risk-benefit framework. All of these tendencies—the developing concept of risk and risk-benefit analysis, the assessment of low dose-effect relationships and the reorientation in health physics away from genetic damage to somatic (corporeal) damage—led in 1976 to the publication of new recommendations by the ICRP. The basic principles of the 1976 statement still stand as the fundamental basis for radiation protection and, by extension, radwaste-management measures in most countries.18 The focus of these are ‘stochastic’ (random) somatic effects produced by lengthy

18

Radioactive Waste

exposures to low levels of ionizing radiation. The frequency of these effects, and hence the risk factors attached to them, has been estimated by extrapolating dose-effect ratios pertaining at far higher doses. Within the ICRP’s recommendations, a straight-line extrapolation is employed—the so-called linear dose-effect hypothesis. This theoretical development had very significant effects on the perception of regulatory objectives and problems through time. During an initial phase, up to the late 1960s, regulators were concerned principally with reducing doses to large populations, thereby securing their genetic health. Inadvertent doses from man-made sources of radiation were averaged across these populations. In the later phase, whose scientific roots lie in the mid-1950s, there was a recognition that no dose was too small, although dispute continues to the present day about the shape of the dose-response relationship at low levels of exposure. Radiobiology became more concerned with protecting ‘critical groups’ who were subject to higher exposures because they lived near nuclear facilities. The significance of collective doses has concomitantly decreased, although it has been revived in connection with safety models for radwaste repositories and gaseous emissions. All ionizing radiation was now considered deleterious, and the objective of radwaste management was transformed to identify and compare systematically the risks related to radiation with other social and technological risks. To cope with this social dimension, a conceptual framework has been developed through which to set the complex and still uncertain physiological effects of radiation against more commonly understood and perceived risks (dose equivalent, quality factors, maximum permissible concentrations, and so on). In the era of cost-benefit analysis in radiation protection, a more diverse set of factors, other than the radiation dose alone, had to be taken into account: In cost-benefit analysis the benefits are taken to include all the benefits according to society…in certain circumstances benefits can be quantified, but when they contribute to the satisfaction of human desires, such quantification may prove difficult.19 Exactly how difficult is attested to in the following seven chapters. 1.6 The structure of the book The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 2 will discuss some theoretical problems which emerge from the study of radwaste management policy. The chapter ends with a conceptualization of regulatory control which attempts to reconcile, in a dynamic way, the technical and public-policy aspects of environmental regulation. Chapters


19

3, 4 and 5 describe the making of radwaste policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden and the UK respectively. Each of these chapters is long in comparison with the rest of the text, but I considered that it was important to retain a comparable level of detail for each case study so that the analytical chapters at the end of the book could be better founded. Chapter 6 develops a broad framework through which the policy process in the three countries is compared. In this analysis I have been concerned to draw out the strategic and industrial interests which define national priorities in the back-end of the NFC. I argue that there is a strong relationship between the composition of these interests and the capacity to create robust radwaste policies. Chapter 7 provides a discussion of the different contexts of legitimation of the control of radioactive wastes. While the industrial and political forces which drive or inhibit radwaste policies must be analysed at a broad level, there is also a related question of the attraction of political consent to these policies. Such consent derives partly from the general industrial and political context of environmental policy, but also from the specific institutional setting of decision-making: the independence of regulators, the role of expertise and the courts, the procedures for public consultation in licensing, and so on. I will show that the platform on which some form of consensus on the question of radwaste policy may be built differs markedly in the UK, the Federal Republic of Germany and Sweden. In Chapter 8 the main conclusions of the study are outlined. Notes and references 1 The Times, London, 2.4.59, p. 10, col. d, and 3.4.59, p. 6, col. c. 2 The Times, London, 6.4.59, p. 5, col. a. 3 House of Commons Hansard (HCH), 7.4.59, vol. 603, col. 17; second reading of the Radioactive Substances Bill, 8.3.60, HCH, vol. 619, cols 322–76. 4 In the same debate it was argued that, ‘at present, public opinion is no doubt the controlling factor, and it is perhaps more restrictive than is sometimes desirable.’ Mrs Judith Hart quoting an American scientist at the Geneva ‘Atoms for Peace’ conference 1958, HCH vol. 619, c. 363, 8.3.60. 5 The crude way of representing radiation risks is to use a risk of death coefficient of 0.0125 per Sievert (Sv) of effective radiation dose. Thus an annual dose of 0.001 Sv (1 mSv), which is the mean annual background dose in the UK, as well as the principal annual dose limit from man-made sources, corresponds to a risk of death of 0.0000125 (1:80,000) in that year. 6 Carter (1987); Colglazier (1982); Lipschutz (1980); Parker et al. (1987). 7 HMSO/Radioactie Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) Sixth Annual Report, 1985, pp. 53–61; Seventh Annual Report, 1986, pp. 51–60. 8 House of Commons, Radioactive Waste, First Report from the Environment Committee, Session 1985–86, HC Papers 191 I, 12.3.86, London. 9 Less than 4.109 Bequerels (Bq) per tonne (4 GBq te–1) alpha and less than 12 GBq te–1 beta/gamma.

20

Radioactive Waste

10 Liquid and glassified highly-active, heat-generating waste stream composed mainly of fission products arising in fuel reprocessing. 11 The exception being fast-reactor and mixed-oxide fuels which contain plutonium and therefore lead to long-lived, plutonium-contaminated wastes during fuel fabrication. 12 International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP (1977). 13 3 mSv per week, or 150 mSv yr–1. 14 ICRP (1959). 15 A limit of 10 mSv yr–1 was taken as a standard (see HMSO (1959) p. 33, para. 116). 16 UK, Radioactive Substances Act, 1960; FRG, Radiation Protection Act, 1960 (amended in 1976); Sweden, Radiation Protection Act, 1958. 17 Mole (1973:78–83). 18 Dose limits were kept at their 1966 levels; 50 mSv yr–1 for workers and 5 mSv yr–1 for the general public. The principal limit was reduced in 1985 from 5 mSv yr–1 to 1 mSv yr–1. Source: ICRP (1985). 19 ICRP (1977) para. 70, p. 14.

Chapter two

Time and the boundary of control

2.1 Introduction There appear to be both generic-technological and national-institutional reasons which make radwaste management and disposal such an intriguing problem of public policy. These are related, but analytically separable. In this section we will concentrate on generic uncertainties related to radwaste disposal. Some authors have argued that disposal is not the appropriate goal for radwaste-management policy because the remaining technical uncertainties are too great and because the experience of waste management in the past has frequently been unsatisfactory.1 Whatever the merits of this argument, radwaste policies in the UK, West Germany and Sweden all take disposal as their ultimate objective. I will therefore limit the discussion here to describing a conceptualization of this objective. Furthermore, for the purpose of illustration, I will mainly use examples of solid-waste disposals to land. This is justified by the currently planned primacy of the land-burial option in national programmes compared with fluid discharges to the environment or solid-waste disposals to the sea.2 2.2 Time and control The question of time has come to stand at the centre of all theoretical discussions of radwaste management because, unlike other toxic materials, time is a significant variable in the problem of management. Radioactivity decays through time, steadily reducing the difficulties of handling wastes and the risks associated with disposing of them to the environment. However, this relationship of activity with time is not a simple one. Radioactive materials are invariably composed of a number of different radioactive isotopes (radionuclides), each with a specific rate of decay. The principal radionuclides present in pressurized-water-reactor spent fuel are shown in Table 2.1, and their decay is graphically represented in Figure 2.1. 21

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Radioactive Waste

Table 2.1

Radioactivity of principal nuclides in light-water reactor fuel

As activity decays, so the rate of heat output from spent fuel declines. The relationship between residual-heat output and time, as shown in Figure 2.2 is inversely exponential. The importance of modelling the decay of the whole range of nuclides in detail is that they each exhibit different types and degrees of hazard to humans. This depends on the mode and energy of decay of the individual nuclide,3 and on its metabolism (the passage and distribution through the body). Considered together, these characteristics determine the radiotoxicity of the nuclide.

The boundary of control

23

Figure 2.1 The decay of radioactivity in PWR spent fuel

Source: SKB/KBS (1983) vol. I, pp. 3:11

To estimate the hazard of a radioactive material, the toxicities of each of its constituent radionuclides must be aggregated over time. To set the aggregate toxicity of high-level waste4 into some general context, it can be compared with the toxicity to man of natural uranium ore. This is most simply done through the concept of toxic potential—the degree of dilution of the material in water before it could be consumed to give a maximum permissible radiation dose to the drinker. Figure 2.3 shows that high-level radwastes represent an increased hazard over natural uranium ore, in general terms, for a period of between 10,000 and 100,000 years. NFC waste-management systems take this geological time-scale as their basic planning horizon. Of course not all radwastes are long-lived. Volumetrically the most significant waste group, low-level wastes usually contain only trace amounts of longer-lived nuclides. Neither do most waste types emit heat in significant amounts. The natural decline of the potential hazard caused by radioactive decay

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Radioactive Waste

Figure 2.2 The decay of residual heat from PWR spent fuel

Source; SKB/KBS (1983) vol. I, pp. 3:15

opens a dimension of choice in radwaste-management strategy which is not available for other toxic-waste types. Such choice has been integrated into management practice for the past 50 years or so in the storage of liquid and gaseous wastes at the point of production until they have decayed sufficiently to be discharged to the environment. Radioactive decay also turns out to be important in arguments about the disposal of heat-generating wastes, since the generation of heat in natural geological or oceanographic systems has potentially destabilizing effects which are difficult to predict with precision. A strategy of interim storage of the wastes can be argued to be justified because of their cooling. At a broader level, decay also promotes the idea that the technical problem of radwaste management is ultimately bounded, that there is some ‘total solution’ to the regulation of these products in the general environment. The basic requirement for the suitability of any geological formation for the disposal of radioactive wastes is its capacity to contain and isolate the radioactive material from the environment until the activity has decayed to non-hazardous levels.5 It is this ideal of ‘control’ over waste products, whether literally or hypothetically, from their point of production to their eventual decay


25

Figure 2.3 Toxic potential of uranium ore and high level waste (the flattening of the curve in the time interval 104 to 105 years and the bump occurring after a few thousand years of decay are due to the growth of radium-226)

Source: OECD/NEA (1977)

which has become the guiding principle of radwaste management. Without the physical fact of decay this ideal could never have been composed. The management of physically stable toxic wastes like heavy metals must always accommodate the basic indestructibility of the product. The possibility of containment has therefore given the principle of ‘concentration and containment’ a specific meaning for radwaste management. Time has become a material fact in determining the potential hazard of different materials and as a parameter of choice in their institutional control. The temporal aspect of waste management led Alvin Weinberg to make the much-quoted observation that: We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand we offer—in the catalytic nuclear burner—an inexhaustible source of energy…. But the price we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and longevity of social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to.6

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Radioactive Waste

Another, shorter dimension of time which is significant in this study is the cycle of accumulation of nuclear capital. It can be generally observed that, during the early phase of demonstration and commercialization of reactor technology, radwaste management and disposal were considered as secondary problems to be dealt with only in so far as this expedited nuclear expansion. This led to the dual management practice of discharges and storage. Only after commercial reactor programmes had been established, and when substantial accumulations of radwastes already existed, did waste management assume the nature of a problem of the first rank. Hence priorities in radwaste-management planning have been time-dependent. For instance, in each of the three countries described in this study, the year 1976 (when reactor systems were already wellestablished) proved to be a landmark year in policy towards the disposal of high-level wastes. 2.3 Hypotheticality and performance I have argued that since radwastes decay techniques and principles of control take account of time dimension within radioactive-waste management. In this section I will argue that this temporal aspect has only been the condition not a determinant by which the ideal of control could be defined. The decay of toxicity, even over time periods beyond human or institutional comprehension, has only become an important feature in the design of waste-management techniques because basic technical uncertainties were felt about the effects of radioactivity on human beings, following the experience of early users of radioactive substances. At a simple level these concerned the general scale of the hazard posed by man-made radioactive materials being dispersed into the biosphere. A typical example of an early estimate is the following by de Laguna in 1959: A direct comparison of the 6×109 curies of strontium-90 expected by the year 2000 [assuming 700 GW installed nuclear capacity] with a maximum permissible body burden [10–7 Ci]…shows that the potential of this one isotope is more than sufficient to injure all mankind. A more realistic comparison is with the ability of the general environment to contain the waste…. The maximum permissible concentration of strontium-90…is 8×10–14 curies per cubic centimeter. On this basis, permissible concentrations of strontium-90 could be reached by diluting the postulated 6×109 curies in 7×1022 cc of water…. This is more fresh water than there is in the world, even including the polar ice caps.7 Thumbnail sketch arguments may be misleading because of the simplifications they employ, and indeed they have been used to support


27

opposite conclusions,8 but this does not alter the fact that radioactive wastes have been thought of as presenting a potential hazard of global significance. Technical uncertainties about their management have therefore attained a special stature. In current understanding these uncertainties may be divided into two parts. Both of these are now considered in the language of risk: (i) the risk that man-made ionizing radiations will be transmitted towards ‘critical’ groups or whole populations of people; and (ii) the risk that these exposures will cause some significant (or ‘unacceptable’) somatic or genetic injury. The problem of exposure to radioactivity applies to both ‘dilute and disperse’ and ‘containment’ waste-disposal systems. ‘Containment’ systems are distinguished through the incorporation of an element of further engineered restraint to dispersion such as an encapsulation matrix and an engineered repository. Indeed, the presence or absence of an engineered barrier in the disposal system marks the regulatory division between radiation protection and nuclear safety in Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany. Assessment of risk types (i) and (ii) is made more problematic by what Häfele has suggestively termed hypotheticality. According to Häfele, the laws of nature can all, in principle, be known. What is beyond science is knowledge of the initial and boundary conditions of phenomena (what he calls contingent conditions) which by their very nature cannot be predicted—they just happen. Initial conditions are basic system characteristics such as temperature and chemistry, while boundary conditions determine the relationship between those characteristics internal to a system and its external environment. These real-world parameters require measurement. Nuclear-related risks create a new range of measurement and modelling uncertainties arising out of the extreme difficulties of establishing the risks whose source lies in contingent conditions. The traditional engineering approach to eliminating risks…is trial and error. The engineer learns by experience to make better and safer machines. This is close to the scientific approach: an hypothesis is made which is followed by experiments, which in turn lead to an improved hypothesis, which again is followed by experiments…. It is precisely this interplay between theory and experiment, or trial and error, which is no longer possible for new technologies…. The process of iteration in its traditional sense is no longer possible. Such truth can no longer be fully experienced. This means that arguments in the hypothetical domain necessarily and ultimately remain inconclusive.9 Risks associated with contingent states are a more dominant feature of radwaste disposal systems than many other of the new technologies alluded

28

Radioactive Waste

to by Häfele. In discussing this contention it is useful to extend the idea of risks associated with initial and boundary states to include a less positivist conception of science than the one Häfele uses. Scientific knowledge does not progress towards some point of completion but evolves constantly, always within institutionally-erected as well as physical or environmental boundaries. The assertion that science is institutionally bounded is not original. What differentiates wastemanagement technologies is not only that their contingent states can never be fully known, but that the science which is invoked to assess technological performance can never be fully validated empirically. This is principally because of their temporal reach. Much of post-war philosophy of science can be summarized by saying that science is true because it performs. That is why science became the preferred method of secular societies. This applies both within science institutions (where its methods enable the testing of theories finally dependent on empirical verification/falsification) and outside science (where scientists and engineers are accorded their expert status because they can prove themselves by producing technological benefits to social life). This capacity to perform is mainly delivered through science’s embodiment in technology. Therefore, technology helps justify science as a practice and as an institution. Internal to science, as instrumentation, technology has an organizational function in that it enables the practice of falsification and puzzle solving. External to science, technology has a broad practical and ideological function through its material effects. This defines a reciprocal relation between science and technology. Neither of these performing (and validating) capacities of science through technology is available during the development and operation of radwaste-disposal technologies. They can never be shown to work. There are no experimental conditions under which waste-repository performance simulations can be fully tested. Any simulation that is carried out is vulnerable to the charge that it is incomplete. This is for at least three reasons: (i) the timescales over which radwaste repositories have to contain radionuclide migration are such that experiments would have to take place under artificially stressed conditions. Most processes in the near- and far-field environments of repositories will be very slow, and it is often this very slowness that affects the balance of critical processes; (ii) repositories are (or will be) designed to utilize their geological or marine environment as a means of containment. Modelling the processes which determine the dispersion of radionuclides in these places can never be complete—the more intrusive the investigations, the more the integrity of the site is jeopardized; and


29

(iii) unexpected events such as earthquakes and meteorite impacts may have major impacts on the long-term safety of a repository, but are ultimately very difficult to predict. These uncertainties take on a particular significance because disposal technologies lack a performing capacity and because of the perceived scale of the effects of inadequate management. Performance and safety assessments of repositories have therefore become the locus of the most intense scientific effort in radwaste management, with a heuristic dynamic all of their own. None of this might matter if we could be sure that when a disposal site did malfunction those affected would be warned and could cope with the consequences relatively easily. The reliability of a technology is not so critical where active intervention can safely repair it. For reasons of safety as well as inter-generational fairness, accessibility is usually not a design feature of radwaste repositories.10 2.4 Modelling the performance of disposal systems Hypotheticality and the related problem of performance have consequences both for the practice of research in support of repository technologies and for the capacity of governments to gain more general consent for these technologies. The first of these questions is discussed here, the second in section 2.5. Safety assessments of repositories for most long-lived wastes have depended on the development of complex simulations of conceptual repository designs. Such repository models have both a heuristic and a validating function. First, they generate a framework within which further research can be done by pointing up weak areas in any analysis. Second, they are used as tools to assert that it is possible to build a repository, and to demonstrate that such a repository would be safe. Ultimately, these safety studies should provide the apparatus against which a specific repository proposal can be judged. The relationship between the conceptual and the real in planning for the disposal of radwastes presents many intriguing issues. As an OECD/ Nuclear Energy Agency pamphlet put it: A direct demonstration of such a disposal system would require practical experience over a period equivalent to that which the system is designed to contain the radioactivity. Since the objective is precisely to ensure geological isolation over a considerable length of time, at any rate in terms of the human lifespan, it is obviously impossible to envisage a direct demonstration over so long a period based on any a posteriori proof of safety. ‘Demonstration’ of high level waste disposal must therefore be indirect and based on a different approach.11 (my italics)

30

Radioactive Waste

Of course, no technology can be tested for the period, or under the precise conditions, equivalent to its operational life, but radioactive waste repositories represent an extreme case of the aspiration to a ‘proof of reliability. In constructing and negotiating such a validation many elements are used, together and interchangeably—conceptual and real, ideal and contingent. The dialogue is confused in a very modern way— simulations become reality, and data about the real world are partial and fragmented. These necessary ambiguities have only deepened with the move towards more containment and away from waste management based on dispersion. Now that the conditions of ‘proof’ have excluded the possibility of monitoring the impact of management decisions, the complexity of the technical problem is greatly increased and the onus of validation is shifted towards the theoretical and away from the practical. All of these effects can be ascribed to the particular fascination which radioactive decay has held for scientists and engineers working in the repository sciences. At a broader level, the effects of time—waiting or pressing forward, half-hearted or firmer commitments to future action, the search for operational flexibility—can be seen in the ambivalence of governments, the nuclear industry and public opinion towards the disposal of radioactive wastes. The present-day capacity to generate and manipulate indirect evidence has been greatly improved with the development of computers and numerical modelling as compared with 30 years ago when radwastes were first produced. Reasonably sophisticated models can now be built which attempt to simulate the hydrological, geophysical and geochemical environment of conceptual or real repositories.12 Complexly related processes occurring across several spatial and temporal scales have to be duplicated in these models. As always, such models are only as good as their assumptions allow them to be. Some general remarks can be made about how the problem of modelling has been approached. First, simple ‘pessimistic’ models can be produced based on general physical principles. These can be fashioned to provide conservative estimates of repository performance and have therefore been much used in justification of conceptual disposal schemes.13 The limitation is that it is not possible to say how pessimistic any assumption is and what effect it will have on the validity of the model as a whole. Second, laboratory experiments simulating a single process or chemical relationship can be used to provide data for models. However, in a real repository environment and during water-borne transport of radionuclides to the earth’s surface, under a ‘normal-case’ release scenario, many interrelated reactions and processes would take place. At present these can only be modelled very approximately due to gaps in data on their kinetics. Third, models can be verified by ensuring that calculations associated with any particular model actually give the correct numerical answer for


31

the assumptions made, and that they are reproducible by other similar or related models.14 Much of this work has been initiated in Sweden. Fourth, the model must be validated against in situ experiments and natural analogues.15 How closely a model of the repository environment approximates to reality can only be established by comparing its predictions with results of tests carried out in the field. The predictive power of conceptual models is a function of their faithfulness to the full complexity of geophysical and geochemical reality. Data validation has received much more attention in recent years as the regulatory pressures to provide convincing evaluations of repository performance have deepened. Until an actual site for a repository is located, safety assessments of conceptual repositories can only provide partial answers. The stress on demonstration of the technology in situ is important because each repository will be a unique, site-specific structure. Its singularity of construction and safety assessment will derive primarily from the nature of the geological environment in which it is placed. Theoretically, the engineered repository and waste package should complement its specific hydro-geochemical environment. The technology for the disposal of solid radwastes to land has been standardized since the late 1970s under the ‘multi-barrier’ concept. This engineering concept was the first to consider systematically the problem of containment over the long term. It envisages a mine for waste disposal composed of an onion-skin structure of complementary engineered barriers around radioactive wastes encapsulated within an inert, durable matrix. This engineered system will eventually be broken down and the waste nuclides will be released into the surrounding geological environment through gradual or freak natural processes, or due to human intervention. The disposal system is designed so as to minimize shortand long-term doses of radiation to workers and affected human populations, within the prevailing boundaries of knowledge and economics. Regulators have chosen to interpret the importance of site-specific complementarity within the ‘multi-barrier’ approach in a variety of ways. Its general importance during the 1980s has been that final repository performance is now seen as dependent on the conditioning and packaging of wastes. Hence design concepts for the radwaste repository have created new impluses for technical change backwards into the whole wastemanagement system (see Figure 2.4). None of the countries considered here have officially chosen sites for high-level waste repositories, and neither Britain nor Germany yet have a land-based site suitable for the disposal of intermediate radwastes. Without being able to anchor safety assessments in reality, the issue of site-specificity continues to hamper decision-making. There are various ways of trying to deal with the boundary between the

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Radioactive Waste

Figure 2.4 The role of performance assessment in the development of an underground waste-disposal system and sub-systems

Source: IAEA (1981)

real and the conceptual, encapsulated in the problem of site-specificity. The first is to take a very pure view of the problem, and to postpone waste-conditioning decisions until a disposal route has been found and the full complementarity of the waste package with the repository can be assured. This also happens to be a convenient excuse for the deferral of such decisions. Second, it is possible to develop the notion of a ‘best’ waste management system, which aspires to locate the one most suitable site for the construction of a repository. The ‘best’ would usually mean the site which included the lowest degree of uncertainty for waste-disposal safety. It is this ideal which motivates disposal site-search programmes. Third, it may lead, as in Sweden, to the development of a conceptual plan


33

for a repository as a feasibility study which may in detail bear little resemblance to the repository eventually constructed. The function of the feasibility study is mainly as a grand gesture of demonstration and to orient research towards a real, sited repository. In sum, an analysis of the safety of disposal routes for radwastes now lies at the centre of planning, technical innovation, and the purely legitimatory aspects of radwaste management policy. But it is no longer sufficient to claim that a feasibility study has ‘demonstrated’ the longterm safety of radwaste disposal. Even assuming that simplified conceptual models are basically correct, the technology of waste-management systems cannot be built around them. The developing technical knowledge of disposal systems has increasingly stressed the complexity and diversity of the real world, and the limitations of generic models. Together with the ALAR A principle in radiation protection, this new sensitivity to complexity has produced an emphasis on specific, tailor-made, waste-management systems. Each step and component is to be designed to suit a final disposal site. The problem of siting is thereby also made more difficult because it may now be felt necessary, technically or politically, to demonstrate that the site chosen for radwaste disposal is indeed the ‘best’ among all possible other sites. Within the ideology of control, which in stressing complexity becomes more specific, and which must also deal with irreconcilable technical uncertainties, a dynamic of learning has been established which will remain open-ended to the last. Although the temporal dimension of radwaste management has produced the mirage of total control and the spur for scientific research, we are left with a deepening cognition of the limits of that control. 2.5 Regulating risks and its social consequences The capacity of governments and regulators to gain more general consent for radwaste technologies has traditionally been considered within the study of risk-perception. Common usage of the notion of ‘risk’ in social studies of the diffusion of nuclear technology was heralded by the seminal article by Starr in 1969.16 One of the more insidious legacies of the debate which followed was the so-called ‘objective-perceived risk dichotomy’ in which objective physical risks (expressed in the nuclear field as probabilities of developing fatal cancers) were decisively separated from perceived risks which were held to be intrinsically irrational. By this device, the burgeoning problem of public anxieties about nuclear energy could either be dismissed as ‘nonproblems’ and ‘science fiction’,17 or when it came to be regarded as a ‘problem’ worthy of study, could be seen as a distorted reading of objectively definable phenomena. Certain special characteristics of nuclear

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technology were held to be responsible for this: its unfamiliarity, involuntariness and so on.18 Either way, public opinions of technological risks could be stripped of their value. There are basically two approaches open to a critique of this first generation of risk-perception studies. One is to investigate the technical justifications which are used to allocate risk values to technologies.19 The other is to shift the focus of the analysis of public attitudes away from the technical fact of the risk itself, and on to more general social frameworks through which risks are understood by those who are at some remove from the risk-generating technology.20 The discussions in sections 2.3 and 2.4 are consistent with these two critical perspectives: both in the openended way by which risks in radwaste management are described and in the stress laid on the physical and social inaccessibility of the technology. In arguing the first position, Wynne contends that expert risk-analysis of complex technological systems is subject to prior framing assumptions which are ‘part and parcel of science, not eradicable lapses from proper rational scientific procedures’.21 Such framing assumptions are ‘tacit, incremental and inadvertent’ creating systematic errors in technical assessments. These errors originate in informal judgements about the whole social-technical risk system under analysis which are not open to resolution with objective information. When processed within the institutions of science or government, such disagreements give rise to structural uncertainties which, for the sake of maintaining the image of scientific rationality and control, are ignored or suppressed. Because of its institutional position and composition, risk assessment is therefore inherently divided against itself. This leads to the interesting conclusion that scientists (or technicians in Ravetz’s nomenclature) are not deliberately foisting myths of technological safety on the lay public, ‘they are themselves enmeshed in those myths’.22 The only way in which these scientific disputes can be resolved is by negotiation over prior frameworks of reasoning. Such questioning of assumptions must usually include a much wider definition of the risks associated with the technical system. Not only may the technical evaluation of risks be faulty, but according to the second critical approach, the effects of these risks in the social arena may not be clear-cut. It is argued instead that risk perception is affected not only by the risks themselves, but also by their status as a representation of inequities of knowledge and power. In seeking to understand the construction of public attitudes, the critique of instrumental risk-perception studies has sought to expose the fallacy of assuming that technological or environmental risks are considered as facts in themselves, apart from the social context in which they are found and interpreted.23 The so-called ‘cultural’ or ‘social relations’ approaches to the problem of risk perception take as axiomatic that: ‘in the real world the perception of probable natural losses is freighted with moral associations and institutional bias’.24


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Psychological studies which take as their subject the individual and his or her responses to technically-defined risks will systematically ignore the social context of the cognition and interpretation of technologies. Deep resonances set up in these interpretations are eliminated and replaced by institutionally-fixed frameworks of meaningful formation and regulation. The design, construction and operation of many technologies will be distant from the experience of all bar a small coterie of experts. Risks, in so far as they can be defined, are only one part of a more general attitude of trust and belief held by those outside this institutional centre. The ‘perception’ of risks is therefore always set in a wider understanding of institutional actors and reasonings, not only of the specific technical justifications which these ‘experts’ give for their decisions. Crucially, the credibility of these institutions depends on how they function in public; whether what they say and do matches the promises and expectations they have aroused. The negotiation of social legitimacy is not achieved through the process of rational (as defined by technicians) argument alone, but equally through the conscious manipulation of symbolic representations. Nuclear power was born with vast symbolic resources (the mushroom cloud, the ‘magical’ and ‘inexhaustible’ energy source, scientific control), and it is these social myths, and technology’s conformity to them, which structure the social cognition of nuclear risks. 2.6 A synthesis: setting boundaries of control As time passes it becomes clear that many of the problems outlined above are not unique to radwastes. The controversy around them is more advanced because they were first recognized in relation to radwastes, and because they appear here in an extreme form. The management and disposal of some fractions of fuel-cycle effluent and debris was seen as especially difficult by the originators of atomic power. Most radioactive waste streams were (and are) treated like other industrial wastes and dumped or discharged to the general environment. The sea or the land is assumed or calculated to be ‘forgiving’ enough to absorb and dilute the pollutants and so pose a negligible risk of harm to ecologies. Higher activity and longer-lived radioactive materials, arising mainly in spent-fuel reprocessing, however, have not generally been disposed of directly.25 For these wastes there was an almost instinctual caution; not enough was known, and it was best to store them.26 While the consequences of this policy of storage were rarely justified in public, a basic unease persisted about their fate. It is an unease which the nuclear industry, despite all its protestations, has been unable to shake off over its 40-year life. It should be remembered that the first high-level wastes were produced by weapons programmes during the successive sprints to produce

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plutonium for warheads in the US, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China. Delicate questions about what to do with stored wastes were swept aside in the name of national security and prestige. That the policy of storage was carried over into the period of civil nuclear power is not surprising since commercial reprocessing has continued, by and large, at the same sites where early weapons material was produced. Habits stuck. Conceptually, the initial wariness about radioactive waste disposal had two consequences. First, a regime of institutional control of intermediate-and high-level wastes came to be seen as one of the necessary attributes of a nuclear programme. Second, radwaste management was understood to imply new technological systems to deal with difficult wastes. How long institutional control would last, or what form the systems which permitted disposal would take, remained unclear for a long time. Historically, the first stage in facing the unease over institutional control and how to end it was to develop a consensus over the desirability of final disposal of all radioactive waste types. Acceptance of this principle happened unevenly—relatively early in the US and West Germany, much later in Britain. In tandem with the formation of this consensus there developed notions about how disposal could be done safely. This was a process of scientific and technological accumulation which again evolved quite unevenly. No international consensus existed on the concept of a geological repository, the current reference point in almost all countries, until the mid-1970s. Several proposals were made which sought to circumvent the need for disposal such as transmutation of the long-lived wastes into shorter-lived substances,27 and the firing of radwastes into space. Nevertheless, the repository consensus held together because it was plausible, politically necessary during a period of growing opposition to nuclear power, and because some countries had already made substantial commitments to research into underground terminal disposal. The consensus did not dispel the unease which had led to it, and we have seen during the late 1980s a revival of the old notion of storage in the concept of retrievability. This suggests that the option of removing waste from a repository should never be given up because better means of control may be discovered in the future. At base, this history of ideas has been concerned with the problem of setting the boundary between institutional and post-institutional control. The pathos of radioactive waste management arises from the relinquishment of direct human control over a set of particularly emotive pollutants. To store or to dispose, and if to dispose then how? This is an ethical question since it springs from an apprehension which cannot be finally allayed. We can never know whether we were right or wrong. We


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can only be reasonably assured. The determined sceptic will never be satisfied. Indeed all our beliefs about the growth of knowledge contradict the idea of a final answer. We know that we have been wrong in the past, we hope that we will know more in the future. If loss of control is the crucial problem then it is a boundary of control which waste management policies seek to arrange. Disposal seeks to do away with the chore of surveillance and is defined as: ‘dispersal of radioactive waste into an environmental medium, or emplacement in a facility…with the intention of taking no further active action, apart from necessary monitoring’.28 Such a boundary of control clearly differs for different waste types. Radwaste is not unitary, but a collection of complex substances. For the mainly short-lived wastes which are discharged directly to the general environment, the boundary is set soon after they arise, and involves only limited intervention. The boundary is feint. At the other extreme, control over heat-generating wastes will take many decades and be dominated by technical intervention. Here the boundary is massive. Not all boundaries of control are imposed or designed simultaneously. Some are set when the nuclear-fuel cycle starts up, others have still to be set. Only in limited cases, for instance, has the boundary of control been set for high-level wastes, and it is unlikely that it will be set for at least another 50 years. Not only is the boundary of control differentiated, it is never absolute, but a layered and open-ended phenomenon. It is blurred both by the engineered features which seek to prolong control beyond the point where surveillance ends, and by the scientific knowledge of the behaviour of the boundary and the flows across it. The movement of radioactivity will be, to a greater or lesser extent, understood. Even when direct human control is relinquished, nuclides will still be directed according to the design of the boundary. Indirectly, through the knowledge embodied in the design and assessment of the physical boundary, control will continue. For discharged fluid wastes and shallow land-burial sites, such as Drigg south of Sellafield, environmental monitoring provides a further element of the boundary. A representation of the boundary of control is given in Figure 2.5. It shows that the period of institutional control over wastes varies considerably. An underlying time dimension, set by the decay of activity, is represented in a generalized way. Below the decay curve there is an opposite and harder-to-quantify curve which gives an impression of the increasing uncertainty, over the period after control is ended, of predictions of risks to health caused by the dispersion of radioactivity through the boundary and back to humans. This accumulation of uncertainty must be balanced against the decreasing aggregate toxicity of disposed wastes. Safety assessments for long-lived radioactive-waste disposal systems usually have a cut-off point at around one million years into the future.

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Figure 2.5 The boundary of control

Performance and scientific scepticism An analysis of radiological effects of disposal (the safety assessment) is the heart of the scientific description of the boundary of control. The objective of this systematic investigation of the engineered and natural elements of the physical boundary is to illustrate control over radioactivity. As such it is the means by which disposal is justified—the main tool for palliating the unease about disposal. What we are assured by is not material, but a collection of ideas: a plan which is only partially demonstrable. Scientific speculation and prediction must always play the decisive role. Performance assessment is a highly formalized activity. Through a wide range of chemical, geological and radiological research, in the laboratory and in the field, it seeks to interpret the boundary of control. I have already argued that what is crucially lacking in any answer which a performance assessment can give is practical knowledge—demonstration in the full, materialist sense. Practical knowledge about the system is substituted with codified, theoretical knowledge in the form of simulations created by chemical and mathematical models of the boundary of control. Such simulations are very common to certain areas of engineering—such as aerospace, where they have achieved an uncanny veracity. What is different here is that the final test of performance, by which the simulation may be calibrated and verified, is never available. The simulation is never made real to the senses.


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This lack of practical knowledge produces an epistemic difficulty. Paradoxically, the scientist investigating the problems associated with radwaste disposal must define a point where doubt about the performance assessment is exhausted. He or she must answer the question: how much is enough? When is it possible to feel satisfied that enough is known about the behaviour of the boundary of control? This surrender of doubt, which is inherently also formative of the boundary of control, is of course not an individual choice, but comes at a point when an expert consensus can be reached that further research would be redundant. As the Popperian account of the scientific enterprise explains, such an exhaustion of scepticism is an unnatural act. In Popper’s view, the scientist must never give up the will to falsify and probe deeper. Scientific enterprise will only fade when the problems seem trivial or basically uninteresting. Problems in assessing the boundary of control are never trivial in the sense of being marginal, although there may be a similar perceived problem of diminishing returns. The last questions are simply unknowable. Despite this, scientists have to set limits on their own research, while at the same time acting as experts in the legitimization of the boundary of control. They play a dual and contradictory role as participants and advisors to the learning process. Utility and the relativity of performance Developing technologies which prevent harms can be distinguished from the innovation of technologies which produce some objective utility. For non-performing technologies, no obvious market exists to which design and operation must in some way be accountable. The main selection rules are dose-limitation objectives and performance assessments. In principle, these are always open to falsification. They are not norms in the sense that market structures are norms because they are products of intelligence and not of practice. Selection rules which govern the formation of complex technologies are always open to doubt in the sense that they are not sure to survive in the economic market. There may be an alternative which colonizes its niche in a socio-technical system. Competition between technologies is largely determined by the structure of the market within which it exists— the type of market, how many alternatives there are, the ‘lumpiness’ or flexibility of capital, the requirements for social and technical infrastructures, and so on. But what makes the choice of a technology incontestable is that it becomes embedded within a socio-technical system and is adapted to all the accumulated knowledge and consent which that system represents. For radwaste-management technologies this structural affirmation is not available. Their integration into a socio-technical system will take a different route.

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Technological performance is always relative—relative to alternatives, relative to its time, relative to its socio-technical setting. This point is most easily illustrated by looking back. A modern general would have almost no use for a bow and arrow, whereas at Agincourt it was the English archers who won the day so decisively. There is therefore nothing intrinsic about technological performance. This is because a technology grows out of, and is adapted to, capabilities and needs within a sociotechnical system. The forces and circuits of information which ensure integration within a socio-technical system do not apply to the shaping of a technology’s boundary with the natural environment. Here the selection rules are not reined in structures of exchange, value and performance. The lack of a socialized framework of comparison is a defect in the definition of technology performance. The breach is filled with technicians who prescribe standards and hypothetical tests, but this does not alter the basic deficit of affirmation, a deficit which feeds into the legitimation deficits surrounding environmental-protection technologies. There is no clear way in which these technologies may be embedded within the structure of social needs which they are designed to address. Indeed they are alienated from these needs because there is no clear relation between the desire, however confused or specific, for a ‘protected environment’ and the design of a technology to assure it. This does not mean that there is no relation at all between expected utility and the assessment of performance. What is important about this technology of assurance is that the relation is attenuated by interposing institutional processes whose authority is never grounded in an accepted structure of value. This buffer of institutions between the design of an environmentalprotection technology and the desire which it fulfils is framed by doubt. Just as science is an institutionally-bounded organism, so is doubt. To understand why doubt is at times inflamed and at others extinguished, we must look at the institutional processing of design. The market is therefore substituted by a specific framework of negotiation whose main site is the licensing process for nuclear plant, but it may extend outwards into other frameworks of social norm formation such as technical peergroup review and on to public debates about the constitutionality of certain technical decisions, as in West Germany. Knowledge and the boundary of control To sum up, the argument has been that there are two types of knowledge about the boundary of control. The first is the knowledge embodied in the physical boundary itself, the second is the encoded knowledge about the behaviour (or performance) of that boundary. I have argued that


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what is crucially missing is a third type of knowledge—intrinsic, practical knowledge about the boundary. However hard we search for analogues and exemplars we always remain alienated from an experience of the boundary of control. Without this experience, embodied and encoded knowledge remain isolated and strongly interdependent. There is no third position (of experience) to liberate them from carrying the whole burden of illustrating the performance of control. Embodied and encoded knowledge are therefore always in danger of becoming detached from reality, even as this knowledge grows more sophisticated. In designing some segment of the physical boundary (the waste form canister, say) a new frame of reference for assessment has to be constructed, restating its own boundaries. This is no trivial problem because of the high degree of complementarity assumed in the boundary’s physico-chemical system. Without practical knowledge, the onus of proof falls on the suspension of scientific scepticism. Such disengagements are necessary in science as elsewhere—there is a need to take some things for granted—but in this case the suspension must be definite. It must be a closure rather than a loss of interest; a line which is drawn and then defended. The capacity to set a boundary of control requires agreement on where this line is drawn. Agreement and assurance are just two sides of the same coin. Although the production of scientific agreement may often be to some extent autonomous from the processes of broader social agreement, in this case the two structures cannot be separated. Any scientific consensus about a performance assessment cannot be isolated from the real world, but will be embedded in it. This becomes clearer in the consideration of the utility of wastemanagement technology. Unlike most technologies whose utility is manifest in the present, and whose advantages can therefore be compared with other competing technologies, waste-management technologies have only a deferred utility. This feature means that the usual means by which a technology becomes embedded in a socio-technical system, and becomes accepted and trusted, is absent in this case. There are no grounded selection rules which allow the suppression of fears about the adequacy of the technology. Every last step in the reasoning of a performance assessment is open to question. Without a normalization of the technology through the comparison of use values, the last resort is some form of agreement. In choosing the concept of a boundary of control—absolute in an administrative and political sense, but uncertain from a technical point of view—the conflicts inherent in radwaste-management decisions become more apparent. An arid discourse about ‘risks’ now becomes an analysis of choices. The false boundary between technics and politics is dissolved by realizing that there is little difference between the choices made by the many actors concerned. They are all driven by a similar unease.

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The boundary concept suggests that innovation in environmentalprotection technologies seeks to intensify control by improving knowledge about disposal-system performance beyond the point of the relinquishment of social control. This implies social and institutional innovation as well as the more commonly understood technological and scientific accumulation. But scientific knowledge and nuclear technology is so organized that those most in need of assurance are also those most decisively excluded from its accumulation. Questions of the formation of knowledge, and access to that knowledge, are basic to the whole problem of waste management, because technological accumulation in the field is driven by unease, not factor prices and a market mechanism. Development is hence a more visibly social process. Not only is radwaste management implicitly oriented to the social goal of protecting health, it is also concerned with the political process of agreeing on the establishment of a boundary of social control around these wastes. Assurance and conflict In saying this I do not want to argue for a purely ideological conception of waste management practices, although this is an important aspect. It is the objective of this book to show that disputes over boundaries of control have always involved a mixing of industrial, scientific and political commitments. Such commitments have determined how boundaries were set in the past for fluid wastes and how they will be set in the future for solid wastes. Through time these commitments bring a variety of interests to the defence of old boundaries and the establishment of new ones. Broadly, they are shaped by three factors: (i) the expansion, nationally and internationally, of the infrastructure of the nuclear-fuel cycle; (ii) the development of science and technology relating to radioactive wastes and the boundary problem; and (iii) the changing political controversy over nuclear power. The first two are country-specific, the last has a more general effect. The state is usually allocated a critical role to play in setting, controlling and guaranteeing boundaries of administrative and scientific control through its regulatory function. We find that the state’s capacity to make commitments to boundary-setting decisions (in principle or in practice) is fundamental to the evolution of policy. This capacity to make boundarysetting decisions is determined by two basic factors. In Chapter 6 I will argue that it is linked to the particular form of the relationship between the state and the nuclear industry. Significantly, the state will only commit itself to addressing boundary-setting problems when these do not conflict with wider strategic and industrial interests which it


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may be pursuing through its nuclear policy. That such conflicts are inherent to the policy process in Sweden, West Germany and Britain will become apparent in the next three ‘case-study’ chapters. But the willingness by states to pursue what have been termed ‘environmental-safety’ goals in the nuclear-fuel cycle is not the same as their capacity to fulfil them. Reserves of social resistance to the execution of effective boundary-setting have proven to be effective in all the countries discussed here. The question of why nuclear power, and more specifically the control of radioactive wastes, should have evoked such trenchant and sustained social conflict is beyond the capacity of this writer to answer. Nevertheless, nuclear protest is not a complete mystery, even though there are several different positions on its origins and significance. Here I will quickly summarize my own perceptions. First, I have defined the ‘boundary of control’ as a multiple and somewhat ambiguous phenomenon; institutionally-situated and the site of both technical and social negotiations. Such a conception suggests that there are doubts intrinsic to the nature of the boundary and the aspiration towards full control of (decaying) radioactive materials. There appears to be an internally generated logic to the technical and institutional framing of the regulatory function which invites dispute. The question to be resolved concerns the provision of assurance about the security of the boundary and the protection of lives. Second, I have identified the problem of the social distance between people affected by regulatory decisions, and experts and decision-makers. This distance is maintained through a relation of power—of knowledge and of the authority to make decisions. Relations of power are always unstable and require to be sustained through reasoning, coercion or deceit. In democratic societies, where the use of the latter two means of social control is normally more limited, the force of reason is upheld as the guarantor of just and prudent decisions. But reason is not a commodity which stands by itself; it is always a dialogue, a search for truth or whatever. And where the needs for demonstrating reasonable motives and precautions are more acute (as in radwaste management), new procedures for extending and deepening the dialogue of reason evolve, or more properly are forced on to dominant interests. Reason is therefore a function of the capacity of societies to converse on certain topics, and the importance which is attached to those dialogues. There is no certainty in this process and no anticipation that environmental politics are necessarily ‘rational’ when judged according to the criteria of scientific consensus-building. What I believe these discussions often manifest are a number of deep-seated, but latent and inchoate, political negotiations which cannot find a legitimate outlet in any other form. This type of argument sees the nuclear controversy as a kind of generational ‘return of the repressed’.

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Third, and closely related to the previous point, nuclear power is the ideal issue for social catharsis because it is symbolically related to so many fundamental disputes: the relation of the state to the individual, trust in science and the state apparatus, accountability in liberal democracies, the viability of a stable world peace in the nuclear age, the destruction of the environment, and so on. Recently the fecundity of these symbols has been graphically illustrated in the way nationalist movements in Eastern Europe have often crystallized around existing anti-nuclear and ‘green’ organizations. The ‘environment’ is a blank canvas on to which may be painted a multitude of hopes and fears; it is a new instrument of political mobilization. Over the past 20 years, nuclear power has often seemed the single clearest threat to the environment, and has as a consequence borne the brunt of most of this anger. Fourth, given the boundary of control and the need to negotiate authority despite the apparently limitless symbolic potential of the nuclear enterprise, the nuclear industry and its regulators have their own vanities to satisfy as well. It was Weber who remarked that all forms of authority seek to become loved and admired in their own terms. Self-justification therefore comes naturally, and large resources will be invested to that end. It is impossible to see many of industry’s responses to ‘the nuclear controversy’ as anything other than the will to be admired once more. All of these aspects can be encompassed under the general heading of legitimation—that is, the active negotiation of authority by those in authority. As we have described, reason is a dialogue, and we would expect such a dialogue to be conducted in distinctive ways in different countries. They will be spoken in different languages and procedures— languages which are based in historical, cultural and administrative tradition. In this book I will be concerned with the way in which these specific features express themselves in the formation and legitimation of policy. At a general level, the institutional frameworks which regulate toxic substances can be seen as structures of dialogue; open or closed; authoritarian or democratic; complex or simple; structured or unstructured. Moreover, they are dialogues within which innovation occurs, both in a technical sense (through assessments) and the more diffuse political sense of social learning. These aspects of the legitimation of radwaste decisions will be discussed theoretically and comparatively in Chapter 7. 2.7 Conclusion From an analysis of its temporal aspects we have come to stress the social and institutional aspects of decision-making and scientific endeavour in radwaste-management policy. I have sought to avoid the telescoping of issues and problems which occurs in discourse employing the risk concept.


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Although fundamental to technical assessment itself, the concept is of little use in the understanding of the politics and dilemmas of radwaste management. In the final section I have made a modest proposal of a conceptual framework within which to describe the generic problems dealt with in this book. As with all metaphors it is a simplification which holds some worth only if it provokes new thoughts. Notes and references 1 See Bullard (1987). The author argues that democratic control of modern technologies requires that their ‘complexity’ and ‘reach’ (the spatial and temporal extent of their consequences) be limited. From this position he contends that an indefinite commitment to surveillance of hazardous wastes should be sustained. 2 For instance, radioactive discharges from all British nuclear installations in 1987 accounted for only 3.3 per cent of total alpha activity and 0.0073 per cent of total beta/gamma activity contained in the high-level waste liquor produced in that year and stored at Sellafield for future disposal to land. Sources: Hunt (1988) pp. 6–7; HMSO/RWMAC Eighth Annual Report, 1987, p. 81. 3 Most transuranics (heavy nuclides) emit alpha particles which are densely ionizing and therefore cause much more tissue damage per unit of energy deposited (dose) than the sparse ionization caused by beta and gamma radiation. 4 First-cycle raffinate produced in spent fuel reprocessing. 5 OECD/NEA (1977) para. 131, p. 51. 6 Weinberg (1972a) pp. 27–34. 7 de Laguna (1959) p. 36. 8 D.H. Day quoting other estimates finds that ‘the “radioactive waste problem” is manageable and that the volume and harmfulness of the waste is modest compared with the radioactive Earth on which Man has evolved’. See Day et al. (1985) p. 109. 9 Häfele (1974) pp. 313–14. 10 ‘Retrievability’ of radwastes is now being considered by SKB in Sweden and Nirex in the UK as a possible design parameter for repositories. 11 OECD/NEA (1983) p. 11. 12 The state-of-the-art for a conceptual HLW repository is now represented by the Swiss Projekt Gewähr published in 1985 (see Nationale Genossenschaft für die Lagerung radioaktiver Abfälle (NAGRA) 1985). 13 Examples are: Hill and Grimwood (1978); Kärnbränslesäkerhet (KBS) (1977). 14 Chapman and McKinley (1987) p. 214. 15 Existing geological sites which show evidence of processes similar to those assumed for radioactive waste repositories. 16 Starr (1969) pp. 1232–38. 17 Sir John Hill, Chairman of UKAEA, speaking in September 1976, cited in Williams (1980) p. 273. 18 In a huge literature, the following are leading examples: Slovic et al. (1981, 1984); Otway and Thomas (1982). 19 Wynne (1981). 20 Douglas and Wildavsky (1982). 21 Wynne (1981) p. 127. 22 Wynne (1981) p. 128. 23 Otway and Winterfield (1982).

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24 Douglas (1985) p. 91. 25 The only exception in the non-Communist world is the US Department of Energy’s Hanford site. From 1944 to 1966 high-level waste liquors were pumped into 149 single-shell tanks for apparently perpetual storage. Of these, over a third are now thought to have developed leaks and the current policy is to pump the tanks out and store the remaining liquor for future treatment. Source: General Accounting Office (GAO) (1989) pp. 1–3. 26 ‘Of…controversy is the decision as to what to do with the storable [highlyactive] waste…. It is the opinion of the author that, at least for the present generation, a plan should be made to maintain control of the wastes.’ (Rodger, 1954, p. 266); ‘Although the costs of tank storage are high, the method has one advantage in the present stage of only limited knowledge, namely, that the wastes are under control.’ (Wolman and Gorman, 1955); A UKAEA delegate, E.Gluekauf, took a similarly cautious line: ‘we have at Harwell not come to the conclusion that we know sufficient about the movement and reaction taking place in the ground for us to consider disposing of substantial quantities of radioactivity in the ground’. 27 IAEA (1982). 28 HMSO/RWMAC (1981) Second Annual Report, para. 5.6, p. 22.

Chapter three

The Federal Republic of Germany

3.1 Introduction Nuclear power accounted for 39.3 per cent of the electricity generated in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1988. It was produced at twentythree operating units on nineteen sites, developing a gross generating capacity of 22,597 MW(e).1 The operation of each of these stations is covered by a licence which requires the reactor operator to guarantee prior provision for the management of spent fuel and other radioactive wastes for a period of at least 6 years. The legal expression of this requirement, the search for ways of meeting it by state and industry under changing political and economic conditions, and the interruptions in that search are the subject of this chapter. In Germany, as in Sweden, the management of nuclear materials has had a profound effect on the development of nuclear power. Although issues such as reactor safety and the economics of nuclear electricity have been significant in fuelling the nuclear controversy, particularly before 1977, it is the struggles over the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle which have been the most palpable constraining influence to nuclear-power development. The Bundesrepublik is also similar to Sweden, but different from the UK, in having a fully articulated policy for the back-end. Unlike Sweden, the debate over the shape and direction of this policy is still very much alive. To a large degree, the orientation of policy has been determined by a conceptual innovation particular to the German context. The term Entsorgung2 technically encompasses activities in the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including recycling of fissionable materials and decommissioning. It also represents the ideal of safe management of backend activities according to the principle of the ‘polluter pays’. This dual but unified connotation has taken on a peculiar rhetorical weight, muddied through common usage. The use of idealistic language to describe regulatory tasks in the nuclear industry is not, however, limited to the Bundesrepublik. 47

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The notion of Entsorgung applied to the back-end of the NFC first emerged in the early 1970s, and achieved wide use shortly thereafter when it was adopted by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) in 1974 to cover the concept of an integrated reprocessing and disposal centre, the Entsorgungszentrum. In 1976 it attained legal status when it became the centrepiece of an amendment to the Atomic Law. From then on, the Entsorgung concept came to encapsulate both a policy of reprocessing (the ‘closing’ of the fuel cycle), and the more general imperative of safe disposal of all radioactive wastes. This up to now inextricable linkage between radwaste management and reprocessing—conceptual as well as legal—is unique to the Bundesrepublik, and the key to many of the disputes which have taken place over radwaste management in the past decade. The chapter opens with a brief review of the institutional framework concerned with implementing and regulating Entsorgung policies in the Bundesrepublik. Then the historical setting of German civil nuclear power will be sketched out. The main body of the chapter is a detailed analysis of the evolution of Entsorgung policy from the time when it was first formulated in the early 1970s to the present day. 3.2 Legal and institutional framework The Federal German Constitution states that, among other aspects of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, ‘the disposal of radioactive substances’ is within the so-called concurrent legislative competence of the Bund (the Federal government). This means in practice that: ‘the Länder [the state governments] may legislate in this field…in so far as the Bund has not exercised its legislative authority’.3 Such a form of words recognizes that both Federal and Land governments must have authority in radwaste management, and that the precise relationships of regulation will depend on the circumstances surrounding any particular application for a nuclear licence. These ambiguities of responsibility have been exploited by the Bund and Länder in their mutual efforts at bringing political legitimacy to strategies in the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle, including the imposition of a ‘boundary of control’, sometimes while each pursued quite separate aims. Within an often finely balanced and competitive policymaking context, a complex regulatory framework has developed to implement Entsorgung strategies. Basic safety standards and licensing procedures for nuclear facilities are set out in the Atomic Law of 1960. In 1976 this was supplemented by an amendment which gave policy for the back-end of the fuel cycle a legal footing. This legal foundation of responsibilities and obligations is complemented by a framework of political commitments on the part of central and regional governments. Executive and licensing responsibilities are divided between them, and policy-making has historically involved complex


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manoeuvring between the centre, which is comparatively weak, and the periphery. Occasionally mediating, and at other times serving the political sphere, are numerous independent and quasi-independent technical authorities. Since these are available to both sides of the constitutional divide, an Entsorgung facility, or more broadly a technology, cannot be politically viable without a correspondingly greater effort on the part of technical authorities to reach a broad-ranging consensus. This stress on consensus within the licensing process can therefore be ascribed, at least in part, to Germany’s Federal political structure. Access to judicial review has been more important in the German policy process than in Sweden and the UK. Recourse to law plays this major role for a number of historical reasons: In the Roman law, tradition law is conceived of as a coherent, selfsufficient body of norms that will yield a technically correct solution to a dispute. Where negotiation fails to secure consensus, and an interest or party fears a politically imposed solution, it is likely to attempt to close down the issue by seeking an authoritative legal resolution.4 The experience of the Third Reich has affirmed this bureaucratic legalism in the ideology of the Rechtsstaat, which emphasizes technical rationality in a conception of a state ruled by law. Procedure, constitutionality, and the right of the individual to challenge decisions felt to be against his or her interests have therefore achieved a primary significance for German policy implementation. Review of responsible organizations Formally, the power to grant and revoke nuclear licences lies with the designated ministries in the Länder. Their main role, however, is only to co-ordinate the licensing process, ensure that the procedural rules have been followed, and take licensing decisions on the basis of technical and other advice. In-house expertise in these ministries is usually limited. The principal significance of the Federal fragmentation of regulatory control has been in the increased potential for conflict. A more discretionary licensing system, as in the UK, is seen as unworkable because of the lack of expertise at the Land level and the inter-state disparities in standards which would inevitably arise from such a system. Conformity of regulatory practice as regards safety matters is for legal and political reasons seen as essential. Such conformity is ensured through the discreet regulatory intervention of Federal agencies. Final regulatory authority for nuclear safety and Entsorgung lies with the Federal ministry responsible.5 Where a case of ‘exceptional public interest’ can be proven, the Federal minister may

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override his or her counterpart at the Land level by issuing an ‘immediate execution notice’ on a licence. Such a measure is rarely used because of its wider constitutional repercussions. Apart from the oversight of nuclear licensing, the Federal government (through the Environment Ministry) has a further role in Entsorgung policy. In the 1976 Atomic Law amendment it was given executive responsibility for guaranteeing the safe disposal of radwastes. Some institutional distance is placed between the Environment Ministry’s policy and supervisory functions through the delegation of technical matters to a number of independent agencies. Much of the licensing of nuclear facilities in the FRG is concerned with establishing whether a plant represents the ‘state of science and technology’. In particular cases, the definition of this is regulated by ordinances and technical bulletins issued by the responsible Federal ministry, and by a system of expert (Behörde) review. Several types of technical bulletin are published: (i) safety rules from the Nuclear Technology Committee (KTA); (ii) recommendations from the Reactor Safety Commission (RSK) and the Radiation Protection Commision (SSK); (iii) the Inter-state Committee on Atomic Energy issues bulletins establishing the legal definition of ‘the state of science and technology’; and (iv) other official bodies such as the Materials Testing Authority (BAM) support the Federal regulatory effort by setting technical standards and testing transport, storage and disposal technologies for radioactive materials. Interpretation of these rules at the Länder level is further aided by ‘directive resolutions’ issued by a national steering committee of the Technical Supervisory Authority (TüV).6 One legal anomaly has been that Entsorgung technologies are not at all stages described as nuclear facilities and therefore do not come under the more rigorous standards and consultation procedures required by the Atomic Law. For instance, interim stores for spent fuel are covered by the Building Act, while research and development and operational safety at a repository site is licensed under Mining and Sub-Storage Law. Up until late 1989 the construction and operation of disposal routes was the responsibility of the Physical and Technical Standards Authority (PTB). This role, together with roles in radiation protection, physical security and nuclear safety, was taken over by the Federal Agency for Radiation Protection (BAS). The BAS will continue the PTB’s Gorleben repositories and make relevant licensing applications. The executive framework for Entsorgung policy is shown in Figure 3.1. Agencies with essentially the same responsibilities exist in all Länder, but the structure of licensing approval depends on the particular facility


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Figure 3.1 Framework for the execution of Entsorgung policy

Source: PTB INFO-BLATT, 1/86, 1.9.86

involved. The Niedersachsen example is used as an indication of the complex relations found in the German regulatory system. In sum, the formal regulatory apparatus for Entsorgung facilities is decentralized in the Bundesrepublik. The balance of power over strategy is mediated through a Federal structure with most licensing authority devolved to the Länder. However, final authority rests in Bonn, and the basic technical ground-rules which define the legality of decisions at the Land level are prescribed mainly by ‘independent’ Federal authorities. The last layer of complexity was added with the amendment of the Atomic Law in 1976 when the Federal state took executive responsibility for providing disposal routes for radwastes. 3.3 The historical setting of Entsorgung politics Commercial nuclear power had a long gestation in the Bundesrepublik, although not for want of faith in the benefits of nuclear electricity. The visions of German nuclear planners were as magnificent as anywhere, and the 1950s and 1960s saw the putting in place of a formidable infrastructure on which to build the electricity source of the future. Between the founding of the Atomministerium under Franz-Jozef Strauss in 1955, and the commissioning of the first commercial station at Stade in 1972, therefore, enduring technological, institutional and industrial commitments were made which bore heavily on the later development of Entsorgung policy. Several different reactor types were built and tested, although lightwater reactors (LWRs) were already preferred, mainly on the basis of US experience, by the early 1960s. The choice of LWRs, loaded with nuclear

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fuel clad in stainless steel or zircalloy, meant that spent-fuel corrosion has not had a significant effect on fuel-cycle policy, as it has in Britain. Foundations for a completely German fuel cycle were also laid early. The chemical industry became interested in reprocessing, or what was known as ‘hot chemistry’, in the late 1950s. Influential voices in major companies like Hoechst became proponents of nuclear power because they sought to exploit Germany’s traditional dominance in the chemicals sector.7 These men progressively tried to dress this naked industrial interest in the more eye-catching apparel of national salvation. In the post-war economic boom they began to argue the strategic importance of nuclear technology. Germany’s main industrial rivals in the west—France, Britain and the US—had all prepared the ground for commercial nuclear power by developing the bomb. If cheap electricity was to be a requirement of a competitive economy in the new order, then Germany too must also go down this path. The Siamese twins of reprocessing and fast-reactor programmes had become central to nuclear thinking on both sides of the Atlantic by the mid-1960s. Reprocessing was seen as a necessary part of the civil nuclearpower complex for reasons of spent-fuel management, uranium conservation, and plutonium separation in order to charge the next generation of fast reactors. By the late 1960s, the hypothetical advantages for safety in HLW disposal were added to the list of justifications. It was assumed that the civil process could readily be made economic under forecast uranium-resource and price conditions, and that reprocessing facilities would pose no special problems for safety and radiation protection. But the evolution of a technology is always greatly affected by the institutional environment of the development. Reprocessing in the FRG has been no different. The pattern of ownership of the electricity-supply industry has been a specially significant factor in this respect. The German electricity supply industry (ESI) is highly differentiated, between large and small, and privately- or publically-owned companies (EVUs),8 with the majority being jointly owned by corporate bodies and private shareholders. In 1984 there were a total of 680 electricity supply companies operating 940 stations. Most of these are very small. The industry is dominated by eight large firms which hold controlling positions in both the coal and nuclear industries. They owe their predominance mainly to membership of the Deutsche Verbund Gesellschaft (DVG)9 which owns the national high-voltage transmission system. DVG members supply about 53 per cent of total electricity, while smaller communal EVUs supply some 27 per cent. The remainder is made up in self-generation for use by firms like the German Railways and from the unaffiliated energy and trading company VEBA. Although most commercial reactors are owned by large utilities, early stations like Obrigheim were constructed jointly


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by communal EVUs, with government support, in order to gain more independence from the larger firms.10 The balance of relations within the state (the Bund and the Länder), and between the state and the electricity utilities is consistently a key influence on back-end decisions. These relations have by no means been stable. Instead, the coalition of interests around a reprocessing policy has always been finely balanced. Changes in policy direction, often forced by political circumstances, presented new opportunities for those involved, including the environmentalist and anti-nuclear movements. Through each of these episodes of policy change a strategy was devised which attempted to add new operational or political flexibility around the basic but periodically fragile commitment to reprocessing in Germany. The beginnings of the end to this phase of development are only now becoming visible. 3.4 An historical analysis of Entsorgung policy The early choice of salt as a disposal medium for radwastes There is evidence that radioactive-waste management was considered from the outset of planning for a German nuclear programme. A memorandum of the Atomkommission dated 9 October 1957, commenting on the first nuclear research programme, stated: ‘These…research efforts must extend to the removal and utilization of radioactive residues.’11 In 1962 the Federal Ministry for Scientific Research commissioned a report on the problem of radwaste disposal from the Institute for Earth Sciences (BfB). The BfB’s report of 1963 concluded that: there are various possibilities for the emplacement of large quantities of radioactive wastes underground. From a geological perspective, the conditions for safe storage of these materials in the Bundesrepublik, particularly in salt formations, could be called almost perfect.12 Radwaste management featured as one of the electricity supply industry’s reasons for the delay in embracing nuclear power production in the mid1960s. An adviser to the giant coal utility Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerke (RWE) wrote in 1966 that the small cost advantage of nuclear electricity would be erased by the ‘special problems…[of] the safe removal and storage of…significant quantities of radioactive fission products’.13 Whether or not this was a genuine concern, or a bargaining position is not really important. Furthermore, Radkau (1983) shows that waste disposal was an early focus of nuclear critics (1959–62), and that, as in Britain, this combined with public and scientific anxiety about the genetic effects of weapons fall-out. Together, these anxieties made waste

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management an issue which had to be seriously addressed by proponents of nuclear power in Germany from an early period. Research and development work on the final disposal of radwastes consequently began earlier in Germany than in most countries, including the pioneers of the peaceful atom like Britain and the United States. In situ geological research began with the purchase of a worked-out ironore mine at Asse in 1965. This project originated in a report by the Working Party on Radiation Protection in the Atomic Commission.14 They had concluded, on the evidence of a seminal US National Academy of Sciences study done in 195714 into the comparative advantages of different geologies for radwaste disposal, that salt was likely to be the most suitable repository rock.15 Special provision was duly made in the second Atomprogramm (1963) for ‘Research into suitable geological formations for underground disposal of radioactive wastes…[and] the planning, preparation and construction of a repository in a salt formation …in the coming years.’16 The choice of salt dominanted all research and planning towards radwaste disposal until 1975 when a worked-out ironore mine in calciferous strata at Konrad in Niedersachsen was purchased for investigation. The reprocessing imperative Entsorgung strategy in the 1970s and 1980s is directly related to the determination to reprocess German spent fuel. This section describes how reprocessing became the centrepiece of back-end strategy. Although many of the early fuel-cycle debates in Germany were concerned with fuel and reactor choice (and access to enriched uranium), the first nuclear programme of December 195717 already envisaged plutonium-fuelled reactors and gave a high priority to reprocessing. As early as 1956, Heisenberg, a founding father of the German nuclear establishment, stated that a German programme which required the export of spent fuel to a foreign reprocessor and the return of separated uranium and plutonium would be unsatisfactory. Germany should be able to make decisions about the nuclear fuel cycle independently, and seek to avoid discriminatory interference by the western powers. Arguments about energy security have continued to be tied to questions of national sovereignty since then. Radkau reports the eminent experimental physicist Haxel as stating in 1959 that reprocessing was the limb of nuclear technology where ‘all the industrial secrets are hidden’ and the Bundesrepublik must catch up with the American and British lead as quickly as possible. ‘[This] is where the chemical industry has a very important [national] task.’18 Although seldom fully articulated, this connection has done much to stiffen resolve in times of political tribulation.


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In 1957 a protocol from the ‘Nuclear Reactors’ group in the Atomkommission stated that chemical reprocessing research was ‘a necessity’. In the following year an Institute of Hot Chemistry was founded at the Karlsruhe nuclear research centre (KfK) and started work on a small test reprocessing rig. In these initial stages of European nuclear development, however, international co-operation seemed the least risky way for non-weapons states to catch up with the technical leading edge. International solutions were also more likely to solicit US approval since they implicitly held security advantages until a comprehensive nonproliferation regime was in place. West Germany duly joined the cooperative Eurochemic reprocessing venture based at Mol in Belgium in 1959. German involvement was state-financed and administered at first from the Karlsruhe research centre. German participation at Mol faced opposition at home. The rapidly growing fast reactor lobby and the chemical industry lobbied in the late 1950s for an indigenous capacity. By December 1964, a consortium of Hoechst, Gelsenberg and Siemens was able, with Research Ministry (FM) backing to found the Company for Reprocessing Spent Fuel (GWK). Its immediate object was to take over the Federal government’s stake at Eurochemic, but it later also took over operations at the prototype reprocessing facility, WAK, at Karlsruhe. Through the plant’s co-location at the site of research and development into fast reactors, a powerful scientific lobby emerged which supported an indigenous reprocessing strategy. Having been obliged to renounce the military use of nuclear materials in 1955, German reprocessing ventures have had to depend on the commercial use of plutonium in civil reactors for their justification. The WAK plant, taken into operation in 1971, was almost entirely funded by the Federal government. Originally it was intended as a means for the German chemical companies to assimilate rapidly the technical know-how developing at Eurochemic, while adapting the process to German requirements. Sustained Federal investment was both a cause and an effect of the wide political support which the project attracted. The mid-1960s saw the coming into operation of the first demonstration and research reactors, and an economic and political environment conducive to expansive nuclear planning. The commercial ‘breakthrough’ of light-water reactors in the United States in 1963, and an emergence of Keynesianism in German economic thinking after the 1966/7 recession, produced a greater willingness on the part of central government to aid nuclear projects as part of a more interventionist technology policy.19 Reprocessing and advanced reactors were the strategic energy technologies given priority in state funding. In the first year of WAK’s operation, the government in Bonn sought to establish a strong market position for German commercial reprocessing

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by joining the two major European reprocessors, Britain and France, in setting up the United Reprocessors Group (URG). Several plans for new reprocessing plants to cope with the anticipated explosive growth of nuclear power were being put forward around the world. URG was designed to pool expertise among the technical leaders, and stymie international competition in what was still an uncertain market. Its first effect was the demise of the Eurochemic venture. Membership of URG, albeit as junior partner, ensured priority access for the Germans to operating and planned reprocessing lines in Britain and France until a planned German facility could be brought into production by the mid-1980s. The new monopoly was viewed with suspicion by those utilities with operating or planned nuclear capacity. In common with other reactor operators they believed that reprocessing was a necessary step of the fuel cycle. They feared being forced into contracts with URG on uncompetitive terms. Hindsight shows that it has not been the structure of the reprocessing market which has forced prices up, but technical difficulties of operating safe and clean facilities. The Entsorgungszentrum concept In 1969 the Ministry of Research began making plans for a large German reprocessing centre, and 5 years later the ministry announced its grandiose Nukleare Entsorgungszentrum (NEZ)20 concept. Such direct involvement by the state followed a pattern set in France and Britain, and led to the growing expectation among the private-sector GWK partners that Federal money would be available for the construction of a commercial plant. There were a number of reasons for the intensification of Federal promotion of fuel reprocessing after 1973. Immediately following the first oil shock, nuclear power reached its apotheosis in the Bundesrepublik with the announcement by the Research and Technology Ministry of an enormous nuclear programme of up to 50 GW(e) nuclear capacity by the year 2000. Arguments about energy security and uranium saving were added to exaggerated electricity growth expectations as a prima facie case for nuclear growth, as in many other countries. This growth implied the early introduction of fast-reactor programmes with a need for plutonium fuel. According to the common position of the period, wastemanagement problems would also be ‘solved’ through the development of a vitrification technology21 for HLWs. Furthermore, the question of national technological prowess and a fear of losing German technological capability gained prominence. Government, industry and the trade unions now argued in unison that nuclear power had a broader importance as Sachzwang for the German economy; the nuclear-fuel cycle was a requirement of a competitive and expanding economy.


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Reprocessing was an integral part of this national objective. Once the NEZ project was tied to this cluster of political-strategic priorities, it developed a strong legitimacy all of its own, identified with broad national goals which the Federal government had, almost selfevidently, to pursue. This politicization can be traced to the formation of the URG in 1971 when the BMFT helped to justify the German withdrawal from Eurochemic on grounds of national interest and by arguing, together with GWK, for a German plant to match those at Windscale and Cap la Hague. With this recommendation, the reprocessing project was rapidly able to gain wide political, though not yet public, acceptance at home. The waning of chemical-industry interest in reprocessing For one brief year, 1972, the problems of back-end planning in Germany at last appeared to have been solved, and the future for plutonium use seemed assured. There had been some surprise when Bonn announced that it would not, after all, finance any part of a future commercial reprocessing venture, but this did not initially dampen interest in the project. Private-sector financing was justified by evoking the ‘polluterpays’ principle. In exchange, the Federal government would take over executive responsibility for disposing of radwastes. This was argued to be an issue of public policy which the state should administer. More importantly, this division of labour lightened the load on the utilities and added another lever of control to the government through its ability to control the waste types disposed. It could, for instance, insist that only vitrified high-level wastes would qualify for acceptance at a future repository. Yet within 2 years the whole expansive vision had become blurred and unsettled. In 1972 the Nuclear Fuel Services oxide reprocessing plant at West Valley in New York was shut down, permanently as it turned out, after it had consistently proven difficult and unsafe to operate. At Windscale the newly commissioned Head End plant which allowed oxide fuels to be reprocessed on the same line as metallic fuels was closed after a serious accident. In the US the General Electric plant at Morris, Illinois (eventually to be abandoned) was running into serious cost overruns and the refurbishment of the oxide reprocessing line at La Hague was being seriously delayed. At Mol, the Eurochemic plant, although operating well was proving to be uneconomic after the French and German pull-out, and it was decided to close the plant in 1974. Reprocessing also suffered from a cost explosion world-wide, intensified in Germany by new licensing requirements for commercial nuclear facilities.22 The estimated capital cost of a large reprocessing plant leapt, over a period of 18 months, from DM500–600 million (already at the limit of the plant’s commercial competitiveness) to DM2.6 billion.23 This

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gave a throughput cost of about DM500 kgHM–1. In the words of Carsten Salander, director of the successor organization to KEWA, cost escalations ‘put an end to expectations of commercial profitability in the sense of balancing costs of the process against the resale value of the recovered plutonium and uranium’.24 One of the most devoted proponents of a German reprocessing capability, Karl Winnaker was later to write about fuel reprocessing that ‘licensing conditions finally required such large investments that they undid many earlier assumptions’.25 These trends conspired totally to change the case for the NEZ plan. First, the international over-capacity for oxide-fuel reprocessing feared by the URG partners in 1971 now turned into a deficit, with only the UP2–800 facility now expected to be available before the mid-1980s. To meet the demands for reprocessing suggested by the BMFT’s nuclear programme forecasts of 1973, a new urgency developed to push on the NEZ. In 1974 the BMFT was stating that the German reprocessing plant should be operating by 1985. Second, the optimistic assumptions about the technical maturity of oxide-reprocessing technology now became tainted with uncertainty. Reprocessing of oxide fuels suddenly seemed difficult, so that further time-consuming and costly technical development would be required. Third, the chemical companies lost interest in the commerical prospects for fuel processing, particularly when the BMFT made it clear that it would not be subsidizing such a project. Nevertheless, the BMFT retained a keen interest in promoting the concept, and maintained funding for the project planning. The reluctant entrance of the EVUs into commercial reprocessing The policy of a constructive push, as the 1974 statement became known, held until 1979. It marked the first instance of the Bund forcing through a nuclear-industrial policy by means of the nuclear licensing process. Even before the Entsorgungszentrum concept was unveiled publically, KEWA (a new reprocessing company) had been in negotiation with the nuclear utilities over pre-payment for back-end services. Although this subsequently became the usual way for reprocessing contracts to be drawn up, for the German utilities the prospect of entering into speculative and inflated reprocessing contracts was unacceptable, especially since the economics of nuclear-power generation was still not commercially proven in Germany. Furthermore, both British Nuclear Fuels Ltd and Cogema were offering cheaper contracts and had a ‘proven’ technological capability—joint membership of URG did not prevent the partners from bidding against each other. The utilities, especially the dominating RWE, were therefore unwilling to commit themselves to sign contracts with KEWA.26 For the utilities the most pressing operational problem was spent-fuel


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storage. Early stations in Germany had followed US light-water reactor designs which provided at-reactor storage of only 2–3 years’ annual spentfuel discharges.27 The equivalent of four-thirds core loading was to be kept vacant according to operating licence conditions, in case of an emergency requiring total core unloading. A further two-thirds was available for spent-fuel storage. The solution to undercapacity appeared at first to be relatively simple. Accumulating operating experience of oxide fuels stored under water was beginning to show that, with controlled water-chemistry conditions, light-water-reactor spent fuel could be stored safely for at least 20 years.20 German nuclear operators therefore began to lobby, as did their counterparts in the US, for extensions to at-reactor storage capacity, and for the establishment of away-from-reactor storage capacity. Long-term spent-fuel storage would avoid the heavy costs of reprocessing. Sensing an impasse, and seeing the object of German nuclear aspirations threatened by the the short-term perspectives of the chemical and electricity supply industries, the Research and Technology Ministry intervened more forcefully. It argued that the burden of financing the NEZ project regardless of its profitability, could be far more easily borne by the electricity utilities. While chemical companies employed targets for the amortization of capital within 4–5 years, the electricity industry in their investment decisions assumed far lower rates of return. The risks of financing a large capital investment programme could therefore be spread. By this accounting device, the costs of reprocessing appeared to be only a small proportion of total generation cost. With the chemical companies beating a hasty retreat from reprocessing, the electric utilities were now being told to fill the breach. Under intense political pressure, the twelve nuclear utilities finally set up a company, PWK, in July 1975. This company would provide for the utilities’ need of back-end services on a co-operative basis, initially intended to include cooperation in negotiating foreign reprocessing contracts and the provision of interim storage capacity for spent fuel. The foundation of such a largescale joint venture represented a major effort. Not only did the utilities have to act co-operatively for the first time, but they had to take control of a new industrial activity of which they had no experience. The electricity supply companies were having to adapt from being reactor operators to managing the technical development of a costly and complex chemical process. Indeed, the process of the transfer of know-how built up by KEWA to PWK became a major sticking point in the negotiations.28 The international political atmosphere surrounding the control of nuclear-fuel cycles had changed significantly. Willrich and Taylor had published their famous study in April 1974 challenging the adequacy of safeguards in reprocessing.29 Internationally, the issue of nuclear-weapons proliferation received new visibility with the detonation of India’s first

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nuclear device in the following month, and anti-nuclear protest had firmly taken root in Germany. The internal institutional politics of the back-end of the nuclearfuel cycle were hereafter joined by the more complex forces of social criticism and resistance.30 It is often difficult to judge the precise balance of the many factors which impinged on policy during the mid- and late-1970s, but it is probably not an exaggeration to say that public opinion became the dominant consideration in the minds of government and industry. The drive to reprocessing nevertheless continued; backed by a coalition in the nuclear research centre BMFT, a political consensus in Bonn, and among nuclear enthusiasts on the boards of the nuclear utilities. For all its elegance, the NEZ concept inherently restricted the options for the siting to the northern state of Niedersachsen31 where nearly all of West Germany’s salt domes are located. The Federal government remained committed to disposal of highly-active wastes in salt. The search for a site for the NEZ began in 1974. Desk studies were used to narrow down the choice to three possible sites in Niedersachsen: Wahl, Lütterloh and Lichtermoor. These were put forward for further on-site investigation. The proposed survey programme immediately attracted opposition from local groups and national environmental organizations. The utilities’ real intentions in pushing forward, appear to have been motivated by a gathering crisis of at-reactor storage of spent fuel. A safety study was commissioned with the nuclear systems contractor, Kraftwerk Union (KWU), for a large 3,000 tonnes32 capacity spent fuel storage silo which was planned as the first building on the NEZ site. Behind this move was already the notion of ‘delayed’ reprocessing (delayed for over 7 years) by introducing additional interim storage capacity away from reactors. In Bonn the renewed slump in the NEZ’s fortunes caused great concern, especially now that the prospects for exports of German nuclear technology looked so bright. In June 1975 Foreign Minister Genscher signed a nuclear export deal with the Brazilian government worth twelve billion DM. The agreement seemed to herald the lucrative advance of German technology into world nuclear markets, and a corresponding effort was deemed necessary at home to maintain Germany’s crediblity as a nuclear supplier. The Brazilian deal was the second strand of the giganticism which overtook German nuclear planning after 1973. Its particular appeal stemmed from the belief that reprocessing represented an important source of advantage to German suppliers of nuclear technology in an international market, where the American companies General Electric and Westinghouse had traditionally dominated.


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Legislative pressure: the fourth amendment of the Atomic Law and the ‘Principles of Entsorgung’ The circumstances under which the Federal government was to signal its intention to press ahead, while dramatic at the time, originated in a lack of co-ordination between ministries in Bonn. The Interior Ministry (BMI), which had taken responsibility for nuclear licensing in 1969 now took the regulatory initiative from the Research and Technology Ministry which had held the highest political stake in the NEZ project. At the 1976 Reaktortagung, the Free Democrat minister at the Interior Ministry, Schmude, issued an ultimatum to the electricity industry. The government chose to force through its declared Entsorgung strategy by exploiting the nuclear electricity’s greatest handicap: spent-fuel storage capacity. Schmude claimed that if PWK’s proposed spent-fuel silo were developed independently of a reprocessing plant there was ‘a danger that spent fuel elements [might] be stored under unsatisfactory conditions of safety’. In view of the electricity industry’s hesitance in taking responsibility for Entsorgung, it would be necessary for the Interior Ministry to carry out a fundamental review of licensing policy for nuclear plants.33 The implication was clear. Such a review would be a lengthy process, and would add to the mounting licensing difficulties already being faced by the industry. Responding for the utilities, the chairman of RWE, Heinrich Mandel, acting as president of the Atomforum, argued that the industry was aware of its responsibilities and was seeking to resolve the Entsorgung problem in a timely way. The NEZ was being held up not by their hesitation but by the site-search process in Niedersachsen and the lack of a clearly articulated licensing process for the total facility. The threat was quickly made good. In September 1976 the fourth amendment to the Atomic Law passed into law with bipartisan support. This set the principle of recycling nuclear fuel into law, effectively tying reactor licensing to a demonstrated commitment to reprocessing. The obligation to reprocess was modified with several qualifying phrases; the most important being that reprocessing should be ‘economically feasible’.34 The amendment also formalized the Federal Government’s duty to dispose of radwastes. This legal framework became a political commitment with a statement in December 1976 from Chancellor Schmidt and the ministerpresidents of the Länder on Entsorgung principles. They directed that reactor licensing should be tied to a new requirement to show proof of prior provision for Entsorgung. The criteria for such proof were set down in the ‘Principles for Entsorgung Provision’ published in May 1977.35 A new requirement stated that reactor operation would be made conditional on the operator holding a ‘Certificate of Entsorgung’ (Entsorgungsvorsorgenachweis). This would

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be awarded to operating reactors when provision for spent-fuel storage 6 years in advance had been assured, either at the reactor site or at a reprocessing plant. The latter option would entail the reactor operator having to demonstrate a reprocessing contract. Most operating stations could not immediately meet this requirement. A graded structure of targets was built up by state licensing authorities. Some expansion was feasible at newer stations, but operators of older reactors were forced into signing contracts with reprocessors. For fuel discharged before the mid-1980s this would entail foreign reprocessing. There has been a general tendency to overestimate the accumulation of spent fuel, directly linked to exaggerated forecasts for the growth of nuclear power in the Bundesrepublik. As a result, spent-fuel storage blockages have been rather less acute during the 1980s than earlier anticipated. This has no doubt fed through into the relatively less forcible measures taken by successive Federal governments on the question of licensing central spent-fuel stores. During the 1980s the spent-fuel storage problem was accommodated easily with Cogema contracts and at-reactor (AR) storage extensions. To prevent utilities from simply expanding AR storage, a further requirement was written into the ‘Principles’ that ‘preparations for the reprocessing of spent fuel should be proven’. Such proof could be given on three conditions. First, a site had to be chosen for the planned NEZ. Second, the licensing process for the facility had to be set in motion with the delivery of an application for the first partial construction licence to the responsible state authority. Last, the whole concept had to be declared ‘relizable on fundamental safety grounds’ by the Reactor Safety Commission. In sum, the ‘Principles’ statement resulted in several important shifts in Entsorgung policy. First, it set out a clear strategy for Entsorgung. A framework of legal and political commitments was created within which, it was hoped by Schmidt (SPD) and the BMFT, German reprocessing could be built up rapidly. In fact, reprocessing remained the weakest link in Schmidt’s energy programme, bringing opposition and conflict at several levels—among the ruling coalition parties, between the Bund and the Länder, within the nuclear and electricity supply industry, and in the public debate over nuclear power. Second, the responsibility for developing a reprocessing capacity had been decisively passed to the utilities. But in making this a legal requirement new uncertainties were introduced to the reactor-licensing process. Through 1976 and 1977 the inadequacy of Entsorgung provision became the main weapon by which construction permits were stopped in the courts by intervenors. Of all these decisions, the suspension in December 1976 of the first partial construction licence for the Brokdorf reactor was to have the most significant effect on future government and legal decisions.36


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Third, Bonn had established a new dominance in the strategically important field of energy policy. This accretion of power to the centre had many political advantages, not least in an international dimension. Fourth, the Federal state had taken responsibility for radwaste disposal, therefore decoupling disposal as a direct licensing requirement for reactors. Developing disposal programmes at Asse, Gorleben or elsewhere would now be a separate political process, decoupled from reactor licensing. Lastly, with the NEZ, the fourth amendment to the Atomic Law, the declaration of Entsorgung principles, the problem of Entsorgung was solved ‘in principle’, and the dreaded question, ‘Wohin mit dem Atommüll?’ had been, in the government’s eyes, answered. Gorleben I In the period after September 1976 events moved quickly, although in several contradictory directions. In December, PWK announced that it would begin the licensing process for a 1,400 tonnes per year reprocessing plant in March or April the following year, once a site had been chosen. It had been intended that one of the Research and Technology Ministry’s three preferred sites would be chosen before the end of 1977. This was revised in December 1976 at a meeting of the government chiefs. They agreed that since Niedersachsen had been chosen by default as the NEZ site, the state should be given a lead role in site selection. In so doing, the already complex lines of responsibility which were having to be established for the multi-function centre were complicated still further. The new formula was clearly designed to give political kudos to a siting decision which was already proving extremely difficult. There was a hope in Bonn that by involving Ernst Albrecht (COU)37 in the siting choice he would later expedite the licensing process. For Chancellor Schmidt, the need to hold together cross-party agreement had become important because of the questions being raised about the government’s energy programme. Political pressure on the NEZ was increased further in February 1977 with the visit of US Vice-President Mondale to Bonn. As spokesman for the newly-elected Carter administration he sharply attacked the contract for nuclear technology with Brazil, and threatened uranium-supply sanctions if it was not rescinded. The German government eventually gave way, and the worst fears of its nuclear establishment were realized. It appeared that the trumpeted competitive advantages for German nuclear technology in the world market had been stifled by American non-proliferation concerns. The Brazilian deal was called off 2 years later, in 1977, after which German commercial reprocessing had to be justified in terms of national energy policy alone. Several reasons have been adduced for Ernst Albrecht’s37 strange decision on the siting of the NEZ. He ignored the three BMFT-proposed

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sites, and instead announced in February 1977 that he preferred a site at Gorleben near the East German border. The choice was not dictated by geological factors. Little information on the Gorleben salt dome had yet been produced. Indeed, Gorleben had been rejected by the BMFT in a preliminary assessment on the advice of the military because of its proximity to the Iron Curtain. Albrecht, however, was alert to the economic and employment benefits of the plant for an underdeveloped corner of his state, and to the need to preserve political flexibility. The regional economic effects promised by the NEZ were clearly substantial, but in the rapidly shifting national-political climate there were also large risks attached to any siting decision. Being an integrated operation on one site, the project was vulnerable to weakness in any of its component parts. This weakness was not only due to difficulties in licensing, but also caused by changes in the political balance of support for the NEZ among the many interests which the Schmidt coalition found it necessary to satisfy. Press reaction generally regarded Albrecht’s choice of the least likely site as shrewd, since it gave him time to resolve other political difficulties before the next Land elections due in 1978. In naming Gorleben he had cleared away uncertainties about siting in other parts of the state. All the same, he left open the possibility of forcing Bonn into a nuclear moratorium in the future—through having chosen a ‘politically impossible site’. 39 In the NEZ, Albrecht had been given a golden opportunity—valuable for regional economic development, but also a means of extracting political concessions from Bonn. Within the milieu of competing regional and sectional interests in German Federal politics, such leverage counts for much. The problem of siting resolved, the utilities moved quickly to form a new executive organization, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wiederaufarbeitung von Kernbrennstoffen (DWK).40 By March 1977 a generic safety case for a reprocessing plant was put before the Niedersachsen licensing authorities and the first partial construction licence for the NEZ was requested. In July the PTB made a similar application for a mined radwaste repository at the Gorleben site. Reaction among people living in the county of Lüchow-Dannenberg was swift and hostile. Almost overnight Entsorgung became the focus of nuclear protest, largely due to the Federal government’s insistence on placing a reprocessing policy at the centre of its nuclear programme. Gorleben was transformed into a new symbol of struggle. After all the equivocation and technical uncertainty of the previous 5 years, the rush of decisons and initiatives between 1976 and 1977 have to be understood as a set of politically co-ordinated moves which tried to ease policy pressures on several fronts. In the course of time these were


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shown to have been a fragile contraption of compromises and illusions, whose consequences still cast a shadow across Entsorgung policy today. The slow death of the Entsorgungszentrum In October 1977 the Reactor Safety Commission (RSK) published its report on the safety aspects of the NEZ. The above-ground facilities were fully endorsed, the main reservations being concerned with the suitability of the Gorleben salt dome for high-level waste disposal. Salt disposal was endorsed in principle, but the volume of the dome had not yet been established. The RSK’s conclusions proved to be difficult to defend against criticism. Opponents pointed to the involvement of the Safety Commission right at the beginning of the licensing process as proof that their reservations about the facility would not be taken seriously. The failure to provide public reassurance led eventually to the formation of the Gorleben International Review, originally conceived by the Niedersachsen ministerpresident Ernst Albrecht, as a more effective tool of persuasion. The credibility of the assertion that the the NEZ was safe ‘in principle’ was challenged by a court ruling at Lüneburg in October 1977. A theoretical provision for Entsorgung, such as a conceptual plan for a reprocessing plant, was ruled not to satisfy the full meaning of relevant sections of the Atomic Law (Sections 7 and 9a). Instead, the 6-year rule should be supplemented with a guarantee of safe storage of spent fuel resulting from the total operational life of a reactor. Construction licences should be awarded only when these ‘concrete Entsorgung-related measures’ had been taken.41 The Lüneburg decision is important because it signalled the start of Federal government pressure on the Niedersachsen government to permit test drilling to start at the Gorleben site. An obligation on the Federal government to press forward with disposal had now been established in the courts. Party conferences of the ruling coalition partners, the SPD and FDP, declared their support for the Lüneburg decision. Policies were adopted which stated that reactor licensing could only be guaranteed once the first construction licence for an ‘integrated NEZ’ had been awarded.42 Despite this, two new reactors in Länder with opposition CSU or CDU governments—Ohu/Isar in Bavaria and Phillipsburg 1 in BadenWürttemberg—were given operating licences in November 1977. Meanwhile, the reprocessing company, DWK, had entered into negotiations with Cogema to secure the reprocessing of German spent fuel.43 A contract had been signed in April 1978, but foreign reprocessing was judged in Bonn to be an escape route for the utilities from national Entsorgung obligations. The continuing emphasis on a German reprocessing facility once more suited both sides of the ruling coalition,

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and must be seen in terms of the gathering crisis in both parties (the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats) over nuclear and energy policy. Two SPD Länder governments (Bremen and NRW) had refused to agree to the ‘Principles’ document, the SPD in Niedersachsen had developed an anti-nuclear stance, and the leader of the SPD faction in Baden-Würtemberg, Eppler, had become a leading spokesperson for the anti-nuclear movement. The fast-reactor project at Kalkar was also coming under increasing political pressure, creating new doubts for the justification for a reprocessing strategy. Its site was occupied in September 1977 after the Chief Adminstrative Court in Münster had queried the jurisdiction of the Atomic Law over the reactor, and the FDP’s position was to change in the following months to one of hostility. The year 1977 had also seen the worst violence so far at anti-nuclear demonstrations. Nuclear power, together with terrorism, stood at the centre of the West German political agenda. To emphasize the need for a ‘concrete’ solution to Entsorgung (i.e. a German solution) made good political sense because it would be seen as setting the nuclear utilities on their heels, while at the same time assuring the long term future of commercial reprocessing. The spent-fuel storage problem Sending spent fuel to France could not solve the problem of storage entirely, and such dependence was judged unacceptable in any case. A three-track strategy was therefore developed by DWK under direction from Bonn. This included: an extension of at-reactor storage capacity; central awayfrom-reactor stores; and a large buffer store at the NEZ. This risk-spreading strategy would ease fuel management through the 1980s, after which the total inventory of German spent fuel was planned to be reprocessed domestically. One of DWK’s first actions in late 1977 was to begin discussions with the SPD government of Nord-Rhein Westfalen over a site for an awayfrom-reactor store at Ahaus. The Federal government continued to force through its plans for reprocessing at Gorleben by linking a licence for a buffer storage silo there to the licensing of all the other plants on that site. The search for an alternative storage option at Ahaus, which would provide added flexibility because it would not be hostage to the uncertainties of the Gorleben licensing process, therefore has its roots in both operational necessity and a specific milieu of politically-motivated regulatory pressures. Once more, the determination of the political centre to push through an unpopular reprocessing strategy created the conditions for policy innovation. An alternative solution pursued by the utilities themselves, and which would merge with the centralized storage strategy, was to provide a more


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flexible means to cope with reactor storage. Problems with the storage of spent fuel were common to most countries with commercial reactors in the mid-to late-1970s. In Federal Germany the added pressure caused by the Entsorgungsnachweis produced a rush by utilities to install compact storage technologies. At-reactor storage capacities could, in principle, be extended from 1–2 years’ annual spent-fuel discharge, to up to 9–12 years’ discharge. Public protest, operating once more through the courts, quickly became a major obstacle to this new strategy.44 Some cases brought against compact storage were successful. For instance, permits for compact-storage racks at Biblis A and B were rescinded in late 1981, primarily because the need for extra space appeared to demonstrate a gap in Entsorgung policy. It was argued that fuel storage for longer than the licensed period of 2 years at the reactor changed the function and therefore the licensing requirements for the entire station, and that the resolution of this new question could not be found in the courts. The balance of political and legal obligations had not been properly struck if Entsorgung became simply a matter of storing spent fuel at the reactor. Operating performance at both Biblis units suffered severely. At one point in 1981 Biblis B had only 10 tonnes of spare storage capacity, and for 18 months both reactors operated at only 50 per cent generating capacity. The lesson of Biblis—that Entsorgung politics could seriously disrupt reactor operations—was deeply felt by all nuclear operators in Germany. It accounts in large part for their concern for legally-viable Entsorgung, even when the short-term economic consequences might be onerous. The operating stations at Würgassen, Brünsbüttel and Obrigheim were allowed to license additional fuel-pond capacity because re-racking was impossible. New stations, from Krümmel (ordered 1972) onwards, were permitted to license additional re-racked capacity during construction. Licensing totally new reactor capacity at old reactors was not easy due to technical restrictions covering the spent-fuel storage. Another German solution to the spent-fuel storage problem was the development of modular cask-storage technologies. Basically this is the adaptation of spent-fuel transport casks for the dual purpose of transport and interim storage. The advantage of modularity for the operator is that capacity can be added when it is required, with low operating costs. Unlike previous pool-storage schemes, casks were to be gas-cooled, so eliminating the problems of liquid waste from water filtration. Financing these relatively less lumpy investments was also easier and less risky. In the long run, however, casks are an expensive option because modularity brings higher unit costs.45 As early as mid-1976 it had become clear that interim spent-fuel storage was a serious problem which could soon threaten reactor operations. The dual-purpose, storage-transport cask provided a way out of the impasse.

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Mobility was important because this ensured maximum flexibility. However, long-term storage required new design concepts and materials to be developed in order to comply with more stringent licensing standards.46 Storage casks were originally intended for use at the reactor, but by 1980 the concept for the two large interim stores had changed from being large pools for wet, actively-cooled, spent-fuel storage into passively cooled, hanger-like buildings which could house storage casks in air. Both the Gorleben47 and Ahaus stores have been dogged with court proceedings. As with other back-end facilities, the most persistent and time-consuming have been legal disputes over which licensing procedure is appropriate.48 A construction licence for the Gorleben store was eventually granted in 1982. On completion it was granted an operating licence by the PTB the following year. This was immediately challenged. The store has stood empty since then. Although the building was finally freed for operation at the end of 1987 there has still been no action with respect to cask emplacement. The Ahaus store has had an even more troubled history. Its first construction licence was applied for in October 1979, and, although construction began in July 1984, this was abandoned with the store only half-built the following year. In October 1987 construction was allowed to continue. Away-from-reactor interim storage has for this reason not provided a means of introducing flexibility into spent-fuel management during the 1980s. Despite its expense and the lack of success in bringing the technology to operation, cask storage has become an essential part of Entsorgung thinking since the late 1980s, with dry storage becoming an increasingly popular concept in other countries as well. In the absence of robust German solutions to the burgeoning problem of fuel storage, spent-fuel transports to La Hague have been the saving grace for reactor operation throughout the 1980s. Only small quantities of fuel from the older stations have been reprocessed at the WAK plant at Karlsruhe. Entsorgung, despite the best efforts of the Federal government, has been achieved mainly by exporting spent fuel. Political change:1977–9 The advent of the loose coalition of environmentalist and leftist groups as a real political force in West Germany after 1977 had a profound effect on Entsorgung policy. This effect was twofold—by changing the electoral fortunes of the two ruling parties and by affecting debates about nuclear power within them. Opposition to nuclear power was the clearest issue on which the new ‘Green’ groups could unite. The Green movement had a role in creating a climate of attitudes which touched deep chords in German political consciousness. To this challenge the main political parties


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reacted mainly by attempting to portray it as illegitimate and seditious. Nevertheless, from early 1978 the Free Democrats (junior partners in the ruling coalition) started losing seats in communal and state elections by failing to reach the required 5 per cent margin, due mainly to a loss of votes for Green candidates. FDP statements on nuclear power became increasingly critical, until at the 1978 party conference at Mainz they called for the abandonment of the fast-reactor programme. In 1979 the party emphasized a firmer linkage of reactor licensing to Entsorgung. The SPD also became increasingly divided over nuclear power, and the issue became one of the chief obstacles to Helmut Schmidt’s attempts to maintain party unity between the SPD Land and Bonn governments. By 1981 almost all the North German SPD parties had anti-nuclear-expansion positions, with some calling for an abandonment of the nuclear option altogether, in direct opposition to the Bonn government’s policy of a steady expansion according to need. Colossus felled: the Entsorgung decisions of 1979 Low- and intermediate-level waste played only a small part in the deliberations over Entsorgung until the late 1970s. Principally this was due to the availability of the experimental Asse salt mine which had been accepting all low-level operating and research waste, and some intermediate-level wastes since 1967. By 1978 about 30,000 m3 of lowlevel waste and 300 m3 of intermediate waste had been disposed of in the mine. At the end of that year the Niedersachsen government refused to renew the operating licence for the mine until new evidence could be presented for licensing the facility under the Atomic Law. The circumstances of this decision once more relate to the Federal political balance during this period. The salt dome at Asse had become a regular disposal facility for all low level wastes and most intermediate wastes produced by Germany’s nuclear power programme, although it was registered as a research facility. By using this description, the mine could be licensed under mining and radiation protection law which covers mine safety and operator dose limitation, rather than the Atomic Law which demands far tougher standards of information for justifying safety. Low-level-waste management and disposal, due to this legal loophole, had escaped attention during the early commercialization of nuclear power in Germany, and was virtually absent from the Entsorgung policy-making. One of the unforeseen consequences of the amendment to the Atomic Law in September 1976 was that, by giving Niedersachsen more say in licensing radwaste disposal sites, the state could now legitimately argue for stricter conditions for the Asse licence. Non-renewal of the licence covering radiation-protection measures at the mine was linked to a

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requirement for a more comprehensive licensing procedure. In particular, a full long-term safety study was demanded for the mine which would have required details about waste packages already deposited which were not available.49 This tough stance was used by Albrecht to apply further pressure on Bonn to gain credibility for a new project he had initiated, the Gorleben International Review. As recounted by Luther Carter, the genesis of the ‘Gorleben Review’ lay in the fortuitous meeting between Amory Lovins, celebrated prophet of alternative energy, and Count Hatzfeldt, a conservative Saxonian landowner, at an energy conference in the US in 1977.50 According to this account, Hatzfeldt proposed a public inquiry to Albrecht in the following year. He accepted the idea as a way of diffusing an issue which was threatening to overwhelm the forthcoming state elections, due in mid1978. In accepting the proposal, Albrecht was also pointedly snubbing the Federal recommendation that the facility was ‘safe in principle’, and so emphasized the independence of the state’s own licensing authority. Opposition to the plant was not his original intention, since he believed that on technical grounds the opponents to the project could be easily defeated. The form which the Gorleben Review took is particularly interesting from the point of view of its legitimating function. An international group of twenty-five independent experts (only five of whom were German) was formed by a directorate in Hannover. They prepared a report critical of the NEZ plans in so far as they could ascertain what these were. This concentrated on the surface installations of the NEZ, finding serious faults with most of them. ‘Counter-criticisms’ from industry and academic experts were elicited and examined by the Review. In this way it was the independent critics who had to justify their conclusions against a co-ordinated response from industry-sponsored spokesmen rather than the other way round. The burden of proof had been shifted, from the principle of ‘safety’, to the demonstration of ‘unsafely’ in the Gorleben Review. The result of the Gorleben Review is well known. Albrecht’s justification of his decision not to recommend the construction of the NEZ at Gorleben to his government epitomizes for the German nuclear industry the enormous, but often intangible, resistance which their programme faces. He declared that, with a number of specific improvements to the NEZ plans, the project was safe ‘in principle’, but that the prevailing political circumstances made it impossible to proceed.51 Every nuclear official in Germany knows these words, and many regard them as a betrayal. In fact, the politics of the Gorleben decision are rather more complex than often acknowledged. Clearly, political pressure was brought to bear on Albrecht: by the huge demonstrations which accompanied the Review;52


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by the coincidence of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island; and by the action of the centre-left opposition in the Niedersachsen government.53 But the decision must also be considered in the context of relations between Bonn and Hannover. The NEZ had come to be identified with the government in Bonn— in particular with Chancellor Schmidt himself. In Bonn the opposition still felt the SPD to be vulnerable on the issue. While they themselves were mostly strong advocates of nuclear electricity, they saw the decision over Gorleben as a means of both stressing their own more forthright policy and of further weakening Schmidt’s position. The CDU, therefore, reacted to the Gorleben decision by claiming that Schmidt’s inability to control his own party had introduced serious uncertainties into the future of nuclear policy. Chancellor Schmidt’s counter-claim was that if the CDU rejected the Gorleben plan, they would themselves threaten an industry which they supported. He argued that further reactor licences could be thrown into jeopardy, since the legal foundation of Entsorgung would be removed. To this the CSU-chief, Zimmerman, replied caustically: ‘It really is laughable that this argument is being made with the law-book in hand.’54 Although Albrecht and Kohl (leader of the CDU-faction in Bonn) carefully avoided any criticism of reprocessing in these discussions, it was clear that the NEZ concept had lost most of its industrial and political support. The industry reacted with panic, although its immediate concern was not with the loss of the NEZ. No reactors had been ordered in Germany since early 1976, and the continual setbacks in the courts and public opposition had sapped confidence. The June 1979 editorial of the leading industry journal Atomwirtschaft-Atomtechnik reflected this mood: This is about the survival of nuclear energy as well as of national and international credibility. Soon nobody will know where and how far we will go. It is possible to reprocess a part abroad, to store a part, and to dispose of a part [of spent fuel]. It now depends on a binding declaration of which proof of prior provision will fulfil the authorities’ requirements.55 (my italics) Redesigning Entsorgung policy Besides rejecting the immediate development of the NEZ at Gorleben, Albrecht made three proposals which were to form the basis of the redesigned Entsorgung concept. First, the construction of an inherentlysafe interim-storage facility should be made a priority. Second, the Gorleben salt dome should be further investigated to judge its suitability as a final high-level-waste or spent-fuel repository. In June 1979 the Niedersachsen

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government duly lifted the restrictions on site investigations which had been in force since 1977. Third, an altogether different fuel cycle should be assessed, with which the reprocessing route could be compared. The notion of a fuel-cycle evaluation was quickly adopted as a major point of argument in the months of confusion which followed Albrecht’s decision. This so-called ‘once-through’ fuel cycle avoids reprocessing, and envisages the direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Since President Ford’s withdrawal of support for reprocessing in late 1976,56 both ‘once-through’ and ‘delayed-reprocessing’ (stowaway) fuel cycles had received increasing attention in the US. The International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) programme, instigated by President Carter, intensified this reevaluation. Once-through was quickly realized to be a straightforward and cheaper fuel-cycle strategy which posed a serious threat to reprocessing in the aftermath of the Gorleben debacle. While the possibility of a complete withdrawal from reprocessing was given a wide airing, the overriding consideration in political circles was not policy change, but to ‘win time’— time to ride out the storm of public protest, time to adjust nuclear planning to the new realities of lower growth, time to reorganize spent-fuel management planning, and time to reimpose party discipline over nuclear and Entsorgung policy. The portrayal of direct disposal as a possible alternative was part of this search for a breathing space. Since it was a device used to develop a new consensus on Entsorgung policy, the real threat which direct disposal may have posed to a reprocessing policy should not be overstated. Reprocessing remained the primary objective, with direct disposal gradually being consigned more to a secondary ‘safety net’ function. As Michaelis put it: ‘In the understanding of all those participating, [the reprocessing] facility will be constructed and operated regardless of the basic decision…which is due in the mid-80s.’57 Achieving agreement between the Federal and Länder governments on which direction to take proved to be extremely difficult. During the summer of 1979, a ministerial committee recommended that the NEZ concept should be scrapped, against the wishes of the Bonn government and the majority of the CDU/CSU Länder. The committee proposed that a decision on reprocessing should be delayed until direct disposal had, by around 1990, achieved a technological maturity on a par with reprocessing waste management. For the Union state governments this was unacceptable. They declared that a reprocessing plant should be established urgently, and that the Federal government should expedite the project by supporting any research which remained to be done. The September meeting of Schmidt and the minster-presidents at last laid the NEZ concept to rest, and inaugurated a new concept—the Integrated Entsorgung concept. This new policy still laid an emphasis on the ecological and economic advantages of reprocessing, but allowed


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for the decentralized siting of reprocessing and disposal installations, and set out a timetable for decisions and programmes. Broad bipartisan agreement between Bund and Länder was found for the complex of provisions laid out in the decision. If anything, these were even more ambitious in scope than the original NEZ plans since they included more elements, and a more delicate balance of responsibilities, commanded still from Bonn, but now dependent on an overtly constructed national political consensus. Integrated Entsorgung (IE) made the following provisions: (i) interim storage of spent fuel in away-from-reactor stores, and in reracked reactor pools. It was agreed that both the Gorleben and Ahaus stores should be developed, with further storage facilities coming into operation in the 1990s as the need arose; (ii) development of a German reprocessing capacity should be continued in a ‘timely’ fashion. DWK was to begin a new site-search programme to be guided by siting criteria which were to be drawn up by the Federal government; (iii) thermal recycling of separated uranium and plutonium; (iv) research into alternative Entsorgung technologies should begin; and (v) a geological assessment of Gorleben should start to establish its suitability for either high-level waste or spent-fuel disposal. A timetable for the implementation of this plan was also presented: (i) immediate extension of at-reactor storage capacity and the construction of away-from-reactor stores; (ii) immediate extension of storage capacities for other radioactive wastes; (iii) a decision by the mid-1980s to be made between the reprocessing and direct-disposal routes on the grounds of their relative safety; (iv) by the end of the 1980s a new repository for low-active waste was to be taken into operation; and (v) by the end of the 1990s, at the latest, a reprocessing plant and disposal site for all radioactive wastes should be in operation.58 The principle of comparing the two fuel-cycle routes on safety grounds is a classic fudge. Although a safety assessment gives the impression of being even-handed and long-sighted, invoking long-term public safety as the final consideration, it derived precisely from the belief that reprocessing had inherent advantages for the safety of radwaste repositories. As at the Windscale Inquiry, the argument went that reprocessing high-level wastes are primarily composed of relatively shorter-lived fission products. The majority (over 90 per cent) of one of the main long-lived nuclides (plutonium) would be separated in reprocessing. With a reprocessing cycle,

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therefore, long-lived toxicity would be reduced and the problem of longterm safety of repositories thereby alleviated. More recent safety assessments of repositories show that the most significant nuclides are not the plutonium isotopes at all, but others found in equal abundance in spent-fuel and high-level waste. The last two objectives of IE were based on the political consensus in Albrecht’s own government over Niedersachsen’s responsibility for waste disposal. This stemmed from the basic agreement that radwastes should be disposed of in rock salt. Of course, an acceptance ‘in principle’ of salt disposal was also a necessary concomitant, on Albrecht’s part, of his continued strong support for nuclear power. He had already played his part in frustrating radwaste disposal to Asse, now he did not want to be seen to be further adding to the difficulties of reactor licensing. We can see that the game of legitimation is driven by the desire of actors within the process to retain power and credibility, and that these turns of poilitical guile cannot be separated from the more idealized questions about whether an industrial facility is safe or not. The revision of the ‘Principles of Entsorgung’ and the new politics of Entsorgung Integrated Entsorgung was given a practical footing with the publication of new ‘Principles of Entsorgung’ (Principles (2)) in early 1980.59 This renewed the requirement for Entsorgung to be tied to reactor licensing by specifying that after 1st January 1985 partial construction licences could be guaranteed only if a site had been chosen for either a reprocessing facility or a spent-fuel conditioning plant. The problem of where to site this reprocessing plant was temporarily resolved when the loyal SPD government in Hessen offered to locate it. To ease the cultivation of public acceptability, one major technical adjustment was demanded for the plant at Hessen. The reprocessing line had to be smaller than that proposed in the original Gorleben plan. As a way of meeting the major criticisms of safety which had been made at the Gorleben hearing, the capacity of the Hessen plant was to be restricted to a tenfold scaling-up of the 35 tonnes per year WAK plant at Karlsruhe. To match this reduction in capacity, the new plant was designated a ‘demonstration’ facility, partly because all prospect of commercial viability had now been removed. Following a rapid revision of the NEZ plans, an application for a construction licence was lodged with the Economics Ministry in Hessen by DWK in early 1980, although a site was not due to be announced for another year. The reduction of the size of the new plant must also be placed in the context of the nuclear debate going on within the SPD. At their December 1979 annual conference, the party had adopted a more circumspect policy


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towards nuclear power. Coal was to be given priority in energy policy while reactors should operate only ‘when it is necessary on grounds of security of supply’.60 A plant with a capacity of 350 tonnes per year, which could deal with spent fuel discharges from about a dozen stations, could also be argued to match the needs for Entsorgung of operating stations and those to be completed within the near future. Construction of a reprocessing plant would therefore not pre-empt future nuclear expansion. With these concerns out of the way there was an ambivalence in the SPD about the exact means of Entsorgung, reiterating earlier policy statements which had emphasized interim storage and the acceptability of foreign reprocessing. However, the political constraint placed on capacity did affect the basic objective of Entsorgung policy, which had been that an independent reprocessing capability should handle all German spent fuel. After 1979, a heterogenous spent-fuel management strategy (including storage, domestic and foreign reprocessing and some direct disposal) became inevitable, despite official assertions to the contrary. A reprocessing ‘gap’ was now seen to open up after 1992 when the first Cogema contract lapsed, while up to 1,300 tonnes of spent fuel (the 1980 estimate) was discharged by German reactors annually. Figure 3.2 shows the estimated accumulation of spent fuel in the FRG to 2010. One of the consequences of adopting the decentralized intergrated Entsorgung strategy by collective decision, was to return the power of choice over siting to DWK. The prize of a DM 4–5 billion (1980 prices) investment was now something which Länder would compete for and, despite the political risks, several were tempted. Over the following 3 years Rheinland-Pfalz, Niedersachsen and Bayern all entered the fray. For a short time there was even a plan for two small reprocessing plants— one in Niedersachsen (Dragahn), the other in Bavaria (Wackersdorf). Planned capacity for the plant remained at the level determined for Hesse mainly because DWK was unwilling to invest in a second redesign of the facility. The industry response to integrated Entsorgung Against this new climate of caution the reprocessing lobby continued to press for a larger plant. At first the argument for increased capacity was made by the utilities within DWK. They sought to resist the blatantly uneconomic investment of a small plant, at a time when it was becoming easier to establish reprocessing contracts in Britain and France. Scheuten, director of DWK, estimated in 1983 that reprocessing costs at the projected plant now translated to a unit cost of about DM3000 per kgHM, equivalent to 1.5 Dpf per KWh in costs to electricity consumers.

Figure 3.2 Accumulation of spent fuel to the year 2026 (annual and cumulative)


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He argued that this was ‘economically indefensible’, considering that a non-reprocessing cycle produced fuel cycle costs of 1.25 Dpf per KWh (assuming a uranium price of $30 per KgHM).61 An alternative, more ambitious, plan was also considered by DWK. In May 1981, the Allied Chemical and General Atomic Corporations in the United States offered their nearly-completed reprocessing plant at Barn well, South Carolina, for sale. For the German utilities the advantage of taking up such an offer was primarily economic. The cost of bringing the 1,000–1,500 tonnes per year facility into operation was estimated at DM 2.6–3.3 billion. This would be shared with US chemical interests, and compared favourably with the substantially higher expense of constructing a new, much smaller plant in Germany. Capacity not taken up by the German companies would be offered to the US nuclear utilities. The plan also echoed earlier American proposals for international spent-fuel storage to be underwritten and controlled by the US. Because of the magnitude of the political and logistical problems which would be created by a German take-over of the Barnwell facility, and because of Bonn’s objection to US control of the German fuel cycle, the plan never gained much support. Nevertheless, it is a symptom of the continuing conflict between the nuclear utilties, and between these utilties and Bonn over the desirability of a specifically German reprocessing capability. Through these debates, the justification for reprocessing was recast. The industry lobby which had insisted on the strategic importance of a German plutonium handling capability proposed to keep the basic commitment to recycling of separated uranium and plutonium. But the advantages of recycling plutonium as mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) in thermal LWRs came increasingly to the fore. MOX has played a larger part in German nuclear planning than in most countries. One of the provisions of the second Atomprogramm (1963) was the commitment to develop, with full state financial support, a technology for recycling plutonium in thermal reactors. This plan anticipated a period of transition between LWRs and fast reactors when plutonium could be used most effectively as a fuel in thermal reactors, rather then being stored in anticipation of the fast reactor. Research into plutonium handling had already begun in the early 1960s at Karlsruhe. In 1969 the programme for developing MOX fuel was moved to Hanau. Operational experience had begun in 1966, since when about 340 assemblies (54 tonnes MOX) have been discharged from, among others, the commercial reactors at Obrigheim, Gundremmingen and Brunsbüttel.62 By the inception of planning for the NEZ, MOX was already considered a safe and economically-viable means of recycling plutonium.63 As the commercial introduction of fast reactors receded, MOX recycling was seen as an increasingly vital part of the justification for a reprocessing strategy.

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The form of this argument was simple. Fissile plutonium could be substituted for fissile uranium in nuclear fuel. By making this substitution, savings could be made in enrichment—needed to increase the fissile content of uranium in light-water reactors. Savings are economic, since a major component of the cost of fuel is removed, but there are also potentially large resource savings. Enrichment strips out fissile uranium from natural uranium and concentrates it. This process produces large quantities of uranium depleted in fissile content, which is basically a waste product. By cutting out enrichment, this wastage is, in principle, also cut out. In MOX fuel plutonium may be mixed either with natural uranium, uranium recovered in reprocessing or with depleted uranium tails. In the German debate, the resource conservation argument was emphasized. Optimistic figures for uranium savings in a stable MOX fuel economy are put at around 40 per cent.64 This has been because the economic case, in a period of abundant and cheap uranium, has been very flimsy. MOX fuel has consistently been more expensive for the utilities to buy than enriched uranium fuel, and the prospects for this improving are limited. For the utilities, however, separated plutonium arising from reprocessing presented itself as a problem needing resolution. If they did not devise their own programme for plutonium use, the injunction to recycle fuel in the Atomic Law could later be used against them. Besides, there were thought to be long-term benefits from putting in place a strategy for plutonium use. A collaborative recycle programme was agreed between the utilities in 1982, with Alkem (the Siemens subsidiary) acting as the main co-ordinating and fuel fabrication hub. This agreement, renewed in 1989, allows for the costs of MOX use to be shared by all the utilities, and guarantees their commitment to Alkem. To summarize, as with the earlier ‘Principles of Entsorgung’, uncertainty about nuclear licensing was not allayed by the framework set down in ‘Principles (2)’. The complex web of policy commitments, while temporarily renewing the political consensus around Entsorgung policy, also introduced new legal difficulties. The potential consequences of this confusion were neatly articulated by Häckel in 1982: It is not certain that the timetable set out by the Bund and Länder for the concrete implementation of the ‘Integrated Entsorgung concept’ can be achieved. If a repository for high-level wastes is not constructed …then the Cogema contracts may lapse in 1985.65 The more uncertain that foreign Entsorgung efforts become, the more it is necessary to have a ‘legally-binding’ national solution to the problem. But should the Cogema contracts lapse, then compact storage…at nuclear power stations may no longer be assured. If compact or interim storage cannot be legally established, then planned [German] reprocessing may be in jeopardy. If reprocessing is in question, so are disposal, recycling and plutonium use.66


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The alternative Entsorgung evaluation:1980–4 As we have seen, the Projekt Andere Entsorgungstechniken (PAE)67 study was born in turbulent political circumstances. Following Albrecht’s example, the Länder had pressurized Bonn into a larger involvement in energy-policy decisions, and PAE became one of the points around which the new arguments over reprocessing turned. After this the project assumed a more marginal significance. The project was based around a series of paper evaluation studies coordinated by a new group at the Karlsruhe nuclear research centre. Engineering and hardware development was contracted out. The POLLUX disposal cask stood at the centre of the technical concept. This was based on a further extension of the dry, interim-storage-cask concept. While originally designed with transport safety in mind, POLLUX can be seen as an attempt to unify the dry-cask concept as an integrated, general purpose container which freed spent-fuel management from previous limitations. In this way, PAE gave the nuclear utilities an opportunity to add further flexibility to its spent-fuel storage strategy. Despite resistance to the project, PAE’s final report proved to be a severe blow to the proponents of reprocessing. Final publication of the full report was delayed for several months in 1984 while the Federal government decided how to respond to its conclusions. In the period leading up to the Entsorgung announcements of the following year, there was little or no consultation with the Länder, reflecting the more hardheaded approach of Helmut Kohl’s centre-right government to nuclear policy and the evaporation of the tenuous political consensus cobbled together in 1979. In January 1985 the government duly announced that reprocessing remained an essential part of Entsorgung strategy, and should be pursued with due haste. Direct disposal of spent fuel could not serve as a legally acceptable provision for Entsorgung. Little over a week later, DWK announced that it had chosen Wackersdorf in Bavaria as the site for its demonstration reprocessing facility and that the licence for Dragahn was being withdrawn. PAE was permitted to publish its final report the following month.68 Five main problems were evaluated under PAE: technical feasibility; radiological safety; an economic comparison of the reprocessing and once-through fuel cycles; the question of safeguards; and resource considerations. Several interpretations have been placed on the assessments of each of these questions since 1985. For some they provide conclusive proof that direct disposal is a technically feasible, safe and correct policy option,69 whereas the Kohl government has consistently maintained the opposite. It argues that the principle of recycling nuclear materials should be retained.

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Figure 3.3 The economics of direct disposal of spent fuel compared with a reprocessing cycle (figures are for 1984 DM/Kg uranium fuel; AE=nonreprocessing option; IE=reprocessing cycle)

Source: Schmidt and Ciesiolka (1985) p. 322

Direct disposal proved to have the most distinct advantages on economic and resource conservation grounds. A cost advantage of about one-third was estimated for the direct-disposal route over the reprocessing route with plutonium recycling, despite high uranium price assumptions and reprocessing costs based on a throughput of 700 tonnes per year (see Figure 3.3).70 As for uranium savings, they could theoretically, with a large and stable nuclear programme reach 35 per cent, but the values currently achievable are in the 5–10 per cent range. In terms of long-term planning, therefore, there were claimed to be no clear advantages for reprocessing without fast-reactor programmes. Gorleben II: a new point of pressure Although the ‘Principles (2)’ of 1979 state only that progress on a repository should be ‘as rapid as possible’, they indicate that a disruption


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in investigations at Gorleben would have consequences for reactor licensing, just as a slow-down in the reprocessing programme would. The risks of discontinuing work and beginning the search for a new site were therefore not merely technical. They raised larger questions of political and policy credibility, and of the unwillingness of Bonn governments to fight new battles with Ernst Albrecht or a possible successor, particularly one from the SPD. While Albrecht had professed a reluctance to unleash a ‘civil war’ over reprocessing, he seems to have had no such qualms over the investigation of the Gorleben site. Its fortifications of walls, ditches, and water cannons, manned by armies of police during disturbances have become part of German anti-nuclear folklore. Bearing in mind that the choice of Gorleben was a stroke of political opportunism, it is perhaps surprising that it remains the candidate site for high-level waste disposal. Attempts by both Chancellors Schmidt and then Kohl to generate a more ‘objective’ sitesearch programme, which included sites other than Gorleben (and Konrad), came to nothing. Gorleben is now the most fully surveyed, potential high-level waste disposal site in the world. These investigations have been held up by the Federal government as evidence of its keeping to the 1976 Atomic amendment. It maintains that until evidence is uncovered which demonstrates that the site is unsuitable for radioactive waste burial, Gorleben will remain the preferred site. Critics have argued that certain criteria should be set before each phase of the investigation, and that progress should be judged against these. They say that such periodic assessments would counter suspicions that investigations are continued merely to ease reactor licensing, and that investigations should be brought to a timely halt if criteria are not met. The government reacted only belatedly to these demands, arguing that site assessment procedures were too complex to be usefully formulated as a set of standards to be met. The real questions about the size, position, hydrology, geochemistry, geophysics and structural geology could only be answered gradually within a ‘site-specific’ assessment of repository performance. This is an argument for diversity and complexity. Unique sites bring unique problems which a list of criteria—a schematic model of a repository—could never capture. But the appeal to specificity is also self-serving because it seems to permit investigators a wide degree of freedom. Not only does it allow them to set the limits of suitability, the emphasis put on site-complexity means that those not directly connected with the investigation work are excluded from a capacity to criticize it. The division between generic and site-specific research has therefore become a political boundary in the German debate; a boundary drawn around the Gorleben investigations so that they can move forward while Entsorgung politics require them to do so. If perfect accountability existed,

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investigation results would be open for everyone to make a judgement about the salt dome’s suitability. But this brand of total openness would hold risks for the government, since it could easily lead to new legal challenges. Having created a political and legal architecture for Entsorgung policy, it could only be sustained by protecting the most sensitive aspects from public scrutiny. Accountability is one of the crafts of political management; usually an arrangement of convenient silences, rather than a free circulation of knowledge and consent. The larger problem of developing safety-analytical tools for safety assessments was first tackled in 1977 by the Projekt Sicherheit Entsorgung (PSE).71 A programme funded by the BMFT brought together all ongoing German research on Entsorgung-related topics. BMFT took the position that the behaviour of real repository systems could not yet be modelled, and that criteria by which to judge them were also premature. Instead, a more open-ended approach was taken. A generic safety-assessment system would be developed to set priorities for research and produce recommendations for planning a repository. The early choice of the site at Gorleben, and the stability of political support for investigations there, gave the German programme a more rigorous attitude towards the problem of site-specificity than in Sweden and the UK where no sites were available. Site-specific assessments have been thought of as developing in stages. Generic safety assessments, and a detailed knowledge of the form and activity of waste arisings, are worked into repository acceptance criteria. At the final stage, when the site investigations are complete, the engineered repository is adapted (‘optimized’) to the waste-forms and the general geological environment which has been charted. The PTB, author of this position, holds that this process can only be successfully completed if there is an ongoing site investigation to nurture theoretical and conceptual developments. Such a gradualist view of the design process for a repository conforms with the plan-approval procedure stipulated in the 1976 amendment of the Atomic Law, and is convenient for protecting the Gorleben site investigations for legal intervention. For this reason it is an approach which has not impressed the critics, who have focused on more specific grounds for regarding the salt dome as unsuitable for radwaste disposal; for them specificity has been used as a smokescreen. The geologist Friedrich Mauthe has commented that you ‘would not buy a horse with three legs’. The first site-investigation programme at Gorleben began in the summer of 1979 and lasted until July 1981. A total of 386 shallow boreholes to a maximum depth of 300 m and four deep boreholes to about 2,000 m were made in the salt dome’s environs. Interest was concentrated on the hydrology of the overlying Quaternary and Tertiary sediments, and the geological history of the salt dome underneath—aspects of the Gorleben dome which are intimately connected.


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It was soon obvious that the sediments overlying the salt dome constituted a ‘prolific’ aquifer and that, as a result, the top of the dome had suffered severe dissolution damage. The flanks and top surface were shown to be strongly fragmented, sub-eroded and altered by recent solution attack down to large depths. Furthermore, natural brine inclusions within the dome were found to have migrated substantial distances. As investigations have progressed, the suitability of Gorleben as the site of a repository has been called into question on four main counts, as follows. First, the effectiveness of the barrier function of the overburden against the migration of radionuclides. Critics argue that the overburden provides minimal protection, and there has been a retrenchment in official statements on the question of the adequacy of the salt dome alone as a sufficient barrier. Second, gas and brine inclusions, and hydrated salt beds have been found with an unexpected frequency by the deep boreholes. Methane is dangerous because it is explosive, and brine is a threat to any canister material, especially in the hot conditions surrounding a radioactive waste package. Third, the salt dome is narrower than first estimated, and the volume of rock salt at a required depth is therefore too small to permit a repository as originally conceived. Fourth, there is potential danger of fissuring and brine incursion into the salt dome due to differential expansion and deformation effects in the interbedded salt and sedimentary layers within the salt body. The technical debate over the hydrology of the overburden and the dome itself, has been the most spectacular, and also the most symptomatic of the rigidity and exclusivity of peer review groups within the investigation process. In addition, it shows the elasticity of the notion of site-specificity. A flavour is also given of the immense difficulties which all investigation programmes will have in being justified against the charge that wide uncertainties still exist about a repository’s actual design and performance. ‘Final’ evaluations of safety can be given only after long programmes of site investigation, in which contrary results and problems will have arisen. In the atmosphere of suspicion which appears to surround all these projects, these problems are exploited by critics and bear on the future viability of exploration work. Professor Klaus Duphorn,72 who was for a time at the centre of this controversy, claims that the problem of Quaternary sub-erosion of the Gorleben salt dome was highlighted as an issue of special importance as early as November 1979, when a symposium organized by the German Geological Society first discussed the geological aspects of waste disposal. In response, under the auspices of the PTB investigation programme, Professor Duphorn organized a working party on the hydrology of the overburden. This work, it transpired, was to give a good general picture of the history of the whole salt dome during the Quaternary period, and

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could therefore be used to give an indication of its long-term integrity as a repository for radioactive waste. By May 1983 Duphorn felt justified in submitting a report to the PTB urging that the Gorleben programme be discontinued, on the evidence which he had collected on sub-erosion and dissolution through three phases of glaciation. Although the German Federal Geological Institute was quick to refute the Duphorn report, dissolution of the cap of the dome has persisted as one of the key arguments about Gorleben’s suitability since then. Attention has focused on the different methods which may be applied to calculate the rate of dissolution of the dome through a complex series of climatological events, and up to the present day. Before 1982 a wide degree of agreement existed about the evidence, but since then the PTB have been accused of applying an unrepresentatively low mean figure which predicts that the salt barrier will not be breached for between 1 and 10 million years. Duphorn and others have claimed that not only have sub-erosion rates been much higher in previous periods, suggesting complete solution of the salt dome in 100,000 years, they further argue that the integrity of the dome is in question. In particular, A.G.Hermann had drawn attention to water-bearing potash beds and the possibility of old geological weaknesses being opened by the stresses caused during and after waste emplacement.74 Each of these problems has been denied,75 although the Geological Institutes’s safety models for the repository are still in an early stage of development. The scientific debate has been joined by a series of court proceedings against the investigative work at Gorleben. At the end of 1986 there were eight outstanding cases in progress, although none of these had interrupted ongoing investigations. In July 1983 the Federal Cabinet decided to authorize the drilling of the two main shafts for the repository, and to allow underground investigations to proceed until 1992. An accident at Gorleben’s shaft 1 in May 1987, in which a worker was killed, has set back the investigation programme by at least 8 years. Investigations are not now expected to be completed until at least 1999.76 Konrad Following the rejection of the licence to dispose of low- and intermediatelevel wastes at Asse in 1978, and the intensification of licensing difficulties in the ensuing years, the search was on for an alternative site. LLW and ILW arisings to about the year 2010 are now planned to be disposed of at a repository constructed at an abandoned iron-ore mine in Niedersachsen. How this site became the favoured one for non-heat-generating waste77 disposal is a story of political opportunism, Federal dispute and luck. In


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1975 the mine had been offered for sale by the owners, Salzgitter AG, to the BMFT as a possible site for industrial toxic waste disposal. The mine had proven uneconomic to operate. Initial investigations in October 1976 led to a formalization of the research work, now redirected towards radioactive waste disposal. The choice of Konrad represented a sharp change of direction for disposal policy in Germany. First, the mine was not in salt, but in porous, calciferous beds; second, the Asse salt mine was still operating as a de facto national repository for radwastes with no sign of threat from Hannover concerning the site’s licence; third, Konrad had operated as a mine, so the advantages of starting work at a virgin site were absent, and, furthermore, investigations were eased by mine workings and shafts. A number of reasons seem to have influenced the change of heart on disposal strategy. The main one was the realization that the volumes of waste which would be produced by the NEZ were far larger than could be accommodated at Asse. The timing of the first Konrad research programme in relation to the passage of the 1976 amendment to the Atomic Law is also significant. The amendment had given executive responsibility for waste disposal to the Federal Interior Ministry. The operator at Asse (GSF) wanted at the same time to retain its research capability, and did not want to dismantle its own operation, or transfer it to a Federal organization (PTB). The solution of moving to another site solved both of these problems. Investigations at Konrad were proceeding when, in 1978, the operating licence for Asse was suspended, throwing the disposal strategy for lowlevel wastes into chaos. It was not until late 1981 that the licensing process for the Konrad mine could begin. The Niedersachsen government had previously opposed the Konrad repository plan, and only reversed its opposition after the government in Bonn agreed that repository sites should be sought in other Länder as well. The long-term consequence of the closure of the Asse mine for routine disposals was a waste-storage crisis, particularly at operating reactors. First, there has been a complete halt to low-level waste disposal through the 1980s; waste being stored pending the commissioning of Konrad. As with spent-fuel management, a multiple strategy was adopted for the management of non-heat-generating wastes. For industrial and medical producers of radioactive wastes, nine state collection depots were constructed—mainly at nuclear research centres. Second, nuclear-reactor operators began licensing a centralized store alongside the Gorleben spentfuel silo in 1980. This store began accepting wastes in October 1984. Third, as licensing new stores became more difficult, a new service industry grew up, providing mobile compaction and treatment services. An increasing volume of low-level waste was also exported for treatment, to Belgium and Sweden.78

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Once the government in Hannover had agreed to the Konrad plan, a safety report, prepared by the research agency GSF, was presented for stage one of licensing the repository. It quickly became apparent that the report was inadequate. The hydrology at Konrad created problems which could have jeopardized the whole project. The years of research work in the mostly dry environment of the Asse salt dome had ‘blinded’ GSF, in the words of one commentator, to the groundwater present in the mine. Later calculations, using the PSE codes, proved that the mine would be flooded within 500 years, and that the central problem of safety was not the rock-mechanical and geophysical aspects which the mining engineers at GSF had concentrated on, but the water-flow, dispersion and structuralgeological problems at the site. A new programme of investigations were carried out, and in 1985 the PTB was in a position to revive the licensing process. Konrad is now projected to come into operation around 1993. This represents a 5-year delay on the operational date proposed in the original disposal plan, and will be some 17 years after the mine was first suggested as a possible radwaste repository. Wackersdorf abandoned and the new Entsorgung settlement The reprocessing lobby appeared, up until 1987, to be as firmly entrenched as ever, though not for commercial reasons. As a former director of DWK put it: ‘While it is important to discuss the Entsorgung problem from an economic perspective…[we must not forget] that we can only move within political constraints.’79 But the political settlement of 1979, encoded in the second ‘Principles’, had come under extreme strain by the end of the 1980s. By early 1989 the risks of holding the line on Wackersdorf were finally seen to outweigh the advantages, and the project foundered. The restructuring which has taken place since then does not, however, signal a relinquishment of the dream of a German reprocessing capability, but is seen as an adjustment which keeps alive that objective in difficult times. There were two principal reasons for abandoning the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant in the spring of 1989: rising capital costs; and the loss of confidence among the utilities that the plant could be completed and licensed—due to a downturn in CDU/CSU support, the possibility of a SPD/Green coalition in either of the next two Federal elections, and the death of Franz-Jozef Strauss, its doughtiest supporter. Costs at Wackersdorf had escalated alarmingly, due to bad project management, but mainly because the reprocessing facility had undergone four substantial redesigns. These had been forced on to DWK through the legal requirement to match the state of science and technology. Each change to the plant produced a new round of licensing, and these became progressively more embarrassing to the Bonn government, if not the Land


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government in Munich which steadfastly supported the project. The Austrian government also began to protest more vociferously against the plant, and major Austrian political figures gave evidence at the second licensing inquiry. Demonstrations also continued at the site; Wackersdorf having seeded a new wave of anti-nuclear protest. To widespread surprise and some indignation, the first step in the retreat from Wackersdorf was announced in April 1989. VEBA, an energy conglomerate which owns Preussen Elektra and thereby had a share in DWK, signed a memorandum of understanding with the French company Cogema on co-operation in the nuclear-fuel cycle. Its main provision was for VEBA to acquire a 49 per cent share in Cogema’s 800 tonnes per year capacity UP3 reprocessing plant at La Hague after 1999. This capacity would then be available to German utilities, or could be sold on. VEBA would also gain access to French mixed-oxide-fuel (MOX) technology. These terms were agreed in a joint declaration by the German and French governments in June 1989.80 This was followed in July by a similar agreement with the British government after BNFL had offered almost equal terms to those utilities, including RWE, not involved in the original VEBA/Cogema deal. Problems quickly arose. First, it emerged that the disunity between the utilities on reprocessing policy had not been resolved by the change of tack. During the autumn, rumours spread that some of the smaller nuclear companies were planning to abandon reprocessing altogether. In a concession to these views, in late 1989 the Federal government agreed that the Atomic Law could be changed to give equal weight to direct disposal of spent fuel. Second, the French in particular began to have second thoughts about German ownership of the French fuel cycle. There continues to exist in France a strong streak of paternalism towards the Germans when it comes to plutonium. Third, those German utilities still negotiating began demanding a force majeure clause which would allow them to pull out of any future contracts if political or economic conditions made this necessary. After some stalling by Cogema and BNFL, this too was conceded. The upshot is that umbrella agreements, not contracts, will be signed, which give the German utilities maximum flexibility over signing future reprocessing contracts. No money is changing hands, they have an option to take up capacity from the year 2000 but, if circumstances dictate, they can pull out of any commitment. The boot is now firmly on the other foot. The price of reprocessing at La Hague will be one-third to one-half of that which would have been paid at Wackersdorf. But the new consensus which rapidly congealed around the realignment in Entsorgung policy was based on a realization of the political advantages in dropping Wackersdorf, rather than strictly commercial ones. The problem was now out of the way; an increasingly

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heavy burden on CDU party unity in Bonn was removed. If the Kalkar fast reactor project was also jettisoned, the two main targets for antinuclear protest would disappear, lifting a major uncertainty from operating reactor programmes. As the chairman of VEBA, Rudolf von Benningsen-Förder, explained: We have a chance to cool the heated discussion about nuclear energy in the Bundesrepublik. Wackersdorf had become a point of focus and a symbol. If we use the opportunity now to reprocess elsewhere, then we can reduce political tensions and hopefully also recast the necessary energy policy consensus over nuclear and coal.81 More broadly, the deal was related to adjustments being forced on the German electricity supply industry by the run-up to 1992. In the European Commission the French have argued against the ‘kohlepfenning’ tax levied on German electricity consumers to support otherwise unprofitable coal mining. They regard this as a barrier to cheap nuclear electricity exports into the German grid. The VEBA-Cogema deal, which secured UP3’s future at a time of some uncertainty, is one way in which a Franco-German rapprochement on these questions can be struck. The year 1989 produced a new settlement in the long history of Entsorgung policy; simplified and less vulnerable to political and judicial interference, but still an object of contention. Plutonium use in thermal reactors and MOX fuel fabrication are likely to be the next targets for dissent. Besides this, nothing has changed in the formal instruments of policy. Paradoxically, the abandonment of Wackersdorf may make it more likely that all German spent fuel will be reprocessed. Together, BNFL and Cogema can offer about 800 tonnes reprocessing capacity per year. What was a situation of scarce capacity has been turned into one of surplus, since the German reactor programme will produce about 500 tonnes of spent fuel during the 1990s. 3.5 Conclusion The central thread of radioactive waste policy in the Federal Republic of Germany is its intimate relationship with the development of policy in the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle in general. The ‘casting off of worries’ meant, up to 1989, strict adherence to the objective of a German capacity for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Waste management and disposal have been subsiduary aims, linked to reprocessing policy by a framework of political and legal obligations; they have always been attached to a raft of wider state regulatory goals. There has consequently been more politicization of policy, which the legal and constitutional structure duly made room for. Boundaries of control—be they institutional or


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technological—have been clearly set as contingent points of political settlement involving a complex texture of social forces. Entsorgung has throughout been a reprocessing policy masquerading as an environmental policy. The fourth amendment to the Atomic Law was intended to form a clearly-defined institutional base from which a German reprocessing capability could be realized. In seeking to define a ‘solution’ to the organization of the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle in one grand gesture (the Entsorgungszentrum), the political ‘centre’ was unable to impose its will on the ‘periphery’. This weakness, shown most vividly over the constitutional fencing over energy policy during the 1970s, led to the rejection of that first policy. Between the remaking of Entsorgung policy in 1979 (still with a commitment to German reprocessing at its centre) and the accession of a centre-right coalition to power in Bonn in 1982, the main constraints on policy implementation were the political relationship between Bonn and the Länder, and the effectiveness of legal challenges to licensing applications within the new policy framework. As in the previous period, the deep contradictions in the Entsorgung concept, and those between the concept and policy process, could not be resolved. Since the early 1980s, Entsorgung policy has been designed as a defence against the weakening of the rationale for commercial reprocessing. Through thick and thin, reprocessing has been protected and alternatives snubbed. Even after the restructuring of 1989, the basic commitment to plutonium separation and recycling in German reactors remains strong. Nothing has been given up, although the path for a direct-disposal policy may have been cleared. A clean break with the past would come about only if a Red-Green government, commited to ending reprocessing and a nuclear phase-out, were elected. Then a new kind of boundary would be drawn around the German nuclear enterprise. In a united Germany under Helmut Kohl such a break is less likely to occur. Notes and references 1 Nuclear Engineering International (1988) p. 12. 2 The word has a complex meaning: the casting off of worries, and the relief of a duty of care. 3 OECD/NEA (1986) p. 44. 4 Dyson (1982). 5 Since June 1986 this has been the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Protection and Reactor Safety (BMU). For most of the period of this study (1971–86), nuclear safety was part of the Interior Ministry (BMI) portfolio. 6 TüVs are based at the Land level with the main function of conducting motor vehicle tests. Eight TüVs also have nuclear supervisory competence. 7 The Hoechst chairman, Karl Winnacker, who was also leader of the ‘Reactor Construction’ committee in the advisory Atomic Commission, and chairman

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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Radioactive Waste of the Atomforum, was an influential protagonist of German reprocessing from the mid-1950s. Energy Supply Company. German Transmission Association. Böhmer-Christiansen (1986) pp. 52–8. Cited by H.Riesenhuber in Veen (1983) p. 14. Cited in Kuhn (1980) p. 4. Löbl (1966) p. 24. US-National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (1957). Research at Asse was at first concentrated on general rock mechanics and radiation protection work. Techniques for emplacement of waste packages were also developed for LLWs and ILWs. Once HLW had become a public issue it was claimed that German planning had been especially prescient in this area. There is no evidence however, that HLW disposal was seriously considered before the mid-1970s. Cited by H.Riesenhuber in Veen (1983) p. 15. The Eltviller programme of 500 MW(e) of nuclear generated electricity. Radkau (1983) p. 104. The Great Coalitition CDU/SPD government of 1967–9 was replaced by the more interventionist SPD government of Willy Brandt. This facility was to include: a large spent-fuel storage silo; a reprocessing plant; waste-management and waste-storage facilities; uranium-processing workshops; MOX fuel fabrication; plutonium-storage plants; and a disposal repository for LLWs and ILWs. HLWs were to be stored as glass. At the end of 1973 the capacity of the NEZ facility was revised to 1,400 MTHM yr–1, as a direct extrapolation of spent-fuel discharges, by 1985, from the 40 GW(e) of nucleargenerating capacity set out in the Fourth Atomprogramm of September 1973. Classification of heat-generating highly-active wastes to ease storage and to condition wastes for disposal. The procedure for gaining licences also became substantially more complex and time-consuming after the SPD consolidated its position in the Federal government after 1969 and abolished the Atomkommission. W.Schüller, speaking at the ‘Symposium zur Entsorgung von Kernkraftwerke’, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, June 1983 (in Veen (1983), pp. 65–6). Salander (1978) p. 230. Winnaker (1978) p. 183. Only some board members at the large utilities, like the RWE’s Scholler and, later, Mandel, considered reprocessing as holding advantages for electricity producers. Smaller utilities were, and remain, far more resistant to the idea because of the large financial risk. According to German licensing requirements, reactors must have a minimum storage capacity of five-thirds of a full core loading. For a 1,000 MW(e) LWR this is equivalent to about 170 MTHM spent fuel. Capacity for one full core must be kept vacant during reactor operation, leaving about 2 years refuelling capacity in the fuel ponds. Hirsch (1986) p. 154. Willrich and Taylor (1974). The first large anti-nuclear demonstration was at the site of the proposed Whyl station in February 1975. Lower Saxony. Sufficient capacity for about 80–100 reactor years of fuel from large lightwater reactors.

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Schmude (1976) p. 235. Bundesministerium des Innern (1976a). Deutscher Bundestag (1977). Construction of the Whyl, Mülheim-Kärlich, Grohnde and Essenheim reactors were all suspended for lack of Entsorgung provision in early 1977. Source: Nelkin and Pollack (1981) p. 162. CDU minister-president of Niedersachsen. See, for example, Charles (1989) pp. 21–7: ‘It is practically an act of faith among conservative politicians in Bonn that the US government’s nonproliferation concerns really are aimed at crippling the German export industry.’ Der Spiegel (1977) no. 8, p. 66 and no. 12, pp. 35–6. German Company for the Reprocessing of Spent Fuel. Chief Administrative Court, Lüneburg: Beschluss Az. VII, OVG B 22/77. Cited in Salzwedel and Preusker (1982). This decision concerned the first partial construction licence for Brokdorf. The FDP went further by demanding that construction licences for ‘safe disposal’ should also serve as evidence in reactor licensing. In total, contracts for 2,420 MTHM spent fuel, to be delivered by 1990, were signed by German utilities with Cogema. Contracts included clauses requiring the return of radwastes. Spent fuel discharges from German reactors were set to rise from 570 MTHM in 1977 to 9,000 MTHM in 1990. Source: Deutscher Bundestag (1977) p. 3. A range of objections was raised: increased heat production and a concomitantly larger stress on cooling systems; the increased risk of pool-water evaporation during accidents; increased problems with controlling criticality in fuel ponds; an increased inventory of radioactive material requiring higher safety standards; and the excess physical strain on storage ponds designed for much smaller loads. Source: Banck (1981). Capital cost of the Ahaus wet (pond) store (1,500 MTHM capacity) was DM700 million. Fixed costs for the Gorleben 1,500 MTHM dry store are approximately DM830 million, with approximately DM3 million per year variable costs. One of the main stumbling blocks for licensing was the requirement to make the cask resistant to anti-tank weapons. AFR spent-fuel store designated for the Gorleben site in late 1979. Cases relating to both Gorleben and Ahaus stores were taken to the Higher Constitutional Court, over the appropriateness of section 6 of the Atomic Law (dealing with the licensing of storage of nuclear materials). For example, inventories of radionuclides, and problems with water-bearing strata near the salt dome. Carter (1987) pp. 270–4. ‘[der Projekt]…ist sicherheitstechnisch realisierbar, aber kann derzeit politisch nicht durchgesetzt werden.’ Speech to the Nidersachsen parliament, 16.5.79, Protokoll der 15. Plenarsitzung des Nds Landstags an 16.5.79, 9. Wahlperiode, p. 1706. On the first day of the hearing 15,000 protesters left Gorleben and marched to Hannover, where they arrived on the 31st of March and the 1st of April to participate in the largest anti-nuclear demonstration seen in Germany (between 40,000 and 140,000 people). The FDP had demanded that an underground retrievable store should be investigated, and together with the SPD called for the policy of immediate reprocessing to be abandoned during May 1979.

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54 Der Spiegel (1979) no. 21, p. 18. 55 ‘Um mehr als Gorleben’, editorial, Atomtechnik-Atomwirtschaft, June 1979, p. 312. 56 In October 1976, President Ford, in a policy statement on nuclear power, had stated that he did not regard reprocessing as: ‘a necessary and inevitable step in the nuclear fuel cycle’. See ‘Nuclear policy statement by President Gerald R.Ford, Oct. 28, 1976’, reprinted in Brenner (1981) Appendix D, pp. 269– 80. 57 Michaelis (1980) p. 10. 58 Bundesministerium des Innern (1980c). 59 Deutscher Bundestag (1980). 60 A.Hermann and R.Schumacher (eds), 1987, p. 12. 61 Scheuten (1983) p. 82. 62 Dibbert et al (1988). 63 Schmidt-Küster (1974) p. 343. 64 Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologic (1981), cited in Stoll (1983) p. 76. In fact, the maximum savings appear to be in the range of 20–25 per cent (source: Albright and Feivison, 1988). 65 A supplementary assumption of the September 1979 chief-ministers’ statement. 66 Häckel (1982) p. 285. 67 Alternative Fuel Cycle Evaluation. 68 Systemstudie Andere Entsorgungstechniken (1985). 69 The SPD adopted direct disposal as its official Entsorgung policy in April 1986: ‘Beschluss des SPD-Parteivorstandes zur Entsorgung von Kernkraftwerke vom 28.4.86’, Politik, no. 4, June 1986, pp. 16–27. 70 Schmidt and Ciesiolka (1985) pp. 321–2. At the time of its cancellation, the unit cost at Wackersdorf was put at DM 4,500/kg HM, and was projected to climb even higher. 71 Waste Management Safety Study Project. 72 Professor Duphorn, Geologisch-Paläontologisches Institut in Kiel. 73 Duphorn (1986) p. 106. 74 Hermann (1980). 75 The two main advantages of rock salt are held to be its ductility, such that it rapidly ‘heals’ fissures which arise within it, and the low conductivity of moisture and gases through salt. 76 Deutscher Bundestag (1988) Appendix A, pp. 34–48. 77 Classification of radwastes has changed since 1982. Konrad is now designated as a repository for ‘non-heat-generating’ wastes. This means that the repository as a whole should not cause a rise in ambient temperature within the geological environment of more than 3°K. 78 European Parliament (1988). 79 Scheuten (1983) p. 73. 80 ‘Joint declaration on co-operation in peaceful nuclear energy between France and the Federal Republic of Germany’, Nucleonics Week, 12.6.89, pp. 3–5. 81 ‘Es lag jenseits unserer Vorstellungskraft’, Der Spiegel, no. 16, 1989, pp. 28–9.

Chapter four

Sweden

4.1 Introduction Deciding how to organize the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle has nowhere caused such profound political conflict as in Sweden. For nearly 5 years, beginning in 1975, Swedish politics was overshadowed by the problem of nuclear safety, and waste management and disposal. By late 1978 two national governments had fallen over the issue. The culmination of this political strife was a national referendum on the nuclear question in which the people of Sweden voted for a 30-year moratorium on nuclear development, leading to a complete phase-out by 2010. The real starting point for Swedish back-end policy was a law making new fuelling permits for reactors conditional on an acceptable solution being demonstrated for radioactive waste disposal. The Swedish policy process is therefore distinctive because it begins with a search for a solution to the disposal problem, and not from general strategic considerations as in the Federal Republic and in the UK. But the centrality of the problem of disposal cannot be explained merely by a special Swedish angst about radiation hazards, although this has played a part. Instead we will show that a particular conjunction of political trends was responsible for raising the issue to national prominence, and from then on the particular Swedish style of resolving political conflicts was a determining feature. Positions on nuclear power became electorally decisive in Sweden during the mid-1970s. Many see the historic overturning of Social Democratic Party (SAP) rule in the 1976 general election as being in large measure due to the successful strategy of one non-socialist leader who distinguished his political appeal by campaigning on a strongly anti-nuclear platform. When SAP was defeated for the first time since the 1930s, a pledge to solve the problem of radwaste disposal came to represent the glue which held together a heterogeneous non-socialist coalition government. A paradox lies at the heart of the Swedish story. This is the co-existence of a rigorous technical assessment of the options for radwaste disposal 93

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with a context of deep-seated and complex political upheaval. Realpolitik and hard science are unlikely bed-fellows, but in this case they sustained each other. How such an apparent paradox should have yielded such a decisive set of policy decisions is the main theme of this chapter. The convergence of political expediency and technical innovation provided the context for effective political control of decision-making even while essentially technical problems were continuously of first importance. Swedish policy was finally judged according to the acceptability of feasibility and safety studies for an HLW radwaste. repository produced by the nuclear industry. The lines of argument and objection were hereby constrained within a technical language, although this also permitted a significant latitude for political manoeuvring. What will be stressed here is an idea of proof as process. This is important for two reasons. First, the details of technical arguments cannot be absorbed, and are of limited interest for the majority of citizens in whose name debates about technology, environmental or energy policy take place. During serious political controversy, such as over nuclear power, the surface spectacle of negotiation and scientific deliberation may be more significant than the substance of the arguments made. Second, for technicians, the proving process takes place in a dynamic and uncertain environment—in which new elements may be included and old ones discarded. The assessment of radwaste-management systems is not goaloriented in any simple way, but is a developing understanding, determined not only by objective knowledge claims but by the institutional structures which give rise to that knowledge—which is both apparently technical and more clearly political. These dynamics can be appropriated constructively to the regulatory process, as the Swedish case demonstrates. This chapter is organized in the following way. First, the institutional and legal framwork for controlling radioactive wastes will be outlined. A discussion of the general historical background of nuclear power in Sweden will follow. Section 4.4 is a detailed analysis of the radwaste policy process from the early 1970s to the present day. The chapter ends with some conclusions about the making of Swedish radwaste policy. 4.2 The legal and institutional framework for radwaste management Since April 19771 the holders of licences for nuclear power reactors have been formally responsible for the safe handling and final disposal of all radioactive wastes. This includes the decommissioning of reactors down to a green-field site. Nuclear generators are obliged to publish a plan for the back end of the nuclear-fuel cycle which is acceptable to the government and the nuclear industry’s regulator. Three reports in all have been

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presented, in December 1977, June 1978 and May 1983.2 Agreement was reached in successive governments that these reports contained proposals which showed that ‘in principle’ a safe means of high level waste disposal exists according to current technology in Sweden. The present regime of implementation and regulation rests on this basic political ‘contract’. The other principle which distinguishes the Swedish context is the parliamentary decision to abandon nuclear electricity production. This followed a national referendum on nuclear power in March 1980. Reactors currently operating will be decommissioned by 2010, ‘with regard to the effects on employment and national welfare’. Whether this actually happens is still in doubt, but the principle remains in place. As in West Germany, the conditions for the development of nuclear power in Sweden are set down in an Atomic Law. Unlike the law in Germany, however, Swedish legislation is non-prescriptive; dealing with basic principles and the allocation of regulatory responsibilities. In common with Swedish administrative practice in other areas, the regulation of the nuclear-fuel cycle is carried out by small agencies which are formally independent of government. On major issues of nuclear safety the government must make the final decisions, usually taking advice from these bodies. Decisions with a smaller political impact are taken independently by the regulatory agencies. This characteristic of wide discretionary powers for regulators is similar to the British system. In taking a position on major safety or radiation protection issues, regulatory agencies are normally concerned with developing a national (and in some cases an international) expert concensus. This is done within a formal review procedure carried over from normal government practice (the so-called remiss system). No public-inquiry system operates as it does in West Germany and the UK. Instead, the impartiality of the regulators, who take decisions through cross-partisan boards of political appointees, is seen as the main guarantor of the public interest. Furthermore, once the agency has published its licensing decision there is only limited recourse to judicial review so common in Germany. Review of responsible agencies The development of peaceful uses of nuclear power in Sweden was first charted in the 1956 Atomic Law. As in its German namesake, radwastes were only cursorily mentioned. The Law was greatly amended during the 5 years when radwaste policy was shaped at the end of the 1970s. In particular, a law linking reactor licensing to satisfactory radwaste management (the Stipulation Law) was added in early 1977. This and other energy bills were rationalized under the new Law on Nuclear Activities passed in February 1984.

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Chief regulatory authority is lodged with the Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) which makes final recommendations on the safety of new and operating facilities to the government. A separate Inspectorate has existed since 1974, but did not take on responsibilities specifically for radwaste management until 1977. All its activities are funded by fees levied on the power utilities. Artificial radiation in the work and general environment is regulated under the Act concerning Protection against Radiation,3 administered by the Institute for Radiological Protection (SSI). At major facilities SSI usually takes a supportive role to Nuclear Inspectorate, and is mainly concerned with operating practices and the control of radioactive effluents. The Institute is lead regulator of non-nuclear radioactive wastes producers, and special cases where nuclear safety issues are deemed relatively insignificant (i.e. shallow land-burial sites). Financing of back-end activities is by the nuclear generators through a system regulated by the state. Finally, the utilities’ plan for the backend is realized by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB). This is jointly-owned by the four nuclear-electricityproducing companies,4 with the state-owned Vattenfall holding a majority share. SKB co-ordinates the planning, construction and operation of all back-end facilities. The regulatory and executive relationships described above are represented in Figure 4.1. General policy questions are decided in government, questions relating to fuel-cycle strategy are decided by the utilities acting through SKB. The three regulators, acting independently of government departments, oversee the execution and financing of policy by SKB. 4.3 The historical roots of nuclear power in Sweden In 1987 nuclear power accounted for some 45 per cent of Sweden’s total electricity production. This power was produced by twelve lightwater reactors operating at four sites with a total design output of 10,030 MW(e). These reactors are the fruits of a programme which began in 1945 with the formation of an Atom Committee and was brought to conclusion in 1985 with the commissioning of the last two reactors, Forsmark 3 and Oskarshamn 3. The military origins of Swedish interest in nuclear-fission reactors have not, as in Britain, had a lasting effect on the development of its civil nuclear programme. Nevertheless, the early military work did have a bearing on the later development of debates about the back-end of the fuel cycle, especially on the question of reprocessing. It is therefore worth briefly relating the institutional history of nuclear power in Sweden and the basic strategic perceptions held by its planners, so as to

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Figure 4.1 Policy-making and regulatory framework for radwastes in Sweden (the statutory responsibilities of the authorities are shown by broken arrows)

Source: Rundquist (1983)

distinguish them from the perceived imperatives which dominated in Britain and West Germany. Shortly after the formation of the Atom Committee, a state-owned company, AB Atomenergi (AE),5 was set up in 1947 specifically to develop ‘peaceful’ uses for the atom. AE took over most of the work being done by the Defence Research Establishment (FOA) into atomic questions, and initiated research directed to civil applications. Weapons research, which began in the late 1940s, focused chiefly on tactical weapons and civil defence.6 A major constraint for this programme was the acquisition of plutonium. Under the ‘L-Program’, plutonium production was to be based on two civil reactors, R3 at Agesta in Stockholm and R4 planned from 1958 to be operated at Marviken. Both were heavy-water moderated reactors fuelled respectively with natural and slightly enriched uranium. The choice of this reactor type over the light-water reactor is claimed to have been made primarily on the grounds of its suitability for a Swedish civil programme, although the reactor also held distinct advantages for plutonium production. Marviken was never completed and Ågesta was never operated specifically for plutonium production. In 1956 a Royal Commission reported that a nuclear reactor programme, based on indigenous resources of uranium could be an achievable means of securing Swedish energy independence. The Commission also proposed an industrial structure for developing Swedish

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technological capabilities. Its report was widely welcomed, but reviews were critical of the ‘monopolistic’ role granted to AE as sole reactor and fuel-cycle supplier. In response, an emphasis on co-operation with the private sector was included in the subsequent Atomic Law. There were also moves afoot towards planning for a Swedish reprocessing capability, although uncharacteristically this was not foreshadowed by the emergence of a fast-reactor lobby. A preliminary study for a small military reprocessing plant was done during the early 1960s, and a site at Sannas on the west coast purchased. Due to local opposition and rising costs, as well as a lack of industrial support, the project foundered. Its failure can also be ascribed to Sweden’s keen membership of the Eurochemic venture and the existence of a powerful faction within the ruling Social Democratic Party which supported the concept of multinational reprocessing, primarily for its nuclear safeguards advantages. Several factors converged to kill the military dimension of the Swedish nuclear planning while at the same time providing a springboard for a civil programme. A wide public debate begun by the women’s section of SAP in 1956 had, by 1959, grown increasingly hostile to the notion of Sweden as a nuclear-weapons-capable state. Over the following decade, political divisions on the question widened, while at the same time military strategists revised earlier positions on the need for tactical nuclear weapons and came to regard them as destabilizing. In 1968 the weapons programme was abandoned, and Sweden assumed the role of ‘white angel’ in the new regime of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the civil side, the rationale for the ‘Swedish line’ of heavy-water reactors was weakened by the availability of cheap and plentiful enriched uranium from the US, and mounting technical problems at the Marviken reactor.7 But the fate of the Swedish line was sealed by the growing resistance in the private sector (in large engineering firms like Asea and Uddcomb) and amongst the electricity utilities (including Vattenfall) to AE’s ‘leadership’ role in the exploitation of nuclear power in Sweden. Asea’s ambitions in the nuclear-technology field advanced in 1965 when the company signed a 5-year joint venture with AE on light-water reactor development. The first commercial reactor order came in 1966 from a speciallyformed consortium of private and communal electricity producers, OKG. Instead of choosing AE’s heavy-water design they opted for Asea’s lightwater reactor.8 In parallel, the Swedish government signed a 30-year agreement with the US for enriched uranium. Following the convention of the period, the utility also began planning for its repocessing needs, and in 1969 signed a contract with the UK Atomic Energy Authority covering fuel discharges up until 1980. Britain would keep the wastes produced and return only the separated uranium and plutonium.

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The Oskarshamn order signalled the end of AE in its original form. In 1968 a new company Asea-Atom9 took over all Swedish interests in reactor design, fuel fabrication and marketing. AE was reorganized into a stateowned company with a support role for nuclear development based at the Studsvik research centre. The switch from heavy-water to light-water technology had been achieved through a transfer of the whole nuclear industry into the private sector. This relinquishment of state control was possible because weapons work had ended; because there is no tradition of direct state ownership in Sweden; and, perhaps most importantly, because no sufficiently powerful part of government argued for a need to invest in reprocessing and plutonium technology. The break made in 1968 was crucial in setting the context for later radwaste policy debates. Without an open-ended commitment to a fuel-cycle infrastructure, the state was able, without contradiction, to accommodate certain boundaries on nuclear activities and radwaste management which were not possible in Britain and West Germany. What is noteworthy about the initial phase of nuclear research and reactor commercialization in Sweden is what may be called its pragmatism. When heavy-water technology proved to be a dead end, it was rapidly substituted with a better alternative. While this seems to indicate tight institutional co-ordination, it emerged instead from a very diffuse distribution of political power. Nuclear power never received the kind of driving financial support from the state which so markedly influenced the nuclear project in West Germany and Britain. Indeed, it was not until 1971 that the government first considered putting forward a national plan for nuclear electricity, and not until 1975 that such a plan was actually published. Before that time all reactor orders had been made independently by utilities, the only government intervention being in the form of loans during construction. For one thing, this meant that Swedish utilities were not averse to shopping overseas for reactors. Proof of the diversity of options open to utilities comes from the Vattenfall purchase of three PWRs from Westinghouse, rather than Asea-Atom. A separate effect of the shift from the public to the private sector was that vested interests located in the nuclear research centre remained relatively stunted in Sweden. AE’s technological dominance was undermined by Asea and the utilities. The most obvious effect of this institutional fragmentation is that a powerful lobby in support of an indigenous reprocessing capability and fast-breeder research never prospered. Within a context of an autonomous electricity-supply industry, and a private-supplier sector intent on competing with a state-owned company, a less centralized, if still powerful, lobby of interests was created around nuclear power. In contrast with other countries, promoters of nuclear electricity did not capture the commanding heights of the state’s

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political and bureaucratic apparatus; the ‘nuclear-energy syndrome’10 did not infect Swedish élites as it did in Germany and the UK. 4.4 The making of Swedish radwaste policy Unlike the other two countries in this study, the development of radwaste policy in Sweden has been shaped by political objectives which were oriented according to certain specific technical aspects of the problem itself. Until 1989 in Germany, as we have seen, the unifying principle was adherence to a political-industrial ambition to establish a domestic reprocessing capacity. Policy in Britain has been formed in a more ad hoc way, usually in defence of established commitments and practices in the back-end of the fuel cycle. The unifying theme of policy-making in Sweden has been the will of a largely autonomous electricity-supply industry to bring nuclear reactors into operation. From the mid-1970s this involved the negotiation of hostile governments and sceptical public opinion. A major feature of the strategy they developed was therefore a search for operational flexibility. The site of decision-making is also unique. Important choices in Swedish back-end strategy were all made by the utilities themselves; sometimes individually, sometimes together, but always at some distance from research and political establishments. Early discussions and positions As Swedish nuclear projections grew more optimistic towards the end of the 1960s, thoughts in the Ministry of Industry turned once more to a domestic reprocessing capability—this time exclusively for civil use. The state of thinking was laid out in a 1971 working group study which proposed a plant large enough to satisfy Swedish needs until the end of the century.11 Its publication coincided with the formation of the United Reprocessors Group cartel, at a time when there were great uncertainties about reprocessing capacity in smaller European countries, but its impact in Sweden was limited. Reactor ordering and construction continued apace, in spite of the competitive institutional environment. In 1970 and 1971 the Riksdag approved plans for a programme for eleven reactors, to be operating by 1980. An industry organization, the Central Operating Management (CDL),12 published a forecast of future electricity demand standing at 24 GW(e) nuclear on-line by 1990. Gradually, as the scale of the plan became apparent, energy policy took centre stage in political discussion. When the oil crisis erupted in the autumn of 1973 there was no apotheosis of nuclear power. Instead, the possibility of a major nuclear programme was viewed with suspicion by sections of all the political parties. The ‘unsolved’

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problem of radioactive waste storage accounted for a significant part of parliamentary disquiet. In late 1972 a Centre Party MP questioned the ‘moral defensibility’ of a nuclear programme which placed difficult burdens on future generations.13 This initiated parliamentary interest, and by the following year the Centre and Communist Parties had adopted anti-nuclear energy policies at their party conferences, and the Liberals demanded a full evaluation of the role of renewable energy and conservation measures. Only the Conservatives were in agreement with the SAP government’s stated preference for a programme of thirteen reactors by 1985. The Centre Party attacked the expansion plans for the nuclear programme and was able to force a moratorium on further reactor licences in May 1975 pending further information being made available on reactor safety and waste handling. For the first time, reactor licensing decisions were transferred from the nuclear licensing authorities to parliament, and the government was forced to prepare a comprehensive energy policy statement, accepted by parliament in May 1975. This plan proposed a reduction in energy consumption growth and a nuclear programme of thirteen reactors developing about 13 GW(e). An idiosyncracy of the Swedish nuclear debate during this phase is that it rested on small differences on the question of how many reactors should be built (Conservatives proposed 14 reactors, SAP 12/13, Liberals 11), not directly on the level of future electricity production. To inform the government on the now thorny question of nuclear backend strategy and waste management, a Royal Commission was formed. The Committee on Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management (Aka Committee), sat for 3 years and reported a few months before the September 1976 general election. It was given a mixed scientific and political membership. Three main groups emerged within the committee. First, a group from AE and the Industry Ministry supported the plan set out in 1971 to develop a Swedish reprocessing plant. AE, which had been the agency involved at Eurochemic, was concerned not to lose technological capabilities built up at Mol and had the backing of the Ministry, which nominally had a responsibility to promote nuclear power in Sweden. They proposed a very large plant, with a design throughput of 800 tonnes per year. This conformed with the notional minimum size for a commercial plant sufficient to service a 24 GW(e) light-water reactor programme, but came against the background of recent technical failures in Britain and the US. To justify this, it was conceived of as a Nordic facility which would process other Scandinavian fuel with a projected start-up date in the mid-1990s. Lastly they made the classical argument that processing should be considered as good for waste management.14 A second group, made up primarily of the electric utilities, soon became

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concerned about the cost of the proposed Swedish plant. Estimates stood at around SKr 4 billion (£565 million, 1977 prices) for construction plus SKr 850 million (£120 million) operating costs annually. Taking optimistic estimates for uranium and enrichment savings produced by recycling plutonium in thermal reactors, a deficit of at least SKr 120 million (£17 million) per year was forecast, not counting the cost of capital. Given the wide uncertainties attached to this figure, and the tendency for gross inflation in reprocessing costs, the private utilities, operating in the competitive environment of the Swedish electricity sector, perceived that the financial risks in such a project were unsustainable. With a rising tide of anti-nuclear opinion in the country and growing divisions within the ruling SAP, the utilities were also sensitive to the political risks of a Swedish reprocessing strategy. If reprocessing was necessary, then it would be preferable to establish contracts with United Reprocessors companies in Britain and France, regardless of the cost premiums which might be paid. A third and much smaller group suggested a delayed-reprocessing route. They argued that there was no urgency to reprocess spent fuel since Sweden had large resources of uranium, albeit low-grade, and a proven technique for its recovery. This undercut the usefulness of plutonium as a fuel. Arguments for introducing fast reactors therefore did not hold in Sweden. Furthermore, the group believed that plutonium recycling in thermal reactors had not been fully investigated and that it was unclear whether the increased security and political risks associated with stockpiles of plutonium were worth bearing. Moreover, it argued that the country could not afford to embark on a risky technological venture such as oxide-fuel reprocessing alone. If reprocessing was commercial and necessary, it was better to attempt to revive the multinational Eurochemic venture and share the burden of risk. Research was commissioned into the economics of directly disposing of spent fuel, and this suggested that the once-through cycle would lead to total back-end costs about one-half those suggested for the reprocessing route. The debate was provisionally won by the proponents of domestic reprocessing. It was recommended that plans for a Swedish reprocessing facility should be drawn up immediately by the electricity utilities, and that preliminary siting studies be started at the Forsmark and Oskarshamn reactor sites. These activities would be paid for by a fee levied on generated nuclear power, and put into a fund which would act as part of the utilities’ working capital. A general strategy developed which projected Swedish spent fuel transports by rail or sea to a central storage facility, receiving fuel from 1982. Radwastes were to be disposed of in geologic repositories run by a government agency, although financed from the nuclear electricity levy. The report concluded that a full-scale, high-level waste vitrification technology still required demonstration, and that substantial research was

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necessary to assure safe disposal. Preliminary conceptual repository designs were presented, based mainly on simple heat-conductivity models produced by the geologist Otto Brotzen. The Aka committee’s work has been discussed at length because if we discount the plan to reprocess spent fuel, and substitute instead its direct disposal, then we have a picture of the back-end of Swedish fuel-cycle strategy as it stands today (i.e. a deep disposal facility for operational wastes, a central storage facility for spent fuel, an integrated sea-transport system for radwastes, and a programme to establish a repository for spent fuel). Besides providing a blueprint for future policy, the Aka committee is also important because most of its members, both technical and political, went on to play key roles in the development of Sweden’s waste policies and technologies. In terms of the preferred division of responsibilities, the committee adopted almost wholesale the model which was emerging in Germany. Reprocessing was to be left for the utilities to develop co-operatively on commercial lines, although the putative advantages for energy policy and radwaste management would mean such a project would find government favour. Radwaste disposal, meanwhile, was to become the responsibility of the state. Research, development, construction and operational costs of such facilities would be passed on to the nuclear electricity producers. The political context for the 1976 general election Having begun so magnanimously, the discussion of radwaste policy now became more fractious. In particular, it became connected with electoral politics on a national scale. There are two ways in which the story of the 1976 Swedish general election may be interpreted. The first (what may be called the political-economy approach) understands it as a faltering in the long and steady advance of reformist social democracy in the country. The second (what may be called the ‘Fälldin phenomenon’ approach) concentrates on the particular campaigning strategy of the man who would lead the non-socialist block of parties to victory, partly by emphasizing his deep personal commitment to a non-nuclear-energy policy. Each has some validity. From early 1973 it was becoming clear that nuclear power would require special handling by the ruling Social Democrats. Believing that the major reason for public disapproval of nuclear power was their misunderstanding of the safety and health risks, the government launched a publicinformation campaign based on ‘study circles’ managed by the political parties and other organizations (trade unions, temperance groups, and religious groups). Public discussion concentrated on energy-policy choices and nuclear safety, not radwaste management. For the government the

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results, in terms of engendering a new consensus of approval for nuclear power, were disappointing. However, the impact of the nuclear question in the election campaign itself should not be over-estimated. In retrospect, nuclear power is sometimes said to have dominated the campaign because it appears to have had a decisive influence on the result. In fact, the chief political argument was over a promise by the ruling socialists to introduce tradeunion-controlled wage-earner funds, under the so-called Meidner plan. Under this scheme, company investments would become partially socialized, and trade-union involvement in education and research would be increased. The plan had been unveiled by the Swedish labour organization, LO, as the next step in the ‘historical compromise’ of social democracy. The Meidner plan came as a response to various strains in the Swedish corporate consensus: strains between the trade unions and their membership; and between the unions and government.15 The plan sought to protect levels of domestic investment, but was regarded in the labour organization (LO) as a way of legitimizing wage restraint. With the dissolution of the post-war social contract, a political polarization had occurred which was seized upon by the leader of the Centre Party, Thorbjorn Fälldin. A turning point of the campaign came with a televised debate between Fälldin and the Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in Gothenburg about 3 weeks before the election. Palme failed to deal decisively with a question about the long-term benefits of nuclear power, and from then on Fälldin emphasized his opposition to nuclear power in an increasingly populist campaign. Opinion polls had shown that about 50 per cent of voters supported a continued suspension of nuclear expansion, but failed to show a clear alignment with voting intention. The party most likely to suffer from this joker in the pack was SAP. Nuclear power was not tamed as a political issue by the major parties until the 1980 referendum, and its potential to wreak political damage has persisted—it threatened to destabilize the government during the 1988 election—and continues to be treated with great sensitivity. With the political setting prepared, Fälldin was determined to put a radical, non-nuclear-energy policy in place by 1990.16 The debate turned on questions of electricity-demand growth, the potential for conservation, and increasingly also on radioactive-waste disposal. Fälldin drew great moral authority from emphasizing the uncertainties of waste management, while the Social Democrats stood by a more ambiguous policy of delayed reprocessing, chiefly for its waste-management advantages. On the question of how large the programme should be, the government maintained that economic growth and full employment would be secured with a thirteenreactor programme, arguing that decisions on a possible further expansion of the nuclear programme could be made during the next energy policy evaluation which was set for 1978.

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Clearly, this more ambivalent set of proposals did not satisfy the voters. In the election of 19 September 1973, the non-socialist block won 180 seats to the socialist (SAP and Communist Party) block’s 169. After 43 years, the mould of Swedish politics had been broken. Coalitions and ‘absolute safety’ Larsson argues that Fälldin’s approach to the conduct of the election campaign, and the management of the non-socialist coalition government should one be elected, had been decided in early 1976.17 He had concluded that the only way in which the nuclear programme could be halted was by taking a ‘hard’ line; dictating decisions to coalition partners and making the survival of the government conditional on their acceptance of his proposals. A more compromising path was feared to be divisive within his own party, and ineffectual in achieving its aims. In making this choice about strategy, however, he appears to have underestimated the depth of, in particular, the commitment to the nuclear programme of his smallest coalition partner, the Liberals. For 2 years he was able to control his coalition by threatening resignation at points where nuclear power decisions might go against him. Fälldin’s entrenched position became the glue which for a time held together a fractious government. Two aspects of back-end policy-making in this period are rooted in this political context. First, having decided on a confrontational path over nuclear-power decisions, it became difficult for the Centre Party to make any concessions without these being interpreted as political defeats. The radioactive-waste issue therefore repeatedly reached major political prominence. Second, the success of the policy of brinkmanship adopted by Fälldin was ultimately dependent on his coalition partners’ determination to remain in power, and especially their desire to grasp the opportunity of the major political break marked by the 1976 election. The Liberals and Conservatives held different motives for keeping the government together, and these stemmed from the political context in which they shared power. For the Liberals, with an energy policy similar to SAP’s, the possibility of forming a minority government steadily grew from 1977 onwards. The Conservatives, conversely, were totally dependent on the coalition for continuing in power, since collaboration with SAP was out of the question. As the coalition partners’ interests evolved, and as the strains of compromise became more painful, Fälldin’s hard-line positions increasingly threatened to jeopardize the government’s unity. The reactor-licensing moratorium lasted until fuelling permits were granted for two reactors by minority Liberal government in June 1979.18 The sharp divergence of policy towards nuclear power between the coalition partners was precipitated immediately after the election. Even

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before a new government had been formed, the issue of the fuelling of the recently completed Barsebäck 2 (B2) reactor came close to undermining it. Before the election, fuelling decisions had been made as a matter of course by the nuclear inspectorate, but, after the election, licensing decisions came directly under political control. Fälldin had made it an election promise that no reactors would be commissioned while he was in government, while both the Conservatives and the Liberals were insistent that the reactor should be fuelled, although not necessarily immediately. They believed that some compromise solution to the nuclear question could be developed over a longer period, and refused to agree to a statement postponing fuelling indefinitely. The way out of the deadlock was based on proposals put forward by the Centre Party. Fälldin secured the leadership of a new government by slightly relaxing his opposition to reactor fuelling. He agreed, against some opposition from within his own party, that the reactor could be brought into operation if new conditions related to spent-fuel reprocessing and waste management (beyond the safety regulations set out in the 1956 Atomic Law) were fulfilled. In setting these conditions, it became clear for the first time that the back-end of the fuel cycle would form the key to the Centre Party’s opposition to the Swedish nuclear programme. The idea of laying down additional terms for the fuelling of reactors had not been discussed by Fälldin before the election and caught the other parties off guard. Politically, it was interpreted as a significant concession which could be built on in government. For our purposes, we will see that the conditions laid down in these seminal discussions were decisive in quickly taking Swedish radwaste policy several steps forward. A unique juncture of political and industrial needs made it possible and necessary to make commitment to new boundaries of control in the fuel cycle. And more than that, in this hot-house atmosphere a whole culture of institutional negotiations was devised which permitted these decisions to be made. Compromise on the Barsebäck reactor suited the political ambitions of all the parties of the coalition. The Liberals had at first proposed a truce on the nuclear question by calling for a limited programme of ten reactors; thereby implying a construction halt at reactor eleven (Forsmark 3) where work had recently begun. The Conservatives found this proposal unacceptable and remained faithful to the thirteen-reactor programme. The Fälldin proposal of placing new conditions on future reactor-licensing was acceptable to both parties as a stopgap measure which gave some leeway for further discussion and compromise. The choice, by Fälldin, of the back-end of the fuel cycle as offering the greatest opportunity for both political and technical objection was a logical one. Technically it was clear that there remained many uncertainties, especially in high-level waste disposal. Stringent conditions of safety could be set by the Centre Party which were difficult to meet, but which could

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be emphasized as a ‘good’, thereby outflanking coalition partners and opposition alike. The back-end had also been recognized as an issue of concern in other countries, so strengthening Fälldin’s hand. Reprocessing of oxide fuel was proving to be technically difficult, a shortage of reprocessing capacity was being forecast for the 1990s, and the associated problems of weapons-proliferation had led to a sea change in US policy towards civil reprocessing. With Fälldin firmly in control, the blueprint for political survival, the compromise policy which emerged from the Barsebäck discussions was rushed through parliament, and included the following provisions: (i)

(ii)

B2 was to be given permission to fuel,19 but Sydkraft, the operator, had to demonstrate before 1 October 1977 an ‘acceptable’ contract for the foreign reprocessing of spent fuel, and a plan for the decommissioning of the reactor. Future reactor licensing would be conditional on acceptable contracts for reprocessing of spent fuel being presented to the licensing authority, and on an ‘absolutely safe terminal storage’ technique for HLWs from reprocessing being ‘demonstrated’ by the reactor operator. An alternative once-through fuel cycle would be acceptable provided that an ‘absolutely safe’ means of final storage of spent fuel was demonstrated.20

In essence, the Stipulation Law (as it was known) is a simplified version of the Entsorgung principles published in the following year. What is significantly different is the acceptance of a once-through cycle as a feasible strategy. The conditions were published in December 1976 and became law in April the following year. For the Liberals and Conservatives the conditions seemed attainable. For Fälldin, and his new Deputy Minister for Energy, Johansson, the conditions were a chance to exploit the difficulties of interpreting the term ‘absolutely safe’. It was in this philosophical question that the Stipulation Law became the mainstay of the Centre Party’s attempt to stifle the Swedish nuclear power development. Fälldin believed that the second condition of the Stipulation Law would be impossible to meet, saying so publicly several times.21 Moreover, his willingness to lower the conditions with relation to Barsebäck 2, which had only to demonstrate a reprocessing contract, stemmed from a knowledge that signing contracts for reprocessing would be difficult. The only oxide-fuel reprocessing line likely to be operating before the mid1980s was Cogema’s UP2 plant at La Hague, and that already had full order books through the 1990s. Both Carter and Ford had been making statements critical of reprocessing in the US during the 1976 presidential campaign, and none of the American plants now looked likely to be commissioned. In the UK the Windscale inquiry into BNFL’s proposed

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new facility was in progress, while the German Entsorgungs-zentrum was still a very uncertain prospect. Nevertheless, the political compromise reached over B2 assumed that reprocessing contracts would be secured, and thereby sustained a fuelcycle strategy normally associated with long-term nuclear planning. The acceptability of this apparent contradiction of an explicit policy of reprocessing with an implicit desire by Fälldin to halt the nuclear programme is explained by the function of reprocessing contracts as a second pressure point on the utilities. As it turned out, this ambiguity of the Stipulation Law’s position on reprocessing later counted against the Centre Party. It transpired that the Barsebäck operator, Sydkraft, was able to sign a reprocessing contract with Cogema for 57 tonnes of spent fuel22 by the following April, and a fuelling licence for the reactor was re-applied for in September 1977. A second time-limited fuelling permit, valid for about two years, was duly awarded in December. A third strand of the Centre Party’s political anti-nuclear strategy was to bring pressure to bear on the construction programme of reactors eleven and twelve in the Swedish programme23 which had begun after the 1976 election. This campaign was waged chiefly by restricting and removing credit guarantees for construction. For the Forsmark reactor, which was three-quarters owned by Vattenfall, withdrawal of state support could easily be imposed, and was therefore used as a hostage in later negotiations about radioactive-waste policy. No direct pressure could be brought to bear on the private consortium building a new unit at Oskarshamn. Already by the spring of 1977 the new power broker in the Centre Party, Johansson, had threatened the dissolution of the government if the Liberal and Conservative partners did not agree to a slow down in construction work at the two sites. As a compromise, civil engineering work was halted at Forsmark in May when credit guarantees were withdrawn, although the project team was retained. Work at Oskarshamn proceeded more or less as planned. Negotiations about credit lines to reactor construction were to continue until early 1978 when agreement was reached on a formula which removed credit liability from the government, but allowed construction work to continue legally. The Centre Party appears to have abandoned this more direct route to halting the expansion of the nuclear programme because its leadership still felt that the Stipulation Law provided a politically less costly way of achieving the same end. The fourth focus for negotiation over nuclear power questions was a cross-party Energy Commission set up in late 1976 at the end of the Barsebäck negotiations. It was here that the continued influence of the defeated Social Democrats was most tellingly displayed. In early 1978, after long negotiations between the coalition partners over an acceptable

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statement, the commission published a majority report supported by the SAP, Liberal and Conservative members, but not by the Centre Party. The report argued that the nuclear programme set out in the 1975 energy policy (the twelve-reactor programme) was still the best route to meeting growing electricity demand, but that a final decision should be left open until 1983. Meanwhile, construction at Forsmark and Oskarshamn should continue. The combined effect of these developments—the Stipulation Law, the pressure on government credits, and the Energy Commission’s deliberations—served to keep nuclear power at the top of the political agenda for two years, and to mark out the negotiating space which was available for each of the parties when the final showdown came over reactor fuelling. All of these issues were constantly linked and then separated in a complex battleground of threats and deferrals. As Fälldin’s and Johansson’s campaign of posture and brinkmanship developed, it became steadily less likely that it could be successful in keeping the other parties to heel. Too much blood had been spilt within the Energy Commission and over Forsmark 3, and while the nuclear power issue remained unresolved the other parties began, for reasons of their own political security, to look at the prospects for power outside a coalition with the Centre Party. In this unstable context, the first steps towards a fuelling decision at the later reactors would therefore entail the break-up of the first Fälldin government. The first KBS report: origins The negotiations over Barsebäck 2 brought swift reaction from the utilities. Very soon after the Stipulation Law was published in December 1976 they launched the Nuclear Fuel Safety Project (KBS), a major research programme into HLW disposal. In proposing his compromise, Fälldin had intended to move responsibility for demonstrating ‘safe disposal’ of radwastes to reactor operators, rather than leave it with a state agency as had been proposed by the Aka Committee. According to this model, the state retains only a commitment to ensure safety and radiation protection with a rather less well-defined undertaking to safeguard disposal sites after institutional control is abandoned. Such an executive/regulatory split usually means that the government revokes the power to actively intervene in radwaste-policy decisions; the state is left in a ‘gatekeeper’ role, broadly ensuring safety through its licensing role. Where the gatekeeper believes the gate will remain shut (Fälldin), the schemes dreamt up inside the ring fence are of little concern. Once the possibility arises of the gate being opened, the gatekeeper is left with no alternative but to make a decision on terms set down by the captive (the electricity utilities in this case). The electricity-supply industry in Sweden

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was effectively free to develop a back-end strategy so long as it conformed with the two conditions of the Stipulation Law. They planned for operational and political uncertainty, and were able to develop an integrated back-end strategy on their own terms. Furthermore, by creating a situation where a single decision (in this case, the granting of a fuelling licence for a nuclear reactor) would carry the full weight of the controversy over radwaste, and by extension the future of nuclear power in Sweden, Fälldin had deliberately engineered an explosive political conflict. Clearly the Centre Party leadership believed that they could benefit under these conditions. Although a range of different management and disposal options were still being considered in the mid-1970s (disposal to sea, transmutation, disposal to space) the Stipulation Law forced the KBS project to narrow down the feasible technical options for a complete back-end strategy very quickly. The reprocessing route was chosen, primarily because it corresponded with the settlement over B2, but also because the direct disposal of spent fuel was still a new concept without a credible technical base. Moreover, closing off the reprocessing route indefinitely seemed to be premature, particularly given the short time-horizons in Swedish politics (general elections are held every 3 years). Lastly, it was reasoned that a ‘demonstration’ of safe disposal would be easier for vitrified wastes than for spent fuel: smaller volumes of heat-generating wastes were produced; it implied an additional barrier of glass to corrosion and activity migration; and most technical competence internationally related to vitrified waste. The KBS project was the first attempt anywhere to provide a holistic feasibility and safety study of a back-end strategy, including a terminal isolation system for radwastes. Conceptual engineering designs were supported by safety assessments for handling and storage steps. Evidence would also be provided about possible locations for the HLW repository. The Stipulation Law deliberately set no timetable for decisions on the back-end, but this did not lessen the urgency of the KBS project. Vattenfall, the major partner, insisted that the project’s final report be completed in time for the earliest commissioning of their Ringhals 3 reactor—due to be completed in the autumn of 1977. It was also clear that if no movement had been made before the next election in September 1979, the Centre Party would again use the nuclear issue to its own advantage. The utilities’ goal was therefore to resolve the radwaste disposal issue well before that time. The project’s method reflected its urgency. Very little original empirical research could be done in the time which the utilities had given themselves. Most of the work involved the collation of data already available on the geological disposal of radwastes, including the Aka committee’s work. Many small research grants were awarded within Sweden and abroad to nuclear research centres, universities, industry, learned bodies and

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consultants. This decentralized research policy was designed to bring a wide constituency of expertise to the problem in order to produce a diverse set of options. Within a tightly organized framework, the most attractive ideas were quickly selected and synthesized into a comprehensive plan by a small co-ordinating directorate. The concept it evolved included five main components: a spent-fuel storage at the reactor, or in a central fuel storage facility (CLAB); reprocessing of spent fuel in France with return of vitrified wastes no earlier than 1990;24 storage of vitrified wastes at a second facility (MLAB) for about 30 years to allow for cooling; re-packaging of the waste container in a durable overpack (lead and titanium); and emplacement of the canisters at 500 m depth in crystalline rock at a site to be selected by the turn of the century. In approaching the problem of proving an ‘absolutely safe’ disposal concept, the safety assessment used by KBS differed from those normally used in nuclear safety. Instead of deriving realistic risk estimates through testing of components and systems, and uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, an assessment methodology was developed which incorporated a notion of acceptable risk. This so-called ‘conservative’ assessment style uses what are believed to be pessimistic parameter values in assessing the performance of a technological system. By extension, improbable parameter values will give an improbably pessimistic account of the risks of radiation exposure. Conservative assessments were criticized in technical reviews of the KBS report because they do not give a picture of the relative influence of different aspects of the system, and therefore precludes a fair comparison of alternatives. For the KBS team however, it had the dual advantage of simplicity and persuasiveness. We should remember that a conceptual repository has the status of an invention. As an invention it is designed to impress and satisfy its reviewers by the plausibility of its principles and assertions. It is a creation adapted solely to that purpose—the work of idealists imagining an impregnable fortress underground. The act of imagining is disciplined only by the anticipation of scientific scrutiny, not by a need for the technology to survive in what Hughes has termed the ‘use world’.25 Like many other inventions, it will never be transformed into a material object; although unlike many inventions, it is never intended to exist in that way. A copyright might be therefore more suitable than a patent as a guard of intellectual property for a conceptual repository. Besides a conservative performance assessment, two further aspects of the KBS plan must be understood in terms of its political function. First, there was reliance in the feasibility study and safety assessment on engineered barriers, rather than natural geological barriers. This was for two related reasons: control could, in principle, be exerted over manmade design features since they can be manipulated and tested; and the

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hydrogeological and geochemical information necessary for a satisfatory safety analysis which emphasized the geological barrier was not available. This type of information would also have been more difficult to produce. Whereas the engineered barriers could be assessed in a more or less static manner—being concerned with characteristics such as rates of dissolution and adsorption under different chemical and temperature conditions—an analysis of the host geology would have to give a dynamic picture of rates of migration of the full radioactive inventory disposed of in the repository. The thermodynamics of chemical reactions—even those involving actinides—has long been the stuff of chemistry research; modelling the diffusion of liquids through rock bodies is a much younger and less prestigious science. There is also, of course, the problem of site-specificity— the concern about the representativeness of generic, conceptual geological environments—which, as we will see below, had its own impact on the KBS process. Second, the KBS project team formalized the ‘multi-barrier’ repository concept. Engineering redundancy is enhanced by building a succession of barriers to waste dissolution and radionuclide transport. Theoretical redundancy was made visible in the technical system, although it was initially thought that each barrier should be sufficient to ensure acceptably low risks of exposure alone. In particular, KBS introduced the concept of a buffer layer of sand and clay between the waste canister and the repository wall. An intermediary layer would both impede water ingress to the repository and give rise to chemical conditions in the near-field which would reduce rates of corrosion and leaching. In trying to freeze the repository’s chemistry, the buffer layer is clearly an aid to static analyses of repository systems, as well as being a symbol of redundancy. Overdesign can be partly interpreted as a response to the Stipulation Law in that it has an obvious persuasive force. That multiple barriers have achieved a wider significance is demonstrated by the concept’s adoption as the model for engineered repositories in other countries. Indeed, far from having a merely persuasive function, the buffer is now an integral part of repository technology. We argued in Chapter 2 that the use values for radwaste repositories are not at all clear-cut; that they too are inventions which, while codified as scientific statements, are limited by serious problems of verification and disputes which are quite outside the realm of scientific discourse. The timing and nature of these disputes is nationally specific (the KBS process for instance), but the basic need for plausibility is inherent everywhere. To support the repository design, preliminary geological investigations were carried out at six sites.26 More important in the longer term, an underground laboratory for rock mechanics and geochemical research was set up in late 1976 at the abandoned iron-ore workings in Stripa in central Sweden. The coincidence of the KBS project and the beginning of

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research at Stripa seems to have been a fortuitous accident. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California had been awarded a $20 million grant by the US Department of Energy for research into rock mechanics but could not find a suitable site in the US due to licensing restrictions. When the Stripa site became available it was rented under the Swedish-American Co-operative project, the bulk of the funding being American. Although work at Stripa was not important to the first KBS report, it has played an increasingly important role in demonstrating a Swedish world technical leadership in the area of performance assessments. The final KBS report was presented, together with an application for fuelling at Ringhals 3 by the State Power Board in December 1977, barely 12 months after the project had begun. Having completed this work, and while SKB was still negotiating reprocessing contracts with Cogema on behalf of the utilities, the whole KBS research effort was redirected towards the once-through fuel-cycle concept. This option corresponded with the second alternative given by the Stipulation Law. The utilities had come to the conclusion that the planning and operational uncertainties attached to time-limited licences for reactors and the need to periodically renew reprocessing contracts would be unsustainable. The once-through cycle promised a way out of direct dependency on foreign reprocessing. By March 1978 the total amount of Swedish fuel contracted for reprocessing in France was 729 tonnes. The whole twelve-reactor programme would during its lifetime produce about 10,000 tonnes of fuel. It appeared unlikely that a sufficient reprocessing capacity for all of this fuel would ever be found, or that future governments would not intervene in spent fuel transports and foreign exchange flows on this scale.27 To add flexibility to nuclear operations the utilities therefore turned to the once-through concept, although without totally abandoning a commitment to the reprocessing of some Swedish fuel. Against the background of difficult negotiations with Cogema over the second reprocessing contract, the desire to escape foreign dependence, both operational and political, was a significant cause of this policy change. US non-proliferation policy also played its part. Following the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 the US government insisted that reprocessing of US-origin fuel was authorized by Congress on a case-by-case basis. This had further confused the international context for reprocessing, increased uncertainty, and affected opinion within those parties, SAP and the Liberals, with close links to the nuclear industry. The KBS report: controversy A trial by fire awaited the first KBS report. Eventually it was assessed by four separate groups of reviewers; an Energy Commission group, Swedish

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and international reference groups, and a Ministry of Industry group which wrote a summary of the critiques.28 This review procedure lasted some 9 months and was closely followed in the press and media. The government’s own considerations on the outstanding fuelling applications (Ringhals 3 and Forsmark 1) began on 1 September 1978 and were to last until 5 October when the Fälldin government resigned over the issue. Three points of contention were raised by the Centre Party in the Cabinet negotiations about the plan. First it criticized the Cogema reprocessing contracts alleging that they did not fulfil the requirements set in the Stipulation Law. Fälldin and Johansson argued that the force majeure clause in such contracts allowed the reprocessor not to reprocess. In view of the difficulties with production at La Hague, reprocessing could therefore not be guaranteed. They also contended that since the line which was due to process the Ringhals and Forsmark fuel (UP3) was still in the design stage and not due to come into operation until 1990, they insisted the KBS proposal was premature. The charge was effective because the viability of the concept proposed by KBS depended on the proven ability of French plant to reprocess high-burn-up oxide fuels and on the proven radiation protection record of the plant. It was deemed politically unacceptable to reprocess Swedish fuel in un-Swedish conditions. The reprocessing policy implied by KBS introduced the serious complication for the utilities of plutonium use. Plutonium recycling in thermal reactors had been proposed by the Aka committee, but no technical capability or operational experience existed in Sweden with plutonium fuels. How, Johansson asked, could a recycle strategy be countenanced without this foundation? Questions relating to reprocessing contracts and plutonium use were pronounced as irrelevent to the Stipulation Law by the Liberal Justice minister at a Cabinet meeting in mid-September 1978. He advised that the Cogema contract was to be judged on legal terms as binding the signatories to the obligations laid down in it, not as an industrial process which might or might not take place. On plutonium use, although it was clearly an important one, the Stipulation Law was adjudged not yet to require a definitive solution. Where reprocessing policy is in place, the question of how a nuclear power programme will evolve is latent in waste-management decisions. Assumptions must be made about not just the plant in question, but also a series of facilities in the future. Technological trajectories, in a broad sense, are laid down inflexibly; the effort of keeping options open has practical waste-management consequences, as well as throwing up obstacles in the policy-making process. Even in the remarkably thorough Swedish KBS evaluation these questions could not be fully considered. This was one boundary on which a decision could not yet be made. One objection was declared legitimate by the Justice minister. This

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concerned the verification in situ of the plan for a high-level-waste repository. Was it possible to demonstrate that there was a site in Sweden which fitted the assumptions of the KBS model of repository safety?29 The challenge was upheld because the Stipulation Law included the requirement to show ‘where an absolutely safe disposal of the high-level waste…could be achieved’.30 The question, outwardly simple, provoked new uncertainties. How far was it possible to ‘demonstrate’ a technology without actually constructing it? Should a specific site be chosen for study (against local opposition) in order to ‘demonstrate’ its suitability? What calibre of site-specific data were necessary to match a mathematical model to physical reality? Did techniques exist which could produce this data? Could the data be integrated into the KBS models? Without appraising these crucial problems of siting and site-specificity, the KBS report was little more than a declaration of positive faith in the perfectability of techniques—the Stipulation Law had clearly been passed to overcome this more complacent attitude towards the problem. Such a declaration might seem intuitively reasonable to the technicians who drew up the notional framework of justifications for the notional repository’s safety. But these ideas were only in the narrowest sense grounded in fact. Since no criteria had been set down for dealing with problems of siting, their resolution inevitably produced a fresh phase of negotiations in which government interest in the technical system itself was to reach a new intensity. On the problem of translating the disposal concept to a site in Sweden, KBS made only the claim that: ‘sufficient investigations have been carried out so that it…is reasonable to believe that a place does exist in Sweden’.31 (The italics are mine.) They claimed up to late September 1976 that any of three sites where superficial geological surveying had been done for the KBS project would be adequate for the repository concept they proposed. To start answering some of the more daunting questions concerning the complementarity of the repository with a geological environment, including a move away from conservative safety assessments, it was alleged would take a further 5–10 years’ research. Much time was spent on the issue of siting by reviewers of the KBS report—with conflicting conclusions. As Johansson and Steen put it: Several reviewers are of the opinion that it is probable that a suitable site could be located. Others are not. There appears, however, to be a unanimous opinion that evidence…of an acceptable site has not been proved.32 Proof, in this case, was necessarily a soft concept. Even in the natural sciences, a proof is, at base, a set of statements which are privileged through various institutional forces and procedures. The truth, and therefore proof,

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is historically contingent. Much of the viability of proof in a new field of knowledge depends on the construction of an institutional framework around the defence of it. The problem of proof in the KBS process cannot be understood in terms of arguments internal to its logic alone, but must be seen as being made possible by a particular conjunction of institutional forces. A starting assumption of the KBS project had been that a repository should be located in an unfractured rock mass. This was one of the necessary starting criteria which produced a ground-water travel-time estimate. As later field research showed, this was an incorrect assumption, since all rock masses are fractured. Indeed, fractures at certain scales are beneficial for the performance of the repository because they aid retardation of several important long-lived radionuclides which might otherwise have been highly mobile. The underlying geological perspective for the ‘unfractured rock mass’ hypothesis was the great stability of the Fenno-Scandinavian shield within which seismic deformaties were not thought to have occurred over a long period. Virgin granite blocks, or areas where fossil fracture systems had been closed by long-term lithification processes, were therefore assumed to exist in theory. It followed that site-search programmes had only to locate one of these blocks to vindicate the KBS assumptions, the problem was where. Paradoxically, this apparently technical debate allowed a temporary political compromise to be reached on KBS by the parties in late September 1978. In a proposal put forward by the Conservatives and the Liberals, further geological investigations to support KBS were to be carried out but the final fuelling decision would be made by the nuclear inspectorate, not by the government. Initially Fälldin agreed to this, but he was immediately attacked by the Press and by his own party which believed this to be a betrayal of the party’s principles. Not only was he seen to be shifting the responsibility to an agency which was held in suspicion by much of his party, but he would be giving up the political control which had been enshrined in the Stipulation Law. New conditions on the siting question were therefore suggested by Fälldin, who renewed the call for a halt to Forsmark 3 construction and demanded a referendum on nuclear power before the next election. Johansson followed up this new attack by publishing, in a clear challenge to his party leader, a list of five new conditions for disposal. With the Centre Party disunited and the Liberal Party no longer prepared to preserve a coalition whose time had gone, the government fell, so ending the first ‘confrontational’ phase of the nuclear and radioactive waste debate in Sweden. With tacit Social Democrat support, the Liberals were installed as a temporary minority government until the election in the following year. The problem of siting did not dissolve with the change of government.

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Further investigations were instigated by the nuclear inspectorate from the Swedish reference group of geologists which had worked in the first round of the KBS reviews. The chairman of this group was Dr Arne Wesslén, scientific advisor to the Centre Party and a well-known critic of nuclear power. The task of the group under Wesslén was to assess whether the Sternö site (the site chosen by KBS to base their safety case) would be a suitable repository site. Its main task was to investigate whether the rock fracture patterns at the site corresponded with the water-flow rates assumed in the KBS safety assessment. No further drilling work was done, nor did the group visit the Sternö area in the 2 months’ review period. Instead, they built up an independent picture of fracturing in the area, using the small amount of drilling and surface surveying data produced by the Swedish Geological Survey (SGU) for the KBS project. On this evidence the committee decided that Sternö could not be regarded as a suitable site.33 One member of the geologists’ group, Professor Hjelmqvist,34 dissented from its final conclusions, claiming that they had drawn an oversimplified picture. This lack of unanimity allowed SKI to distance itself from its own advisory group’s report and to seek additional hydrological advice. When a new group in turn rejected Hjelmqvist’s complex model, the SKI board again decided to ignore the results. In the final meeting, on 27 March 1979, the board decided, in a majority decision, that site investigations did not disprove the availability of a suitable site in Sweden. Objections to reactor-fuelling licences could no longer be sustained on geological grounds, although the board argued that the final decision should be for the government itself to make. Many of the commentaries which followed the demise of the Fälldin government35 saw the failure to reach a compromise as springing from the political background of the Stipulation Law—where different meanings were attached to the term ‘absolute safety’ by the leaders of the coalition parties: Fälldin, Bohmann (Conservatives) and Ahlmark (Liberals). The break-up of the government was therefore no more than the dissolution of a political settlement, rather than an event of wider significance to waste-disposal policies elsewhere; participants in the reviews had all been aware that assurances of absolute safety could never be given, even in principle, so that the term had a specifically political meaning from the outset. In these tense and confused circumstances what stands out, however, is the failure of the research and review procedure to yield a definitive agreement on the safety of waste disposal. The boundary of absolute safety could not be drawn within the institutions of science. And this was not so much through any failure in the review system, which was conducted in an exemplary way, but because this review was conducted within an

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uncertain political environment. Just as the politicians were dependent on the views of reviewers for technical advice, the reviewers, in giving this advice, were themselves subject to the political environment in which they made recommendations through being aligned with certain views. And the regulator, the nuclear inspectorate, stood as a bridge between them, while trying to preserve its credibility as independent arbiter. For the Liberal government, the paralysis of expertise provided a quandary. To defer reactor fuelling would have meant serious risks of disarray in energy policy, a vitriolic election campaign and continued difficulties in forming non-socialist coalitions. After a delay, the government decided to act upon a recommendation from the board of the nuclear inspectorate that the KBS study was acceptable and that no new methods were needed to conduct a site-specific safety assessment. Furthermore, the Sternö site was declared large enough to accommodate the glassified wastes from the two reactors in question. This implied that the site could not serve as evidence in fuelling applications for the four remaining reactors. In June 1979 Ringhals 3 and Forsmark 1 were granted timelimited fuelling permit? (valid for about 10 years) in respect of the KBS report and the second Cogema contract. The consolidation of back-end policy after the fall of Fälldin Decisions could have been made differently. We have argued above, that the Stipulation Law did provide a framework for confrontation, but the evolution of the debate thereafter could have taken different directions. The main technical issue at stake—given that there was a wide disparity of views on the adequacy of the KBS geological data—was how quickly new information and analysis could be made available to provide the degree of assurance required by the significant power blocks involved. The policy criterion appended to this concerned the size of the Swedish nuclear programme. Both of these were merged and confused in the politics of an unstable government coalition. For the Centre Party, a deferral of a decision on the KBS report could have been designed as the first in a succession of reviews and deferrals. For the Liberals and Conservatives, keen to bring Ringhals and Forsmark reactors on-line and unwilling to submit to Fälldin’s ‘hard’ line, a delay could have demonstrated their dedication to nuclear safety. Privately, these two parties had been assured that new test drillings and data analysis might last 4 or 5 months, so that a final licensing decision could be reached in the summer of 1979, some months before the next general election. The demonstration of safety, far from being defined by the procedures of scientific inquiry, was always viewed within KBS as an accumulation of knowledge structured and interpreted against a wider political context.

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But further deferral was not the preferred route: In theory, it ought to have been possible to agree on [a degree of assurance sufficient for the Ringhals 3 application]. In theory it also ought to have been possible to accept that the time needed for this could have been extended into the next election period. Likewise in theory, such an agreement could probably have been used rather effectively against the Social Democrats in the election, portraying them as ‘nuclear hawks’ etc. That the theoretically obvious solution could not be turned into practical politics clearly illustrates the overall breakdown of trust between the parties of the coalition.36 In spite of the exertions of the Centre Party-led coalition between 1976 and 1978, it had succeeded in making very few substantive decisions. Neither had it seriously impeded the growth of the Swedish nuclear programme. Nevertheless, when the new minority Liberal government came to power, energy and nuclear policy in Sweden was in considerable disarray. In its short period of office, the coalition party had produced a number of initiatives which were launched to bring order back to policy, and, in the process, redefine the state’s regulatory functions in the nuclear field. Funding for construction at the third Forsmark reactor was renewed, a site search programme was started for a central spent-fuel store (CLAB), and a Royal Commission was established to examine institutional and financing options for radioactive-waste management. With the passing of the first Fälldin administration, the Stipulation Law had become a dead letter, and nuclear legislation required simplification. The nuclear inspectorate’s authority had been effectively suspended for 2 years and had to be reconstituted in a new regime which replaced the injunction of absolute safety with the more modest ‘acceptable’ safety. Once the KBS report was completed, it had been anticipated that the project would be wound up. Instead, as it became clear that time-limited licences would remain a major obstacle to smooth reactor operation, it was decided to continue with the research, and to reorient it towards spent-fuel disposal. Initially this was mainly used as a bargaining tool for future fuelling permits rather than an indication of policy change. Nevertheless, the commitment to immediate reprocessing did gradually weaken, so that by 1980 the once-through strategy was seen by the utilities to have greater merit for the Swedish programme. Non-reprocessing reduced the industry’s dependency on foreign reprocessors to provide storage capacity for spent fuel; it minimized the companies’ exposure to future reprocessing price rises; and removed the problem of devising a plan for plutonium use. No explicit decision was ever made to abandon the reprocessing route, it disappeared from view because there was no

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support for it embedded in the government or the industry. Once-through processing could be taken up because it offered palpable short-term advantages; it could become a viable alternative because complications of technology policy and operational necessity did not hold in Sweden as they did in Germany and Britain. Planning for CLAB still worked on the assumption of foreign reprocessing of a proportion of Swedish spent fuel. A decision to reprocess had, as we have seen, been made independently by the utilities and was incarnated in the first KBS report. Now it became clear that by constructing CLAB the utilities were building in new operational flexibility, since extended fuel storage could serve as the fulcrum of a delayed reprocessing or direct disposal strategy. A feasibility study for a direct disposal concept was published in June 1978.37 This study introduced the sea-transport system, the copper-canister design, and proposed a timetable for highlevel-waste or spent-fuel disposal starting in 2020. All of these features were later adopted as policy. The referendum on nuclear power and its consequences for back-end policy At the end of March 1979, just as a stability was returning to nuclear policy, the post-KBS consensus was decisively interrupted, and back-end planning was set irreversibly down the non-reprocessing path. The Three Mile Island accident on 28 March 1979 produced a chain of events which removed spent-fuel reprocessing as an option in Sweden altogether, and eventually produced an extension of the moratorium on reactor orders. Ten days after the accident, the Social Democratic Party leadership agreed to a national referendum on nuclear power, which the anti-nuclear movement had demanded since 1973. Having previously resisted a referendum, SAP now felt that a second election dominated by nuclear power would be too damaging for the party. Three options were presented to voters: a nuclear phase-out within 5 years, a more gradual phase-out by 2010, and a phase-out which allowed Swedish reactors to be operated until the end of their operational lifetimes (leaving the last to be shut down no later than 2020). Line 2 (phaseout by 2010), which was sponsored by SAP and the Liberals, gained the most votes (although not an overall majority), and became agreed policy in a parliamentary decision in June 1980. In the meantime, a general election had produced a new non-socialist government—once again led by Fälldin. In his second term, with the referendum out of the way, energy issues all but disappeared from the national political agenda. The referendum result had several direct effects on the logic of backend policy in Sweden. Reprocessing of spent fuel, whether indigenously or abroad, now became redundant to fuel-cycle strategy. The phase-out

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decision had removed the last justification for plutonium use in Swedish reactors, whether in LWRs or, in the more distant future, in fast reactors. A doubling-back from the reprocessing route required a cautious balance between operational needs and pragmatic diplomacy. As in West Germany and the UK, limited spent-fuel capacity at Swedish reactor sites began to pose some risks to reactor operation from 1977 on. In Sweden, however, these constraints never became very acute. There are two main reasons for this. First, the early Swedish reactors were constructed with about five-thirds core-fuel storage capacity. Assuming that one full-core equivalent is left vacant for emergency core unloading—an operating licence requirement—then these reactors could operate normally for between 3 and 4 years without exhausting at-reactor storage capacity. When the ponds were full it was relatively easy for reactor operators to license re-racking of existing fuel ponds, allowing tighter packing of fuel elements.38 The Ringhals 2 unit was the first to have at-reactor storage capacity extended in 1976. Surprisingly perhaps, re-racking was not taken up in the arguments about the fuel cycle and radwaste management. Second, the plans for a centralized spent-fuel store at Oskarshamn were well advanced in 1981, by the time re-racked ponds at some stations had begun to fill up again. Operators then had clear planning targets to work to, with additional fuel arisings being easily accommodated in re-racked pools. Spent-fuel transports to Sellafield and La Hague also helped ease the pressure on storage capacities, particularly at Barsebäck, Ringhals and Oskarshamn up to 1983. By then, some 27 per cent of Sweden’s cumulative spent-fuel arisings had been exported. The consolidation of strategy was matched by a rationalization of institutional and legal arrangements. Apart from safety oversight, the state would regulate only the financing of radwaste management and the industry-sponsored research programme. All state-funded research and development work in support of fuel-cycle strategy and waste management was cut. A new organization (NAK)39 was set up to administer a fee levied on nuclear electricity to finance waste management, decommissioning, and disposal. NAK was also charged with periodically reviewing the SKB research programme. It retained a rump capability to intervene in research by being allocated a budget to initiate complementary research into alternative techniques which showed promise and were being ignored by SKB. Research evaluation of this sort was to permit SKB to make research policy independently, while avoiding the dangers of being locked into a single technical system. It was argued that SKB was unlikely to have lighted upon the best disposal technology so quickly. Moreover, through the process of authorising the first KBS report, SKB had become tainted with the accusation that its work was directed towards expediency, because its aim was reactor fuelling rather than the overriding social duty of

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protecting citizens from radiological harms. There was a risk that confidence in the excellence of SKB’s proposals might be undermined. An intermediary body like NAK would be able to play the role of an institutionalized and empowered critic of the repository concept, working between the utilities and the regulators. Low-level-waste management was nowhere directly referred to. These wastes had been stored at reactor sites, many of them already conditioned.40 A strategy for their disposal was developed collaboratively by 8KB and PRAV (the predecessor to NAK). A strategy of deep land disposal for more active wastes at reactor sites was chosen in 1978 because it avoided difficult confrontations in new areas and because it gave the opportunity of simplifying the transport of wastes. All the reactors are coastally situated and could be linked by sea. Last, the conceptual design for an operational waste repository, based on the KBS concept, indicated that the quality of geology was not of first importance in site choice. Site investigations were duly carried out at the three eastern nuclear sites: Oskarshamn, Forsmark and Studsvik. Forsmark was eventually chosen as a site for the SFR repository, as much because the spent fuel store, CLAB, had been located at Oskarshamn, as for any distinct geological advantages. Indeed, the site was later found to have potentially serious structural geological disadvantages as a repository site.41 To reduce this uncertainty the SFR was sited below the sea-bed about 1,000 metres from the Forsmark reactor site. It was argued that sub-sea disposal limited the risk of future inadvertent human intrusion into the repository. Intrusion has been regarded as one of the main uncertainties in conventional risk assessments for repositories since the late 1970s. Planning for the SFR1 showed a strong streak of pragmatism and discretion away from public scrutiny. Technical and siting choice were radically limited from the beginning, and design changes were made well into construction. For instance, one of the main problems in the repository’s safety assessment turned out to be gas production in the silo repository. This could have been trapped and given rise to destructive mechanical stresses or potential for explosions in the repository. A means of draining the gas was developed only after construction at Forsmark had begun, and sanctioned by the nuclear inspectorate. In 1985 a major redesign was done on the basis of reduced forecasts of waste arisings going to the SFR. In the process, one of the two planned silos was eliminated from the design. Flexible regulation: the storage of low-level wastes One of the effects of the SFR planning process was the development of a new type of long-term storage facility at two reactor sites.42 High cost

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estimates for the repository led to an investigation of cheaper aboveground alternatives. In 1982 the Institute for Radiological Protection conceded that ‘in principle’ a tumulus long-term store for conditioned low-level wastes would be acceptable on radiation protection grounds. For the utilities there was an additional advantage if these stores were to be licensed under the Radiation Protection and Environmental Protection Acts, since they did not include engineered barriers which could be judged by nuclear safety criteria. According to this distinction of repository function, safety assessment ignores the impedence of the waste matrix, its packaging and the repository barriers, and is concerned solely with estimating radiological effects of freely released activity. So far as they leak a proportion of their contents each year, these facilities are extensions of reactor discharge pipes. The limits of permitted-activity inventories at these tumulus storage sites, which in turn define the appropriate regulatory procedure, are quite arbitrary estimates by the regulators themselves.43 These kinds of invention are a necessary part of all environmental regulation, and become questionable only when the wider framework of control has come under suspicion. In Sweden, where the focus of the radwaste disposal controversy has been so firmly on high-level wastes, there has been little space for disputes relating to operational wastes. This does not mean that establishing this boundary was uncontested. Although operating licences were awarded for sites at the Oskarshamn and Forsmark reactors in 1986 and 1987 respectively, in the Forsmark case the local commune, Östhammar, was unwilling to make a final decision due to local opposition. The case was eventually decided by the Konsessionsnahmd, a national arbitration body in Stockholm which found in favour of the utility. KBS-3 and the construction of an independent back-end strategy While these adjustments were taking place, SKB was producing a blueprint for Swedish fuel cycle strategy until 2010 and beyond. KBS-3, the final fuel-safety report based on a once-through cycle, was submitted in May 1983 in support of licensing applications for the last reactors in the Swedish programme, Forsmark 3 and Oskarshamn 3. A new Nuclear Activities Bill was also in preparation, and it was under this that the two reactors were awarded fuelling permits in 1985. The central condition of the Stipulation Law was revised. Reactor owners now had to ‘demonstrate that a method exists for the handling and final disposal of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste…that can be approved with respect to safety and radiation protection’.44 (The italics are mine.) The ideal boundary of control of 1976 had been transformed into a more pragmatic notion over the intervening 8 years. Swedish policy is distinctive in having developed

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this social conception of the safety assessment without sacrificing any of the clarity of its overall objective of safe and timely disposal of all waste types. The strategy outlined in KBS-3 closely followed that of KBS-2: centralized storage of spent fuel (CLAB was already under construction); encapsulation of spent fuel in copper canisters after about 40 years’ cooling; and disposal of spent-fuel and reactor wastes into two separate repositories. Transport of spent fuel to CLAB and reactor waste to the SFR repository would be by ship, a system which was inaugurated in 1983. KBS-3 was commented on by Swedish and international teams of reviewers in two separate exercises organized by SKI and the Ministry of Industry. As in KBS-2, the safety of the spent-fuel repository was the centre-piece of the study. KBS-3 also placed a primary reliance on engineered barriers, with particular emphasis on the copper-canister packaging of spent fuel. Conceptual modelling of corrosion, dissolution and transport processes showed that a standard copper canister, assuming appropriate quality assurance, could ensure isolation of the fuel for about a million years. This assessment was not substantially challenged by any of the reviewers. But the assertion of corrosion-resistance for a million years was only one aspect of the technological boundary which KBS-3 drew; albeit the aspect most used in public justification since it promised long-term safety which was only partially dependent on the site chosen. Certain basic parameters of water chemistry, water flow and local stresses had to be met, but detailed knowledge of the host rock was, in effect, redundant in the validation of safety. KBS-3 therefore encapsulates another important characteristic of repository technologies, which is that the conditions of their validation are a key principle of their design. Such validation can only be achieved through the demonstration of theoretical consistency and empirical grounding. We may therefore expect that it is the ability to understand, in the hard sense of the refutation of counter-claims, the performance of a repository which will be the major influence on its design. KBS-3 stands at the beginning of research and choses simple solutions to the problem of validation. Moreover, it demonstrates the characteristic of extradetermination. We use this term to describe the excess of validation, over what might normally be acceptable within science, which is necessary in a public process of validation. The dimensions of this excess are identifiable in the layering of validation discourses, as in the claims of a million-year canister and in the multiple negotiations around nuclearfuel-cycle policy. In other words, in seeking to satisfy the needs of a social settlement of the disposal question, more validity claims must be produced than within the more restricted arena of scientific-technical institutions. Despite the million-year canister, the task of measuring the notional

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boundary of the report against reality was no less urgent than it was 5 years before. The question of site-specificity could be ignored after the experience of the first KBS review, and against a growing technical consensus that generic concepts were of limited value. The KBS-3 approach to site-specificity did not include specific targets for geohydrological parameters: The possibility of establishing quantitative criteria for individual barriers [in repository systems]…is currently being discussed in certain countries…. No similar effort has been made in the KBS work…. At the same time, safety is best demonstrated by showing that some combination of barriers at some sites offers possibilities, with margin, for a final disposal with acceptably low impact on the environment.45 Hence it was necessary to demonstrate the principle of safety in a general sense, but this necessitated the testing of a repository concept in specific locations. In the spectrum between generic and specific studies KBS-3 attempted to find a middle ground; still conceptual, but including some preliminary studies of performance at identified and surveyed sites. Detailed surface investigations, including boreholes down to about 800 metres, were conducted at four sites.46 Fracture zones, hydrology, hydraulic conductivities of bedrock and groundwater chemistries were charted. At each site, separate repository plans were designed from a basic model, and site-specific safety assessments done based on data collected there. Only two of the sites surveyed—Gideå and Kamlunge—were judged to have ‘good potential’ as repository sites. For the main analysis of the safety of spent-fuel disposal, the case on which SKB chose to be judged, KBS-3 returned to a generic model. It sketched out dose consequences for five scenarios of generic repository performance and nuclide dispersion using central parameter values from the four site investigations. The final results of this analysis are given in Figure 4.2. KBS-3 employed site-specific research to prove a general point, and in doing so futher clarified the limits of proving that general point. Investigations had been conducted to sustain a conjecture of safety. This is quite unlike the German approach to site-specific research in relation to HLW disposal. There, a deliberately more gradualist approach has been taken to building up a safety assessment for one site, Gorleben. Both the Forsmark and Oskarshamn reactors were awarded fuelling permits in June 1984 having accepted KBS-3 as fulfilling the requirements of the new nuclear legislation. Permission was also granted for the five reactors, including Barsebäck 2, licensed under the Stipulation Law— new permits taking account of KBS-3. This freed them from the obligation to reprocess spent fuel—now wholly inappropriate. SKB was also to offer

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Figure 4.2 Calculated doses in different scenarios: KBS-3, 1983

Source: KBS (1983) vol. IV, pp. 20:46

redundant reprocessing contracts for sale. A further legacy of past arrangements was the already-transported Swedish spent fuel stored at French and British fuel ponds awaiting reprocessing. After negotiations which involved the US government, the small quantity of fuel from the first Barsebäck contract stored at La Hague was the subject of a swap for 25 tonnes of West German MOX elements. CLAB began accepting the MOX elements in 1988 while the BAS will receive, starting in the mid-1990s, all the wastes accruing from the reprocessing of Swedish fuel. In addition, the German utilities will receive separated uranium and plutonium. Similar deals will be struck for the fuel stored at Sellafield. The advantages for the Swedish concept of the fuel-swap rest principally in the simplified handling and conditioning of spent fuel, rather than having to adapt CLAB and a future repository for a small amount of vitrified waste from Cogema.

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4.5 Conclusion With the granting of an operating licence for the SFR1 repository by SKI in late March 1988, and the earlier licences for shallow land-burial sites at Oskarshamn and Forsmark, disposals of radioactive wastes have commenced for the first time in Sweden. Other parts of the fuel-cycle concept have also been brought into operation. Capacity for spent-fuel storage is guaranteed at CLAB until at least 1994. Geological surveying in connection with a new underground laboratory to succeed Stripa is currently underway at Simpevarp, and is complemented by continuing investigations at two of the sites investigated for the KBS-3 report. The back-end strategy which became inevitable after the referendum is gradually being realized. Unlike in the UK and West Germany, most of the arguments about radioactive-waste management seem, for the time being, to have faded in Sweden. The ground rules and orientation of policy were established during a short, intense period of negotiation in the late 1970s. Political commitment to finding an acceptable radwaste policy was assured by the threat which disputes over radioactive waste posed to the stability of successive governments and the utilities’ chances of gaining operating licences. As we have seen, the nuclear debate in Sweden crystallized around the issue of the disposal of HLWs and spent fuel. That it remained at the centre of this debate can be put down to the viccissitudes of electoral politics. Had the SAP been re-elected, or had the Liberals and Conservatives been less insistent throughout the first Fälldin government about the fuelling of Barsebäck 2, Ringhals 3 and Forsmark 1, a quite different policy might have resulted. While Sweden is not unique in having made reactor licensing conditional on a ‘solution’ being available for the disposal of radioactive wastes, it does stand alone in having constructed a back-end policy around a conceptual plan for radwaste disposal, rather than a real project. The KBS reports are real only in the imaginations of their designers and reviewers, and do not finally commit the utilities to anything. Should the nuclear option become politically viable again, and there are now signs that an early phase-out of the nuclear programme will not now happen, even reprocessing of spent fuel would be permitted under the current legislation. Future fuel-cycle policy has been left open until at least 2020 when the spent-fuel repository is planned to come into operation. Industry as well as regulators emphasize the fundamental difference between the feasibility studies done under the KBS project, and plans for a spent-fuel repository that could be licensed for construction. This gap is a convenient distinction which derives from the need to ‘demonstrate’ a ‘solution’ without fully being able to assess a repository at a particular site. The Swedes more than anybody have tried to peer into the problems

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of demonstration and site-specificity. Inevitably the KBS assessments will seem crude when set against the assessments for an actual spent-fuel repository in the future, but the basic process of that inquiry is unlikely to differ much. A precedent and memory has been created. The foundations of a consensus have also been laid. In general, even prominent critics now agree that a spent-fuel-disposal unit built along the lines of the KBS reports would probably be adequately safe. The disposal concepts chosen by the KBS projects have placed heavy reliance on engineered barriers (the copper canister and the benthonite buffer material). This is now acknowledged to have been a politically circumscribed choice. It is easier to ‘prove’ the corrosion-resistance of copper and to propose a design for a canister which is thick enough to last a million years, than to rely on incomplete data about geological environments for safety assessments. Although the ‘multi-barrier’ concept which stressed complementarity of engineered and natural barriers over long time-scales had already been developed by 1977, it was easier to justify to a lay audience (essentially the Liberal and Conservative members of the first Fälldin government) that an engineered barrier could provide the necessary isolation. The Swedish process shows that the common-sense view of design and innovation as being concerned with artefacts cannot be applied to radwaste management technologies. The policy process forced the development of a ‘belt and braces’, massive, over-engineered tomb concept. Such redundancy was an effect both of uncertainties about performance assessment in broad conceptual terms, and of ambiguities in the KBS approach to site-specificity. The problem was not that a solid, corrosion-resistant edifice was beyond the imagination, it was that the conceptual and practical tools for showing its worth were still undeveloped. The main innovations necessary to investigate repository performance were theoretical; related to systems of knowledge and institutions of knowledge. For this reason the Swedish process also puts into perspective the limits of demonstrating safe disposal in principle because it shows that the meaning of this now ubiquitous term is confused. Does it mean that a technological capability exists to construct a repository for heat-generating wastes? Does it mean that techniques are available with which to test engineered components of that repository? Does it mean that techniques for surveying a geological site comprehensively are available? Does it mean that knowledge exists to assess the basic chemical and physical processes of repository degradation and nuclide release? Or does it mean that a sufficiently wide range of peer reviewers can agree that a predictive performance assessment of a repository is reasonable, and gives an assurance of long-term safety? Proof in principle must include all these and perhaps other meanings.

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I have tried to characterize the Swedish radioactive-waste policy process as one which had deep political roots and developed in a unique way as a result. Technology and strategy have always been clearly constrained by their political setting. Such pressures have always been mirrored in the institutional and legal framework of radioactivematerials regulation. Crucially these pressures always came from the political centre, rather than the periphery, as in the UK and West Germany. In the end, the acceptance of the KBS feasibility studies became possible as much because of a political ‘fatigue’ among governing parties, as through diligent scientific appraisal by independent regulatory agencies. The lesson of the Swedish process is that safety assessments are inextricably linked to their institutional context. It is no accident that Sweden, with its superficially technicalist approach to resolving the problem of the back-end of the fuel cycle should demonstrate this so clearly. The context of the Stipulation Law determined that acceptance of the technical system could only be achieved by modelling a backend strategy according to political sensitivities. This meant that there was never a pretension of developing a technically ‘optimal’ system, since the final decision would be made by a politically sensitive Cabinet. What the policy process produced was both a technical benchmark from which to work and a wide understanding that the basic problems of radwaste management could be resolved. This is a question of creating a social contract as well as merely one of technological management. Notes and references 1 The date of the Stipulation Act, properly known as the Act on Special Permission to Charge Nuclear Reactors with Nuclear Fuel, etc. (Swedish Code of Statutes, SFS 1977:140). 2 Kärnbränslesäkerhet (KBS) Projekt (1977, 1978, 1983). 3 The basic principle of the act is that ‘All practicable precautions [should be taken] to avoid injuries caused by radiation.’ Furthermore, ‘the release of radioactive substances from nuclear power stations shall be limited to the extent which is reasonably achievable’ (SSI FS 1977:2, para. 10). 4 Statens vatenfallsverket (Vattenfall, State Power Board); Sydkraft; Oskarshamnverketkraftgrupp (OKG); and Forsmarks Kraftgrupps (FKA). 5 Swedish Atomic Energy Company: four-sevenths state-owned; three-sevenths owned by a consortium of private industrial firms. 6 Johansson (1986)—this summarizes reports published in Ny Teknik by Christer Larsson, April-May 1985; see also Forsberg (1986). 7 The Marviken reactor project was abandoned in 1970. 8 Oskarshamn 1, 440 MW(e) BWR. 9 This company was 50 per cent state-owned and 50 per cent owned by Asea. 10 Lindberg recognized that Sweden might be a partial exception to his characterization of ‘an interacting set of political, institutional and structural

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19 20 21

22 23 24

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obstacles that constrain the search for alternative policies’ (Lindberg 1977, p. 327). Ministry of Industry (Sweden) (1971). Central Operating Management (1972). Brigitta Hambreus, Centre Party spokesperson on energy, cited in Sahr (1985). Ministry of Industry (Sweden) (1976) pp. 69–79. Pontussen (1984) argues that the LO’s immediate problems were associated with its collective ‘solidaristic’ wage-bargaining strategy which broke up during the 1973–4 recession. He stated in April 1976 that he would ‘not participate in a government which permitted the fuelling of new reactors’ (cited in Vedung 1980, p. 18). Larsson (1985) pp. 434–6. Ringhals 3 and Forsmark 1. The Swedish convention is to abbreviate the names of reactors according to site and unit number. Reactors at Ringhals are known as R1, R2, R3 and R4. The other reactor sites are: Forsmark (three units), Oskarshamn (three units) and Barsebäck (two units). A time-limited fuelling permit for Barsebäck was granted on 22.12.76. Its operation was later limited to the period over which it produced the amount of spent fuel covered by the Cogema reprocessing contract. Government Proposition 1976/77:53, December 1976. He suggested that the ‘Stipulation’ clause would be fulfilled when all competent experts were of the same opinion that a certain solution was absolutely safe. The Energy Commission later suggested that a ‘draconian application’ of the term should not be used. Equivalent to about 2-year fuel discharges. Forsmark 3 and Oskarshamn 3. The 1977 and 1978 Cogema contracts had a waste-return clause, including non-high-level wastes. Waste-return clauses state that the reprocessor has the right to return all residues arising from reprocessing, but that this right will be exercised only if a suitable waste form can be agreed with the customer. Disposal of these was not considered in KBS. Hughes, The Evolution of Large Technological Systems, in W.E.Bijker et al. (ed.), The Social Construction of Techological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, pp. 51–82. The main investigations were done at Finnsjön, Kråkemåla, Sternö, and Kynnefjäll. Just 57 MTHM of Swedish fuel was transported to La Hague. Johansson and Steen (1978). John Winchester, reviewer for the Energy Commission, concluded that: The question of finding a suitable location for the final waste repository is not answered directly by KBS. From our reading…it is by no means clear that a crystalline rock mass can be found of the required size and overall tightness which at the same time meets the other requirements of groundwater compositions, temperature, freedom from disturbances from previous human activities, and availability from a human standpoint. (Ministry of Industry/Energy Commission (1978) p. IV: 15.)

The other main Energy Commission reviewer, Jan Ryberg, wrote: ‘I am convinced that there will be no difficulty in Sweden of finding a sufficiently large rock body which [will] meet the hydrologic requirements.’ (Ministry of Industry/Energy Commission (1978) p. IV: 53). 30 Clause 2.1, Stipulation Law.

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31 Cited in Johansson and Steen (1978) p. 16. 32 Ibid., p. 173. 33 ‘The review group concludes that the Sternö region cannot be used for the repository proposed by KBS.’ Granskningsutlåtande avseende KBS-utredningen, by SKI Konsultgruppen för geologifrågorp 12.3.79 (cited in Sahr, 1985, p. 105). 34 Professor of Geology at Lund University. 35 Abrahamson (1979); Barnaby (1980); Jones et al. (1980); Sahr (1985). 36 Lonnröth (1979) p. 24. 37 Swedish Nuclear Fuel Supply Company (SKBF) (1979) pp. 28–58. 38 Normal procedure has been to replace a proportion of standard racks with 88 positions each with close-packing racks with 140 positions each. 39 The Council for Handling Spent Nuclear Fuel. 40 Ion exchange resins and filters are fixed in concrete at Oskarshamn and Ringhals, and in bitumen at Barsebäck. Both concrete and bitumen are used as a waste form at Forsmark. Dry low-level wastes are either compacted or incinerated at Studsvik and stored in drums. Source: Larsson et al. (1986) p. 41. 41 ‘In the opinion of SKI…SKB have not selected the best site for a final repository for reactor waste from a geological point of view.’ (Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) (1984, p. 10). 42 They are classified as storage facilities because runoff and discharges from the site will be monitored. 43 Less than 0.6 TBq per m3 for actinides with half-lives over 5 years. This compares with the Drigg licence in Britain which permits less than 0.8 TBq alpha-emitters per m3 per day. This latter limit allows averaging of activity over a 24 hour span of operation. Source: HMSO/RWMAC Seventh Annual Report, June 1986, p. 55. 44 Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) (1984) p. 1. 45 Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB/KBS) (1983) vol. IV, p. 17:2. 46 Gideå, Fjällveden, Kamlunge, and Svartboberget. Sites at Taavinunnanen, Tingen and Galleevora were also surveyed.

Chapter five

The United Kingdom

5.1 Introduction Over the past decade, radioactive-waste management, practice and policy has suffered a number of set-backs in the UK. But these difficulties have not, until recently, fed into a wider crisis in policy for the back-end, as in West Germany and Sweden. Governments and the nuclear industry itself have alternately treated radwaste management either as a marginal problem, or as one which was too explosive to touch. In both moods, only partial management strategies have been devised. Until the manoeuvring which preceded the botched privatization of the electricity supply industry, radwaste management had reached public attention in diverse and often unconnected ways. The authorized dispersion of radioactive discharges into the air and sea has created a long-running and public scientific dispute, accidental releases have produced calls for tighter control, and the search for disposal sites at sea and on land has produced serial localized protests. But these strands are never clearly knitted together and we have not seen in Britain the scale of conflict witnessed in Germany and Sweden. Yet radwaste management strategy has frequently proven a fragile contraption. So much so that use of the word ‘policy’ seems appropriate when describing the decision-making process in Britain. In government, the term ‘strategy’ is more often used. A strategy is to a plan what an invention is to an innovation; it has a more tenuous relation to reality. A leitmotif of this chapter will be the question of why radwaste policy in Britain has not really impinged on nuclear-fuel-cycle policy. The answer stems partly from the legislative framing of radwaste management as one of limiting the diffusion of radioactivity into the general environment on short time-scales. While this has suited both the needs of the nuclear industry and the regulators, it is not an arrangement which has coped well with the operational and political difficulties created by the policy of reprocessing. Even now it is not possible for the reactor operators openly to make provisions for a non-reprocessing, spent-fuel management strategy. 132

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The inertia of the commitment to reprocessing is therefore a key condition of radwaste management. I will argue that the most serious blockage to coherent strategy has been the poor linkage of regulations relating to the day-to-day management of wastes to those which deal with disposal activities and planning. This link, which was built into both the Swedish and German contexts—through the Stipulation Law and Entsorgung policy—is absent in Britain. Of course, the expediency which characterizes the British situation because of this is not necessarily a sign of weakness. Incremental change may well be rational where strategic and scientific uncertainties remain. But there is also a case for arguing that regulatory weakness may militate against both the safety and, more importantly, the political viability of management and disposal strategy. As we have seen in previous chapters, these aspects are always interwoven. The related question of dynamism in radwaste policy is also of interest. No framework of policy dynamism has been established in Britain, as it has in Sweden and West Germany. Strategy is not driven forward by a grounded internal logic, but by specific and discrete operational and political pressures. Changes in the physical regulation of wastes have come about in the post-1976 period through reactive rather than proactive changes. The absence of a unifying constraint or inducement makes the story difficult to tell. Unlike the West German and Swedish chapters, this one will be concerned mainly with liquid and solid low-level wastes. Intermediate and high-level wastes have in Britain been considered in a far more fragmented way. We will trace this emphasis to the institutional relations extant in British back-end policy-making. The following section will be a brief review of the regulatory framework for radwastes in the UK. Then I will describe the specific operational and strategic relations between reprocessing and radwaste management in the UK. Most of the chapter is concerned with a detailed historical account of the evolution of radwaste policy, and ends with a short concluding section. 5.2 The control of radioactive wastes Review of the legal framework and responsible organizations There are currently twelve nuclear power stations operating in the UK, which annually produce about 3,000 m3 of solid LLWs and about 700 m3 of ILW. Activities at Sellafield produce about 45,000 m3 of solid LLW per year. About 30,000 m3 of untreated ILWs are stored at the site.1 Apart from being the main producer and storer of solid wastes, Sellafield also gives rise to by far the largest liquid and gaseous discharges of all British

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nuclear sites. In total, the nuclear-fuel cycle produces over 90 per cent of radioactive wastes by volume and over 99 per cent by activity of radioactive wastes in Britain. As pressure has increased over the last decade for less activity to be discharged direct to the environment, the scope for trade-offs between ‘dilute and disperse’ and ‘containment and storage’ management schemes has become wider. In this way, the balance between worker and public safety is more clearly drawn in a fuel cycle with fuel reprocessing. Consequently, there has been in the UK a more sharply defined public controversy over the adequacy of radiological protection than has taken place elsewhere. Indeed, this conflict, between worker and public dose-limitation, underlies much of the discussion which follows. The framework for radwaste regulation is set out in Figures 5.1 and 5.2. This system may be defined according to two main distinctions— between liquid and solid wastes, and between licensed sites and nonlicensed sites. Non-licensed sites comprise dispersed ‘small users’ of radioactive materials. All commercial nuclear installations are so-called ‘licensed sites’. Non-licensed sites (mainly industrial users) come under the Radioactive Substances Act (RSA) and must be registered with the Secretary of State responsible for the environment in England, Scotland and Wales: Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP) in the Department of the Environment (DoE) in England; the Scottish Development Department; and the Welsh Office, respectively. Small users must also hold authorizations to accumulate and discharge radioactive substances. Such authorizations are enforced through inspections by the HMIP, which also

Figure 5.1 The institutional framework for the control of radwastes in the UK

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Figure 5.2 The legal framework for the control of radwastes in the UK

has the responsibility to ensure that ‘best practicable means’ for reducing gaseous discharges are in place. In all, there are currently about 5,800 small users in the British Isles. They dispose of their solid wastes at fifty-two local-authority sites authorized to accept certain LLWs. Information about these disposals is held by the disposer, not centrally. In addition, about fifty Ministry of Defence (MoD) establishments are authorized to arrange for disposal directly, without ministerial consent. Their authority to do this stems from ‘administrative arrangements’ with the other authorizing departments. At nuclear facilities (power reactors and fuel-cycle installations) onsite management of radwastes does not fall under the Radioactive Substances Act. Instead, these sites operate within the provisions of a licence2 issued under the Nuclear Installations Act (NIA) by the main nuclear licensing authority, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII).3 Provisions set down in site licences cover only the safety and radiological protection aspects of accumulating wastes at nuclear sites.4 Only radioactive discharges from these licensed sites are regulated under the RSA, jointly by the Department of the Environment (DoE) and the Ministry

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of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF).5 Under normal operating conditions, therefore, the only statutory instrument available to the principle regulator, the DoE, to influence radwaste management is the site discharge authorization. The division between ‘accumulations of solid wastes’ and ‘discharges of liquid and gaseous wastes’ underpins radwaste practice and policy-making in the UK. Executive responsibility for the disposal of low- and intermediate-level wastes has rested, since 1982, with an industry-sponsored agency, Nirex. Officially, Nirex works to a waste-management strategy developed by the DoE.6,7 5.3 The logic of reprocessing8 Just as the assumption of a policy of domestic reprocessing in the FRG has constrained the field of view of radwaste policy-makers, so reprocessing has provided the horizons for the world-view of British planners. British civil nuclear-power programmes are deeply rooted in the project to develop atomic weapons. Work on the British bomb began in 1946, after the Americans had denied Britain access to nuclear materials and technology. Having decided on a plutonium bomb, the first priority was to produce the material. Construction of two plutonium-production reactors began in 1948 at Windscale and the following year work began on the B204 fuel-reprocessing plant at the same site. Development of the two technologies was always intimately related; two sides of the same coin. This same currency (gas-graphite reactors with natural metallic uranium fuel and solvent reprocessing to separate plutonium) was taken as the standard for the civil atomic programme. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) believed the magnoxreprocessing line to be the most direct path to commercial fast reactors. Gowing (1974) shows that the long-term promise of fast-fission reactors dominated Harwell’s early thinking about civil atomic power during the late 1940s. Among the many different reactor types broadly considered, the fast reactor stood out as having outstanding qualities. This reactor would provide the means of making efficient use of resources of nuclear material. With global scarcities of uranium forecast, and the more immediate pinch of the American embargo, extravagant use of uranium was thought to be a serious impediment to the viability of commercial nuclear power on a large scale. Thermal reactors, such as the Magnox reactors, were seen as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of breeders fuelled with plutonium. Large investments began to be made in fast-reactor research, beginning in the 1950s. Together with a strategic goal to reprocess spent fuel from civil reactors, a nuclear fuel design was inherited by the Magnox reactor

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programme which made reprocessing an operational necessity. The history of this coincidence lies at the heart of our interpretation of radwaste management in the UK. The two military plutoniumproduction piles built at Windscale in the late 1940s and early 1950s employed a simple natural uranium-graphite moderated design which was carried over into the Calder Hall reactors which superseded them. The Calder reactors had the dual purpose of producing weaponsgrade plutonium as well as electricity. This entailed reactor operation at higher temperatures. To achieve these with a carbon dioxide cooled reactor, a new material was used for the fuel-can (magnesium oxide). Although magnox, as it became known, provided a distinct advantage for reactor performance, its serious (although for a long time unacknowledged) limitation was that when discharged from the reactor and placed in water-filled ponds for cooling, the fuel-cans began to corrode rather rapidly. Such corrosion released fission products into the pond water. This drawback was cast aside because of remaining doubts about the costs of uranium and enrichment and a growing confidence in the Calder design. A similar gas-cooled reactor was hence adopted for the first civil reactor programme in 1956. Spent-fuel storage capacity at these stations was limited to four-thirds of a fuel core, sufficient for about 18 months’ fuel arisings at initial burn-ups. Fuel was expected to be stored for about 6 months, transported to Windscale for further storage, and reprocessed within 18 months. The even pace of this cycle was critical, since a slowdown would have led to higher levels of corrosion, first at Windscale and later at reactor sites, to a point where liquid discharges quickly began to approach and possibly exceed the limits set in the discharge authorization. Continued operation of the civil reactor programme was hereby inextricably linked to reprocessing activities at Windscale.9 Approval for the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Windscale in 1978 reinforced the linkage between British civil reactors (AGRs in this case) and reprocessing. Only now, over a decade later, as the whole future of the British reactor programme has been cast into doubt, does the justification for reprocessing look less persuasive. Costs have risen so that they represent a substantial risk to investors, and there is no ready use for plutonium. Visions of fast-reactor programmes have faded with the government’s decision to cut funding on fast-reactor research. Commenting on earlier forecasts of fast reactor commercialization, the then Energy Secretary Cecil Parkinson remarked: ‘There was a tidiness about this arrangement. It all looked neat, but in the end it was improbable. The timescales did not make sense.’10 By extension, the same might be said about the Magnox-Windscale nexus which has churned along for nearly three decades.

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5.4 An historical assessment of radwaste management policy and practice Radioactive waste management policy in Britain can be split into three more or less distinct phases. The first began in earnest with the decision in 1946 to develop an indigenous nuclear-fuel cycle in support of the atomic bomb project, and ended nearly 30 years later with the publication of the Flowers Report in 1976.11 These 30 years span the establishment of one military and two civilian reactor programmes, enrichment, fuel fabrication and reprocessing facilities, as well as the creation of a legal and institutional framework under which these activities were regulated. In terms of sheer scale, the control of radioactive effluents from nuclear sites starts and ends at Windscale. Effluents from the First Separation Plant (a small military reprocessing line) threatened to hold up the production of plutonium in the early 1950s, but discharges were kept down, often with temporary hold-up or filtration measures which became embedded practices. Formal regulations for radioactive discharges were instituted in February 1952, when they were set at what seem in retrospect conservatively low levels. Solid radwaste disposal also began almost immediately. Even before the first Windscale pile had gone critical, sea dumping of radioactive wastes had started in 1949. Ten years later a shallow land-burial12 site was commissioned at Drigg just south of Windscale. Drigg took a range of solid wastes, mainly from Windscale, but including more active materials from the AEA’s southern sites: Harwell, Amersham, Winfrith. Wastes with significant alpha contamination were disposed to sea. Civil reactor wastes and those which could not be disposed of to land or sea (fuel element debris and highly-active wastes) were routinely stored where they were produced, and monitored by the AEA’s Health and Safety Division. It was early understood that immobilization was the first step in dealing with the heat-generating, first-cycle effluent produced at the Windscale reprocessing lines. Research started in the late 1950s and a pilot glassification plant was operated at Harwell from 1962–66. We can see from this that schemes for the management, storage, control and disposal of the more bulky and difficult wastes were already in hand when the Radioactive Substances Act came into force in 1963. Even if many of its practices were subsequently questioned, British waste-management practice and planning appear at this early stage to have been relatively coherent and effectively operated. There is little sign of the chaos which was to characterize policy later on. For its first decade this system of control seemed satisfactory to both the industry and the regulators and provoked no public comment. There seemed to be no urgency in solving the remaining problems of high-level waste disposal. As the head of the AEA’s Industrial Chemistry unit put it in 1976: ‘No decision can be reached for many years, but again no decision

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is required for many years.’13 Such ambivalence came under attack in the Flowers report, published in September 1976. This contained the now classic formulation: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived highly radioactive wastes for the indefinite future.14 The first effect of the so-called ‘Flowers criterion’ was to bring sudden urgency to high-level waste disposal. Public interest in radwaste matters had already quickened in 1975 when it became clear that British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) intended to build a new oxide fuel reprocessing plant which would predominantly handle foreign spent fuel. Suddenly Windscale was being characterized as a nuclear dustbin. The Flowers report and the Windscale Inquiry together represent a major reassessment of back-end policy and mirrored similar public debates in Germany and Sweden in the period following the first oil shock. But while the German and Swedish debates produced radical policy breaks with the past, in Britain it served more to confirm the status quo. Here radwaste had only a negative value, never a positive, strategic one, as in Germany and Sweden. The third phase begins with the abandonment of the first plank of strategy in the post-Flowers period and has seen the unravelling of the pre-1976 regime. At the end of 1981 the government decided to cut short its drilling programme in connection with high-level waste disposal, and argued that there was no urgency in developing a disposal site after all. Instead, the emphasis was bringing new sites for low-level and intermediate-level waste disposal into operation. After some confusion about the government’s intentions, Nirex,15 an industry-sponsored body, was set up for this purpose. Since then, a more restrictive regulatory climate has evolved, mostly on the back of public controversy about liquid discharges from nuclear sites and the perceived value of conditioning those waste-streams which previously were stored raw. Disposal routes for solid wastes have been restricted. Sea dumping has been abandoned and three successive Nirex site search programmes have failed through lack of political support. The fourth programme, initiated in 1987, has been more sensitively designed but still has an uncertain future. Since 1988 two new developments have come to dominate waste-management strategy: a loosening of the reprocessing nexus so that the chances for a more flexible fuel-cycle policy are now greater than ever before; and the prospects for decommissioning Britain’s ageing Magnox reactors and the inefficient early AGRs.

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Before 1976: the making of the first strategy Widespread use of radioactive materials, especially of radium for industrial, luminizing and clinical purposes, began in Britain after the Second World War. Although radium was known to be toxic, no special provisions were made for its use and control until 1963 when the second Radioactive Substances Act came into force. By then, about a thousand users of radioactive materials were registered with the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG). Management and disposal of radioactive wastes from these processes had been regulated by a cluster of statutes administered by several government departments. An attempt was made in 1948 to formalize the control of radwaste disposal but this proved a failure—firms and research establishments continuing to discharge most of their effluents to sewers and the sea untreated, often without the knowledge of local authorities. The production of radioactive wastes by the weapons programme was by all accounts more rigorously controlled, especially after the passing of the Atomic Energy Authority Act in 1954. Section five of the Act placed a stringent obligation on the Authority: ‘to secure that no ionising radiations…from any waste discharged…by [the AEA] cause any hurt to any person or any damage to any property’. (The italics are mine.) Discharge authorizations devised by the MHLG and the MAFF, but monitored by the Authority itself, were the main instruments of achieving this. The first authorizations took a crude form.16 While the Authority held the pre-eminent position for nuclear-power decisions, it was extremely difficult for government departments to challenge its working practices. While regulatory authority has passed away from the AEA, the discharge authorization remains the basic tool of radwaste regulation in the UK. Managing radwastes arising from the weapons programme was cloaked in secrecy, as is testified by Margeret Gowing’s (1974) account of the suppression of information about the Windscale discharge pipe in 1950. Clement Attlee is reported as saying that too much publicity about the pipe was ‘undesirable’, since it would bring attention to the project. In this view the Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys, concurred, arguing that it ‘would be better for us to keep [this] light under a bushel’. From the outset, the sea was regarded as the natural repository for wastes. Liquid wastes were discharged untreated to available water bodies (lakes, rivers and the sea) sometimes, as at Harwell, after having been stored on-site for a short period to allow short-lived nuclides to decay. Solid wastes and sludges from the fuel pond were either stored at the site of production, or bagged and drummed for dumping at sea, according to what was more practicable. From 1949 this operation was carried out by the Ministry of Supply. Radwastes were included in routine dumps to the

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Hurd Deep in the English Channel by the Admiralty and Army of unwanted matériel, such as unstable ammunition. Through the 1950s, the volume and activity of radwastes dumped at sea rose steadily17 and operations were gradually redirected to sites in the Atlantic Deeps, clear of the continental shelf. This change was brought about by a growing recognition, fostered at the first Atoms for Peace conference in 1955, that sea disposal of radwastes was a topic on which international agreement and co-operation would be possible. It was also a chance for the fledgling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to make its mark. In 1958 the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea duly designated the IAEA as the competent authority to draw up standards and procedures for sea dumping. Three years later, the Bryneilsson Report18 produced a series of technical criteria for sea dumping, but concluded that the disposal of high-level wastes could not yet be recommended. A separate panel subsequently reviewed the legal, administrative and organizational measures needed to enforce the Bryneilsson recommendations, but was unable to reach agreement.19 The only criterion to survive the so-called Rousseau Panel’s deliberations was a restriction on sea dumping at sites of less than 2,000 metres depth. Dumping in shallower water was thought to run the risk of interfering with fishing. Since the Hurd Deep was shallower, dumping of radwastes was ended there in 1963 and moved to the Atlantic. Sea dumping remained at the heart of both military and civil radwaste disposal policy right up to the abrupt suspension of operations in 1983. Until the late 1960s it was primarily used by AEA sites in southern England as a cheaper option than transport to Drigg. Plutonium-contaminated material from Windscale was also disposed of in this way. Sea dumping of civil reactor wastes did not start until the mid-1970s. The most important aspect of the sea-disposal option lay not so much in its actual utility as a disposal route, although that was already substantial, but in the promise it seemed to hold that disposal routes would be available for more active stored wastes and decommissioned nuclear plant. In essence it was this tacit dependency on the sea route which explains the very late start which Britain made on land-disposal research. Hence the British government’s great reluctance to relinquish the option.20 By 1956 the prospect of a civil nuclear power programme, the 7year limit placed on the first AEA Act, and growing political disquiet, led the government to commission a report from the Radioactive Substances Advisory Committee21 on an extended system of controls for radioactive wastes. The Keys Report was published in late 1959 and defined the structure for radwaste regulation in the UK which persists to the present day.

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The report begins with a summary of general principles for radwaste management.22 (The italics in the following extract are mine.) (i) It is not in the nature of radioactivity that the economic value of the useful materials involved can be realised without some release of ionising radiations to the general environment…. This release can be controlled within safe limits. (ii) Discharges of waste should be so controlled as to ensure, irrespective of cost that they will not…directly endanger the health of any member of the public living in the neighbourhood. In addition…a genetic hazard to the nation as a whole [should be considered when authorizing discharges].23 (iv) The number of people with sufficient scientific knowledge to evaluate these problems is so limited that it would not be practicable to set up a large number of separate local controls, (v) …control ought to be organised on a national basis. (vi) This does not mean that local disposal is undesirable… conventional methods should be used where practicable…. The authority responsible should, however, have a reserve means of disposing of wastes which are too active to permit safe local disposal.24 The basic dilemmas of radwaste management are all represented here: the trade-off between the costs and benefits of protection; the tendency towards centralized regulatory control; and the problem of ‘sufficient knowledge’. The thrust of these principles is towards the control of site discharges and the extent to which conventional waste-disposal practice would be suitable for radwastes. No special concern is expressed for how to deal with more active solid wastes. Only five paragraphs in the report deal with solid wastes,25 and only a passing reference is made to research on high-level waste immobilization. The report’s only mention of the disposal of high-level wastes stated that they should be stored or dumped in ‘inaccessible parts of the earth’s surface’. Land disposal in Britain was to be limited to ‘a few hundred microcuries of radionuclides of half-life longer than a year’.26 What little land disposal there was would be divided between the AEA (which already operated the burial site at Drigg) and local authorities. In the Radioactive Substances Act a further provision was made: If it appears to the Minister that adequate facilities are not available for the safe disposal or accumulation of radioactive wastes, the Minister may provide such facilities, or may arrange for the provision thereof.27 This clause went some way to meeting the Keys recommendation that there should be a National Disposal Service (NDS). In practice the NDS

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became no more than an administrative arrangement between the Radiochemieals Inspectorate and the AEA to dispose of non-nuclear fuel cycle radwastes at Drigg and at sea. Sea disposals and disposals at Drigg are hardly covered at all by Keys, because they were Authority territory and therefore outside the remit of the committee’s work. On setting limits for discharges, the Keys Report contains the seminal statement which recommends that: ‘it is the essence of a prudent system of control that discharges should be kept not only within the upper limits of safety, but as far below them as can reasonably be achieved’.28 In a strong sense the whole of what followed can be interpreted as the struggle over what this phrase meant. While its basic appeal is easy to grasp, applying the criterion can mean a variety of things. Its main limitation is that it typically represents in Britain a cost-benefit trade-off which has been made behind closed doors. Historically the ALARA criterion has become progressively more central to regulatory practice in Britain, and has formed the basis of the international approach to radiation protection since the mid-1960s. Lastly and most significantly, although the report was written with the new atomic programme in mind, the main regulatory problems identified by the report concern the use of radium in industry and the disposal of radwastes from non-industry sources. This is also where the bulk of the Radioactive Substances Act was directed. It is clear that the authors had little conception of the magnitude and diversity of solid radwastes which would be produced by a full-scale civil nuclear power and reprocessing programme. Yet, 30 years on we find that a regulatory regime created to control low-level wastes not arising from the nuclear-fuel cycle is still the legal framework by which the nuclear industry’s wastes are controlled. The full consequences of this mismatch of powers are described in the following sections. The overflowing sink: highly-active wastes at Windscale The storage of the first-cycle raffinate29 from the First Separation Plant30 was already perceived to be a serious operational constraint by the Industrial Group of the AEA who built the plant. Highly-active liquors were stored in horizontal tanks and evaporated to reduce volume. Longerterm management of these wastes was also realized to be ‘highly political’. Government ministers were, however, unwilling to give direction. Gowing argues that: ‘in the late 1940s Ministers, with one exception, were not concerned and preferred to leave the whole thing to the experts’.31 This dichotomy between the technicians and the politicians, each waiting for the other to provide policy initiative continues to paralyse decision-making even today. Richard Stokes, Minister of Works, was an exception, and

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commissioned a report on how to deal with the high-level liquor tanks from the chief engineer at Windscale, Christopher Hinton. Hinton felt that the tanks were a grave responsibility and ‘gave grounds for considerable anxiety’. Such concerns were not shared in the Cabinet. Duncan Sandys, Minister of Supply, replied that: ‘the only way to ensure absolute safety was to abandon the entire atomic energy project. If any sudden release of radiation should occur the sea was close at hand.’32 Until BNFL made their proposal to construct a pilot vitrification plant at Windscale in 1975, the problem seems to have slipped from the attention of government. The AEA continued with its research programmes, but there was no real pressure to bring into operation a commercial-scale rig at Windscale. Plain blindness to the operational hazards of a strategy of continued storage eventually created the conditions for a serious malfunctioning of the British nuclear-fuel cycle. Operation of the Magnox programme was nearly brought to a halt by an unexpected hitch in the fuel and waste-management cycle. The umbilical chord between reactors and Windscale’s reprocessing line became clogged, and, with nowhere for the reactors’ excretions to go, they almost expired. As we have seen, the Magnox gas-cooled, metallic-fuelled, graphitemoderated reactor was an extension of military designs. One of the abiding operational difficulties of the reactor is its use of a magnesium-alloy fuel cladding which corrodes when immersed in water—especially when water chemistry is not controlled to avoid the build-up of chlorine ions. Furthermore, corrosion is an autocatalytic reaction which is self-reinforcing and accelerates with time. A primary planning requirement for any programme of Magnox reactors was therefore a capacity to guarantee a smooth reprocessing cycle. Spent-fuel management therefore presents quite different challenges for reactor operators in Britain compared with West Germany or Sweden— where the main problem has been the ability to license new storage capacity. In Britain what counted was the effectiveness of the storage/ transport/ reprocessing system, given the need to minimize storage times. To assure this cycle for fuel from the civil programme, a second separation plant was commissioned in 1964 with a design capacity of 1,500 tonnes per year throughput. Organizing the system of storage and transports efficiently proved to be complex and costly. Due to the size of the Magnox core, comparatively large volumes of spent fuel were produced, considerably increasing the scale of the operation.33 It also made the generating boards (CEGB and SSEB) completely dependent on operational management at Windscale/Sellafield. This relationship persisted for a long time after the purely technological imperative had been reversed with the dry spent-fuel store at Wylfa. The lack of flexibility in this scheme was eventually exposed at the most neglected point of the chain—the storage of liquid heat-generating

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wastes in B212 and B215 at Windscale (see Figure 5.3). One of the prime design considerations for the storage of these wastes had been volume reduction. About 4,500 litres of raffinate was produced per tonne of fuel processed.34 At the First Separation Plant, volume reduction had been by evaporation. But liquor composed of the tributyl phosphate (TBP) solvent used in the Second Separation Plant degraded to phosphoric acid, and led to substantial precipitation of solids.35 These solids settled to the bottom of the storage tanks and created ‘hot spots’ where elevated rates of corrosion occurred, and which gave rise to unsteady vapour releases. To solve this problem, a steam-stripping system was devised for the tanks which removed the phosphates and allowed raffinate to be concentrated to about one-hundredth of its original volume. Eight tanks of this design were installed. A larger, more advanced, actively-cooled tank (including an agitation system to prevent the build-up of solids) was brought into operation in 1970. By this stage a whole host of new management blockages had arisen at the Windscale site. These problems can most easily be defined in terms of the five operational areas in which they occurred: the storage of spent fuel in fuel ponds; the production of secondary effluent streams; the plutonium purification and finishing plant; the storage of highly active liquid wastes; and the storage of intermediate-level Magnox fuel-cladding swarf. Acute difficulties appear to have arisen first in the storage of highly active liquors in B215 and B268. The first tank of the new design (Tank 9) developed a minor leak in its cooling jacket in late 1971 just after reprocessing had begun to operate under the new name, British Nuclear Fuels. The tank was shut down for 6 months.36 In the following year, 1972, a more intractable corrosion problem was discovered in B215. Once more the source of the trouble lay in the magnox fuel-cladding material used in the first programme of British reactors. Due to the higher burn-ups which were now being achieved in the Magnox reactors, up to 5,000 MWd per tonne as compared to 3,000 MWd per tonne in the early period, a larger proportion of the magnox fuel cladding was migrating into the outer surface of the metallic fuel rods. This thin film of impregnated magnesium oxide was not stripped off in the decladding stage and became incorporated in the raffinate sent for evaporation and storage. Since the magnox caused the precipitation of new solids, much lower levels of concentration were possible, producing an unexpected surge in liquor arisings. 37 Construction of new storage tanks could not keep pace with the inflated requirements. In September 1972 BNFL was forced to suspend reprocessing operations for about 6 months while new storage capacity was laid on. In fact, storage capacity appears to have been a bottleneck for at least

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Figure 5.3 Flowsheet of radwastes at the Sellafield site Source: HMSO/HMNII (1986)

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another 18 months, because BNFL later claimed that the 3-day-week of 1973/74 had caused delays to the installation of new tanks. The slowdown in work on the reprocessing line was further exacerbated by a strike at the Windscale works during 1973. Reprocessing was not resumed until 1974, by which time Tanks 10 and 11 had been commissioned. Only then did the full implications of cladding corrosion become clear. Due to the fuel’s degenerated physical condition, reprocessing had to proceed more slowly, and a backlog of ageing spent fuel built up at the Windscale fuel ponds. Storage pressure moved backwards down the chain, and by 1975 BNFL had begun to refuse acceptance of further shipments of fuel from the generating boards, due to an exhaustion of storage capacity at the site. Fuel-storage ponds at reactors began to fill, and discharges of activity began to rise. Suddenly the delicate operational balance of the whole system was in jeopardy. The rising radioactive discharges from Windscale and reactor sites during this period provide an indication of these operational problems.38 Before 1974 spent-fuel pond water at Windscale and reactor sites had been discharged to sea directly. Since the mid-1960s these discharges had steadily increased.39 Up until 1972 about a third of beta-emitting nuclides arose from the B205 reprocessing line, most of the rest from Magnox fuel-storage ponds. It appears that the rising discharges were mainly due to increased activity in pond water. Alpha discharges from the Windscale site arose principally in military plutonium-handling activities. They had risen precipitously since the mid-1960s, so much so that a new site authorization was written in 1971 which raised the ‘total alpha’ discharge limit by a factor of more than three (see Figure 5.4). By 1973 the corrosion problems which had been building up in the spentfuel ponds were leading to levels of soluble nuclides (mainly caesium and strontium) which could not be controlled with established methods. Increased corrosion had also reduced pond visibility, so making underwater operations (such as fuel handling) difficult and slow. Together with the increased dose rates at the side of the ponds, there was a significant increase in dose uptake among personnel operating and maintaining plant. The first solution to improve the poor visibility was to increase the throughput of water in the ponds. However, in order to stay within site-discharge limits, a means of reducing levels of activity in the pond water was also required. Failure to cope with these radwaste management problems would have resulted in the shut-down of part, or all, of the Magnox reactor programme. It was therefore vital to keep material moving through B205 when it was operating. Complete redesigns were not possible, nor was there any regulatory pressure for these. The underlying need, which the regulators were forced to accept, was to keep the Windscale lines operating.

Source: HMSO, Black Report (1984) p. 48

Figure 5.4 Historical discharges of radioactive liquid effluents from the Windscale/Sellafield site (total alpha)

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Several further interim measures were hastily put in place which allowed operations to continue. A rudimentary ion-exchange concept for filtering pond water before discharge was also brought into use in 1975. This concept was refined until in 1976 it consisted of a system for pumping pond water through skips filled with synthetic zeolite placed on the floor of the fuel pond. Although a costly and cumbersome system, radiocaesium discharges were reduced by a factor of two, and fuel ponds returned to their clear phase. The only way to keep the juggler’s act at Windscale going was to add new balls to the cycle; each modest in themselves, but together creating large new demands on site management of waste streams. The regulators’ place in this struggle to regain control of the Magnox reprocessing cycle at Windscale was non-interventionist and supportive. A formal safety regime was not completed until 1976. Before this, the Nuclear Inspectorate itself performed a primarily advisory role for BNFL. The Ministry of Agriculture meanwhile sought to improve its environmental monitoring programme and bring more confidence to the site discharge authorization. Windscale’s problems during this period were later attributed to the shift of a military facility to primarily a civil operation, which was subject to an external regulating authority and to chronic lack of investment during the late 1960s. The site had only very gradually come under the control of the regulators who arrived after 1971. The perceived national importance of Windscale’s operations made it difficult to impose regulatory order. Relations with BNFL were delicate and discrete, and substantive change came slowly. Full regulatory control over Sellafield’s discharges was not achieved until the Site Ion Exchange Plant (SIXEP) was commissioned in 1984. New tighter discharge limits were also set. Taking stock Discharges from Windscale have been the subject of much controversy since the mid-1970s. The lineaments of this debate were set early on. As Wynne comments: There were two different attitudes on radioactive waste among the objectors [at the Windscale inquiry]. Those few who believed that the risks from existing Windscale discharges could be shown to be too high, differed from those who were agnostic on that question, but who believed that the main uncertainties about risks from a future THORP centred on the inability of regulatory bodies to exercise rigorous control.40 Since then, the case for the ‘few’ has been strengthened with successive

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changes in radiological protection recommendations,41 revised habit surveys by the MAFF’s Fisheries Research Laboratory (FRL); and especially by allegations of increased levels of cancer in the area around Sellafield and other nuclear facilities. Estimated doses during the 1970s to the most highly exposed groups of people (critical groups) in West Cumbria would today be regarded as unacceptable. Nevertheless, we will concentrate on the more general argument about the effects which ‘styles’ of regulatory control have had on policy choices. The institutional structuring of perceptions and practice of radioactivewaste management (RWM) from early in British nuclear programmes has been described above. Broadly these were: the overriding importance attached to the continued operation of the Windscale reprocessing operation for military and strategic reasons; a military and civil nuclearfuel cycle which required a steady reprocessing throughput at Windscale, and tied reactor operation to reprocessing; the concentration, as a result, at one site, of most radioactive wastes; a legal framework for RWM regulation which accommodated the need for secrecy at AEA sites; and, finally, the particular technical conception of radwaste management which is represented in this legal framework—what is termed as ‘dilute and disperse’. British radwaste management policy since 1976 has been shaped by these institutional determinations and legacies. Not only is institutional credibility, both of the industry and the regulators, rooted in perceptions of past performance, but the public debate about radwaste management is uniquely concerned with radiation protection standards and discharges to the environment. While this may produce more informed discussions about the science underlying the regulatory regime, it also means that the main strategic choices underlying the British fuel cycle have been only fleetingly posed. This is a defining feature of the controversy over radioactive waste in the UK. Unlike Sweden and West Germany, grand political settlements have never been wrought in Britain. To store or to dispose: vitrification as a panacea In the shadow of the long and complex saga precipitated in the liquor storage tanks in B215, a separate development was taking place which might ultimately have alleviated the problems which have just been described. This concerned the attenuated and unsuccessful attempt by the AEA to develop a vitrification process technology for high-level wastes. The reasons for the failure of three successive initiatives (FINGAL, HARVEST and a micro-wave technology) to be brought into commercial operation lie mainly in the ambivalence of the industry’s perception of waste management in the long term. Before 1976 the Authority had not seriously considered the disposal of highly-active wastes. Disposal was an

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ultimate aim, but they remained in an open mind about the best route. Research into a land-disposal route did not begin until 1975. Work on a process to solidify highly-active liquid wastes (FINGAL) began in 1958 at the Harwell laboratory and continued until 1966, when an active pilot plant was operated successfully. During this first period, the main objective of the project was to develop a cheaper and more secure method of storage of high-level waste so that liquors could be immobilized immediately, rather than being placed in storage.42 Basic leach tests were conducted on a number of different phosphate and boron glass products, together with phase diagrams to relate trends in glass properties to composition. Development work resumed in 1972 on a new process which produced larger, annular blocks which allowed for better underwater cooling.43 An active pilot plant for this HARVEST process became one part of the original BNFL expansion plan of 1976. The prime motivation for this appears to have been the need to transport high-level wastes back to foreign reprocessing clients. Through the mid 1970s, as the search for disposal concepts for highlevel waste intensified, an international technical consensus emerged that borosilicate glass (BSG) was a stable, inert and resistant matrix which would be suitable for disposal. But agreement on a vitrification material did not bring forward a process for glassification, and still less did it clarify a disposal policy.44 Whereas the AEA became concerned with the irreversibility of the process and wanted to proceed gradually, BNFL were intent on commissioning a full-scale plant as soon as possible to alleviate its operational difficulties of liquor storage. Interest in glass deepened in 1976. Under pressure to comply with the ‘Flowers criterion’ concerning radwaste disposal, and because BNFL had been forced to emphasize the radwaste management advantages of reprocessing during the Windscale Inquiry, the justification for vitrification shifted. It now became emblematic of the post-Flowers spirit of enlightenment, and was elided with plans to bring into operation a repository for high-level wastes (on land or at sea) by early in the twentyfirst century. By the 1977 White Paper (Cmnd 6820), glass had been established as a component of a disposal strategy, although no route was yet officially favoured. Work began in Britain on assessing the performance of conceptual repositories. The National Radiological Protection Board concluded that while glass appeared from the available data to be an adequate material, its behaviour in a repository still ‘require[d] extensive study’.45 Such continuing uncertainties led RWMAC to state: ‘The decision to solidify would not prejudice decisions about the choice of disposal route.’46 Concerns about irreversibility and suitability were thus swept

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aside. Irreversibility in the simple sense of not being able to change the matrix, but also in the deeper sense that a disposal concept must be designed around a matrix once it is set. In the more sophisticated view of the interacting suite of multiple barriers then being developed in Sweden this seems short-sighted. Multi-barriers have emphasized the interconnectedness of all the waste processing and handling steps and show that an optimized technological system cannot be devised without a fairly acute conception of the waste stream’s final destination. This of course is another reason why commitments must be made to an ultimate boundary of control. Without it a properly designed technological system for radwaste management is inconceivable; like designing a passenger carrier without knowing whether it would turn out to be a boat or a bus. Having given the AEA time to deliver a technology, BNFL finally signed a contract to buy a vitrification process from the French Commissariat de l’Energie Atomique (CEA) in early 1981. The French system had a proven record of commercial-scale operation. A schematic radiological assessment to compare the two glasses’ performance in a repository was done,47 but was marginal to the decision to go ahead. Today, despite the virtual suspension of work in Britain on the final disposal of high-level waste, vitrification of the Sellafield liquors, some of them more than 30 years old, commenced in 1990. Research on other immobilization media (principally ceramics) continues and BNFL has started negotiating with reprocessing clients about glass acceptance criteria for wastes to be returned to them from the mid-1990s onwards. British policy on disposing of these wastes is only slightly clearer now than a generation ago. The nearest a British government has come to a general statement on the need for disposal routes is in the 1986 White Paper: ‘decisions on the precise disposal sites and methods are difficult …[but] they should not simply be left to future generations’.48 On the evidence of attempts to develop a vitrification technology, there is a basic resistance in the British system to making decisions about longlived radwaste management. The state has owned and controlled all sections of the fuel cycle from the outset. With electricity privatization, and the possible construction of a dry store for oxide fuels, substantial amounts of long-lived wastes will for the first time be in the hands of the private sector. States find it difficult to think about their own demise; believing their constitutions to be inviolable. Without this perception, no structure of political interests can appear which might create the necessity for real preparations towards the relinquishment of control. As more material comes out of the state’s hands, the likelihood of such a coalition of interests forming increases.

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The Flowers Report and after Just as the announcement of dramatic plans for nuclear expansion increased public interest in the environmental consequences of nuclear power in Sweden, so news of the third reactor programme in Britain in late 1973 produced the first murmurings of public debate in Britain. The announcement brought to a head a crisis of organization and technological choice within the British nuclear industry which spluttered on until the choice of a Westinghouse PWR design for the Sizewell ‘B’ station in 1980. British nuclear planning through the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by the continuing imbroglio over reactor choice. Having suffered serious technical and economic set-backs with the design and construction of AGR reactors in the second reactor programme, and in the context of the oil crisis which had reinvigorated the nuclear option, the CEGB announced a huge new reactor49 programme in December 1973. The main significance of the reactor programme announcement from our viewpoint is that it caused the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) to take up the question of the environmental consequences of nuclear power. The sixth RCEP report produced the first full-blooded British investigation of questions other than reactor choice and the size of reactor programmes, and covered areas such as radwaste management, radiation protection, reactor safety, long-term nuclear planning, reactor siting and proliferation hazards. At the same time BNFL was seeking to establish a further hold within the international reprocessing market. The AEA had already moved in this direction by signing reprocessing contracts with several European countries to reprocess oxide fuels. A predicted expansion of the market for reprocessing services produced the second strand of the British fuel cycle evaluation—the Windscale Inquiry. The Flowers Report, Nuclear Power and the Environment, has gone down as a classic statement and marked an important turning point in the nuclear debate in Britain. The ‘Flowers criterion’ tried to set the target of a basic boundary of control around all radwaste types. Since publication, the report has been widely quoted to support a diverse range of arguments. Here I will discuss only those features which affect radwaste strategy. Flowers recommended that formal responsibility for setting out a radwaste management and disposal strategy should be given to the Department of the Environment. Before 1976 no such role had existed in government, and, by default, strategy had been made by the producers of waste themselves. Among these it was the UKAEA which had traditionally taken the lead. The upshot of the White Paper published by the incumbent Labour government50 was that for the period up until 1982 the DoE took a more active part in planning radioactive waste management. Partly this was

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through force of circumstance, since the lack of systematic planning in the previous period begun to affect the operability of the civil reactor programme. Research and development was taken over by the Department of the Environment. After review, research funding was substantially increased and work on land disposal begun under a joint EEC programme. A series of ‘systems studies’ were also started to identify and develop ‘optimal’ management and disposal schemes for the full diversity of NFC wastes. Implementation of such a strategy implied the ever greater intervention of DoE and MAFF (alongside the NII) in the design of new plant at nuclear sites. A regulatory shift was taking place, although it eventually stopped short of meeting the Flowers criterion. The report’s assessment of the control of discharges from nuclear sites endorsed the then current regulatory arrangements and principles. However, it did comment that ‘[the] arrangements appear somewhat fragmented…they lack focus’. In line with an earlier RCEP recommendation they suggested that the concept of a ‘best practicable environmental option’ (BPEO) be applied to assessing radwaste management choices. Although the first BPEO study was not published by the DoE until a decade later, the notion of applying a structured decision analysis on the whole life-cycle of a waste stream (production, storage, treatments, packaging, transport, disposal routes) became the technical aim of the DoE from 1979. BPEO is the technological manifestation of ‘as low as reasonably achievable’. It articulates a vision of a global, systematic technical solution to management and disposal which implies a deeply interventionist regulatory style; each step of the fuel cycle being designed to some definitive objective of safe disposal. In an era where sea and land disposal routes were still open, and where work on routes for other wastes was in hand this was still possible, and indeed BPEO was used to justify established disposal practices. BPEO also had a legitimatory role in policy. First, the whole range of management steps, from production to disposal, could be formally structured according to the two basic dimensions of radiological protection—protection of the operator and the public. This had several effects. It was a vehicle by which the DoE could argue for a greater role in enforcing changes in management practice particularly at Windscale. A broad master-plan could then be presented to the public as a strategy for implementation, and be sure of having more success by presenting itself as the ‘best…option’. Radwaste management at the Windscale site was also the subject of criticism from the Royal Commission: The Windscale plant deals routinely with highly radioactive and dangerous materials and…incidents…inevitably occur…. Nevertheless, it is important at such a plant that the highest standards of good

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housekeeping should be employed and we feel bound to say that we did not gain the impression that this was so at the time of our visit. 51 [The italics are mine.] This remark was about standards of waste storage and accounting at Windscale which eventually affected waste management at all nuclear sites. In particular, it allowed the regulating departments to argue for the development and implementation of treatments for wastes which had previously been stored raw, often under water. Treatment was regarded as good housekeeping because it immobilized the wastes, thereby increasing safety and reducing operator doses associated with waste storage. The 1977 White Paper also charged the Environment Department with ensuring ‘that the creation of wastes from nuclear activity is minimised’. Furthermore, the Commission claimed that it was ‘unable to discover any clearly formulated policy for the future disposal of this waste’. On the subject of overall regulatory control, the report recommended that: ‘responsibility for developing the best strategy for dealing with radioactive wastes should rest with the government’.52 The Commission argued that the government’s main objective for waste management should be the protection of the public and not ‘to offer the cheapest rates to BNFL’. This could be achieved by the formation of an organization (a Nuclear Waste Disposal Corporation, NWDC) to develop and manage disposal facilities. The organization was to be a statutory monopoly accountable to the government. An independent advisory committee would be set up to aid the government in planning and administering its task. These bodies would work under the premise that the problem of disposal should be resolved before a large reactor programme was undertaken. This recommendation was subsequently ignored, and nothing came of the NWDC, mainly due to Authority opposition, and its proposed role was later partially taken by Nirex. A Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) was set up in 1978, with a restricted function of advising the minister at the Department of the Environment. The government response to the Royal Commission accepted a more interventionist role for government in developing a strategy for radwaste management. Consequently the DoE was given new responsibilities: (i) to secure the programmed disposal of waste accumulated at nuclear sites; (ii) to ensure that there is adequate research and development on methods of disposal; and (iii) to secure the disposal of wastes in appropriate ways at appropriate times and in appropriate places. (The italics are mine.)

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No new powers were distributed to government departments and the overall result was to provide the impetus for a slow adjustment in the balance of regulatory authority within government. Flowers therefore does not represent a radical break with the past, but an opportunity for the relations between the nuclear industry and its regulators to be redefined. What was not recommended was a formal linkage between the licensing of new reactors to real advances towards disposal plans—as had been the intention of the Flowers criterion. As we have seen in the Swedish case, the results of adding this requirement to reactor licensing are not unambiguous, since agreement on an acceptable disposal technology is always far more than a decision about the adequacy of a technology through the formation of a technical consensus. It frequently involves a grand new political settlement embodied in new institutions and procedures for negotiation. The most significant effect of a ‘stipulation’ criterion is that it knits together an industrial and political effort to confronting the issues which obstruct the search for acceptable radwaste management and disposal policies. Only by bringing these issues to the front of the nuclear debate can they be resolved. The Windscale Inquiry: reprocessing interrogated The origin of the Windscale inquiry has been well documented elsewhere.53 Briefly, it stemmed from the unwillingness of Cumbria County Council to approve a planning application made by BNFL in mid-1976 for a major expansion of reprocessing and waste-management activities at the Windscale site. Their objections derived from conventional planning criteria, and the application was referred to the Environment Secretary, Peter Shore, for a decision on whether to ‘call in’ the application and thereby force a public inquiry. There was considerable delay in a decision being taken since, despite intense political pressure, government departments were split on the merits of such an inquiry. After a period of hesitation, the balance within the Cabinet was eventually tipped in favour of a full public inquiry by a failure at a radwaste storage facility at Windscale. A leak from a silo holding magnox fuel cladding had been discovered in early October 1976. There are two systemic aspects to this apparently chance event. First, it underscored the requirement for good housekeeping demanded in the Flowers Report. Second, it indicated the ambiguous position which the regulatory departments, in this case the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, held on operations at Windscale. Although deeply involved in auditing safety at the site, the Nuclear Inspectorate appeared to be ignorant of the October 1976 silo leak even after it had been discovered. These two elements of waste management—operational and regulatory control— were to prove important themes at the Windscale inquiry.

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The original BNFL proposal for a new Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP), included £40 million for ‘the development of a process for the vitrification of waste’.54 Once the public inquiry had been announced, the vitrification plant played a central role in BNFL’s case for THORP. An application for a vitrification facility was actually approved in March 1977 by the Cumbria County Council but not acted upon until 4 years later. A second application for planning permission was submitted by BNFL in March 1977, and the section dealing with the planned oxide-fuel reprocessing plant was called in by Peter Shore. The Windscale Inquiry was heard before Mr Justice Parker, and lasted for 100 days between June and November 1977. It was a landmark for the public debate about nuclear power in Britain. Two themes dominated the inquiry, and the resolution of both turned on arguments about radwaste policy and regulation. The first was the justification for reprocessing. Early on in the inquiry, Friends of the Earth (FoE) and the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) proposed extended storage of spent fuel as an alternative to THORP, although without rejecting the principle of reprocessing. They argued that no immediate need existed for the plutonium which would be separated at THORP, and that the plant was premature. BNFL responded with a range of contentions which are interesting to consider because they show how narrowly the question of whether to reprocess was defined in comparison with the almost contemporary discussions in Sweden and West Germany. The first peculiarity is that the need for reprocessing could not be justified in the classical manner, with reference to the fast-reactor future. The room for manoeuvre had been reduced both by a stock of separated plutonium sufficient for the still unordered commercial fast reactor (CFR1), and the Flowers Report’s distinctly cool assessment of the prospects of large-scale fast-reactor commercialization in the near future. Radwaste management therefore figured large in BNFL’s submissions to the Windscale Inquiry. They argued that: storage of stainless-steel-clad AGR fuel for the periods envisaged would not be acceptable;55 spent fuel would in any case need to be reprocessed since oxide-fuel pellets were prone to more rapid corrosion than glass; the extraction of plutonium from HLWs represented significant advantages for the long-term safety of radwaste disposal; and immediate reprocessing would obviate the need to develop extensive new spent-fuel storage facilities. Subsidiary justifications which were used included the following: resource savings through recycling of plutonium in thermal reactors; the dispersal of expertise should the project be delayed; and the perceived advantages of reprocessing capacities being located in nuclear-weapons states. Mixed-oxide use British reactors had in fact already been decided

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against in AEA studies. The supposed waste-management advantages of reprocessing therefore bore the full weight of the justification for reprocessing. The dispute over the technical feasibility of extended storage of AGR fuel under water led to further research into operational experience in the US and to an acceleration of fuel-pin tests, already being carried out at Harwell. This work yielded inconclusive results, and Parker chose to emphasize the need for further research. On the related question of the safety of the direct disposal of spent fuel, Judge Parker relied on the evidence given on behalf of the Windscale Appeal by the retired geologist, Professor Tolstoy. Parker concluded: The final effect of Professor Tolstoy’s evidence was to confirm that, as between disposal of spent fuel and solidified highly active waste the latter was preferred since it would involve the disposal of much less plutonium and be less vulnerable to leaching.’56 The second main strand of the objectors’ case concerned radiation protection of operators and the general public. This subject took up about half of the inquiry and marked the opening of a public debate which had been noted in the Flowers Report and has raged ever since. The scientific basis of the ICRP recommended-dose limits, their administration in the UK, the acceptability of levels of exposures to workers at the Windscale works, and the contamination of the environment around Windscale due to past discharges, have all featured in this debate over the last decade. These issues are related, and in posing questions about them a powerful establishment of science, government and industrial-military commitments has been confronted and unsettled. New research on cancer rates among operators at the US Department of Energy facility at Hanford was presented at the Windscale Inquiry in a paper by Mancuso, Stewart and Neale.57 The Mancuso Report concluded that current ICRP risk estimates for high-rate, low-dose radiation were inaccurate by a factor of 20. A dispute on the statistical adequacy of the Hanford evidence evolved, which was not fully resolved. More broadly, the significance of the worker-exposure debate, and another related to radioactive discharges from Windscale, was that assertions by the regulatory and advisory bodies concerned—principally the FRL, the NII and the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB)—were scrutinized in public for the first time. None of these organizations escaped the inquiry without censure, even from the benevolent pen of Judge Parker. Furthermore, although this was not reflected in Parker’s conclusions, submissions in relation to radiation protection and waste management tended to deepen rather than reduce the belief amongst many objectors and in the Press that the independence

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of bodies such as the ICRP and NRPB was questionable. In this sense, the gradual decay of institutional credibility which has fed the radioactive waste controversy in Britain may be seen to have begun at the Windscale Inquiry. And the radiological protection establishment has borne the brunt of this loss of faith. In sum, the Windscale Inquiry represents just one of a number of reevaluations of back-end policy which took place in Europe during the mid-1970s. As in the other cases, waste-management issues played a central part in the discussion. However, whereas alternatives to reprocessing were considered elsewhere, these were discounted as not feasible by the Inspector at Windscale. The root conclusion of the Inquiry—that reprocessing was necessary and desirable for Britain—was accepted by parliament almost without debate. Civil reprocessing has remained a distinctly undivisive issue in Britain to the present day, although the storm clouds are certainly now gathering. This is mainly because reprocessing was perceived to be a basic imperative by industry and government into the late 1980s, even though the justification for it was already somewhat tortuous in 1976. The new approach: high-level waste disposal to land As was shown above, the Atomic Energy Authority remained ambivalent about finding a land-disposal site for radwastes other than Drigg from the late 1950s. Almost by accident, as an adjunct to the British decision in 1975 to stay within the European Community (EC), the AEA’s attitude began to change when it was nominated as the body to represent British interests in a new EC initiative on high-level-waste disposal on land. The Community joint programme on geological research was designed to compete with the collaboration on sea disposal which had been negotiated by the OECD/Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). A new group, the Environmental Protection Unit (EPU) was created at Harwell in collaboration with the Institute of Geological Sciences (IGS). The unit was commissioned to draw up the British component of the programme concerned with crystalline rocks. Detailed geological surveys, including the drilling of boreholes, were to be included in this research. As a guide to this search, a set of general criteria for the land disposal of high-level wastes was published.58 During these early stages the project was firmly ‘science-driven’. It was to concentrate on groundwater-flow studies and the collection of data for future site characterization and selection programmes. Nevertheless, the ambiguities in purpose which were to prove the eventual downfall of the programme were already apparent. In justifying the need for site-specific research, Gray stated that: ‘No further activities would be meaningful without field studies designed to confirm that the generalised criteria are met in detail in a particular area.59 Whether these studies would ‘examine

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the feasibility of geological disposal of high-level wastes in the geological environment of the UK’, as called for by Flowers, or whether they represented the first step in an already activated site-selection process, became a moot point which persisted even after the whole programme had been officially abandoned in 1981.60 At the local public inquiries into the AEA’s applications to drill at sites in Scotland, England and Wales, objectors sought to exploit these confusions. On the evidence, however, it seems that the Authority had no interest in broadening out its programme into a formalized repository site-selection process; whereas the Institute of Geological Sciences unit actually carrying out the work grew more committed to land-disposal options. To accommodate this tension, the programme underwent ‘a change of emphasis. A much wider feasibility study was defined, aimed at building up a coherent and consistent view of the potential of various geological environments in the UK.’61 An initial set of three planning applications was submitted in January and February 1978. Due to the reorientation of the programme, a further six applications were announced in July 1979.62 Sites representing the full range of crystalline, argillaceous and evaporitic rock types were now included. Differences persisted and were underscored in 1980 when the IGS was made full contractor for geological research, leaving the AEA with only a subsidiary role. Early confusions in the goals of the research programmes meant that by the time the first public inquiry opened at the beginning of 1980, the research programme was already nearly 4 years old and a head of suspicion had built up in those areas where siting was a possibility. In spite of the lengthy consultations, which the AEA instigated with local councils at the locations earmarked for drilling surveys—regardless of continued assurances about the programme’s basic research pedigree—local opposition to the plans when they were announced was vigorous and well organized. The ‘foot in the door’ argument motivated much of this anxiety, and led to the recruitment of some influential voices to the opposition cause. The future Secretary of State for Scotland, George Younger, lent his support to groups protesting about the Loch Doon, Ayrshire, planning application in early 1978.63 By 1979, media attention on the drilling programme was recognized by the incoming Conservative government as a significant factor in planning for a sizeable new nuclear programme. Nevertheless, with the enthusiastic support of the Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine, the programme struggled on for a further 2 years. Fourteen sites were eventually chosen for more detailed investigation. But at only one site was planning approval given, permission at seven other sites being refused, while at other places decisions were never made. Under the Town and Country Planning Act the AEA appealed through the device of a local public inquiry. By the time Heseltine’s successor, Tom King, announced

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that the whole research programme was being ‘reoriented’ away from site-specific geological investigations towards desk and laboratory work in late 1981,64 limited surveying had been done at only one of the sites originally announced, Altnabraec. The whole programme had come to be seen by the Cabinet as a serious and needless political liability. Whatever its goal—of comparing disposal options or of finding a repository site— there was little commitment at the top of government to either strategy. Support for the IGS came from from those with something to gain from it—the DoE (working to the ‘Flowers criterion’), RWMAC,65 IGS and a small research community who had been contracted into the programme. Against this was ranged the embarrassing political fall-out from the exposure of policy muddle, and most of all the possibility of civil unrest at sites when the AEA attempted to begin investigations. Unlike Germany, the British state has never had the stomach to use force in defence of civil nuclear projects. To extricate the government from the drilling programme, the virtues of a policy of long-term interim storage (for at least 50 years) for vitrified high-level waste were emphasized. At the same time, intermediate-level wastes were made the priority of disposal policy. Technical justification for this change was based on two assertions. First, ‘as a result of research undertaken [so far]…, there is no evidence of any major scientific problems and the government has concluded that it is feasible to manage and dispose of all the wastes…in acceptable ways’.66 It was therefore decreed that the feasibility of land disposal had suddenly been established ‘in principle’, even though the government’s language remained tentative. A policy of interim storage would be pursued because research had suggested that the main remaining problems for HLW disposal were the uncertainties which heat generation introduced to repository-performance assessments. That this came to be regarded in Britain as a more serious issue than in other countries indicates how the ambivalence towards HLW disposal affected the evaluation of disposal schemes. Studies produced at Harwell in the 1970s assumed, on the basis of simple rock-temperature modelling, that 100 °C should be the limiting temperature for any HLW repository and, working backwards, concluded that this could be achieved only with a heat rating for each HARVEST canister of about 1 kW.67 There are various reasons why neither of these criteria are of crucial importance, but the major refutation of the position came later from the IGS itself: ‘There is at present no geochemical evidence to support the imposition of a 100 °C maximum temperature on a crystalline rock disposal system.’68 In fact this type of confusion about technical parameters seems to be endemic to British decision-making about radwaste management. Policy is held, in the political sphere, to be directed by technical judgements which provide a single ‘best’ solution which may then be implemented. But neither the requisite information, nor a

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professional consensus on ‘best’ disposal technologies or sites has ever been allowed to develop, and this the technicians ascribe to the cowardice of the politicians. This dichotomy has arisen because no framework exists to commit the political centre to politically costly management options, and because of the fundamental problems of matching the generic parameter assumptions used to order the whole management system to the peculiarities of a site. In all national systems, parameters which are prescribed early on in the planning process have come to haunt site-search programmes. The real world does not conform to, or cannot be shown to conform to, the theoretical models used by planners. Shifting parameters which have been embedded in an idealized system will inevitably lead to legitimate technical criticism of already-unpopular site investigations.69 A philosophy of the ‘best…site’ is the logical aspiration of management at a broad level, but at the specific level of actual sites the notion of perfect judgement proves to be not only unattainable, but unduly restrictive. The ideology of an ‘optimized’ management system (and thus of costbenefit analysis) persists because it serves a number of other functions. Post-Flowers, British governments have found it necessary to search for and justify ‘solutions’ to all aspects of radwaste management, if only conceptually, while at the same time defending established practice. Frequently it has been convenient to argue that such practices are the ‘best’ on radiological or economic grounds. Second, the government has argued for a relatively non-interventionist stance on policy-making in the 1980s; solutions will present themselves when necessary, preferably through the nuclear industry’s own endeavours. The main dynamic for this will, they believe, be the nuclear industry’s need to conform to the constraints of radiological protection within the ALARA framework. Third, the idea of a perfect system gives government the freedom to argue, when necessary, that new information justifies a change of course. There is no other, moderating, standard for decisionmaking. We can therefore characterize British policy-making as driven by an expedient conception of perfect information about radwaste systems, whereas in the FRG and Sweden policy has been driven by the need to meet legally-defined (therefore social) goals within a broader policy for the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle. The formation of Nirex By 1981, the outlines of a progressive land- and sea-disposal strategy for radwastes for the UK had been sketched out. It involved: (i) disposals of solid low-level wastes at Drigg until capacity was exhausted by about the late 1990s;

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(ii) gradually increased disposals to sea of low- and intermediate-level wastes, and plutonium-contaminated materials, depending on the availability of packaging facilities and the international political conditions; and (iii) bringing into operation deep land repositories for certain PCM streams70 and high-level waste by the first decade of the next century. As the magnitude of the intermediate waste streams became more apparent, and with the growing uncertainties surrounding the sea route, alternatives which included a larger component of land disposals were sought after. Again the origin of this development can be found in the Flowers Report, and once more the first systematic account of what the implications would be in terms of different land-disposal options can be found in the DoE’s studies of the period.71 These studies envisaged a complementary range of disposal routes— including five land-based and two sea-based—which were to be brought into operation over a period of about 20 years. The preliminary justification for this ambitious strategy was based on the matching of activities and longevities of all the radwaste streams arising in Britain to disposal environments. It was within this grand plan of ‘systems studies’ that the search for land-disposal sites was organized between 1982 and 1986. On 16 December 1981, Tom King, the Minister for Local Government and Environmental Services, announced to the House of Commons that in the light of a review of the research programme on high-level waste disposal, the programme of exploratory research drillings would be discontinued. A decision on disposal of high-level wastes (which route and where) was to be postponed for ‘a period of 50 years and possibly longer’. New priority was to be given to the early disposal of wastes with lower activities. Justification for this change of course employed a remark made in RWMAC’s report of the previous May.72 A new emphasis on intermediate wastes was welcomed almost everywhere in the nuclear industry and in government. It coincided with the Nuclear Inspectorate’s determination to enforce, for reasons of safety, the treatment and packaging of all raw waste streams which had previously been left in store at Sellafield and the reactor sites. The Department of the Environment, which had inherited the AEA’s drilling programme, felt by the end of 1981 that an intermediate-level-waste disposal scheme could serve as a practical demonstration of the new systematic approach which it had fostered. The AEA for its part had grown increasingly weary of the public trials it had had to endure and the inconsistent backing which it was receiving from government. The December 1981 announcement came after the discussion in government and industry about the organization of radwaste management

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in Britain had been revived, especially in relation to the formation of a disposal agency as Flowers had recommended. In 1979 the Expert Group reviewing the 1959 Key Report had rejected the need for a new organization, but by 1981 the DoE was indicating that change would be necessary, with the waste producers themselves being given primary responsibility for disposal. A Tory government committed to rolling back the state could not countenance the creation of a new quango, and preferred a private-sector solution. Out of informal pressures emerged a CEGB proposal for a new directorate, jointly funded by the main radwaste producers. This organization’s function would be to review, formulate and monitor policies for disposal and long-term storage of solid radwastes on behalf of BNFL and the generating boards. The proposal was taken up by a government searching for direction after abandoning the drilling programme. It was agreed that an industry-funded agency, formally independent from the AEA, should be set up. Executive and regulatory authority was to be divided between the state and the industry in the following way: (i)

(ii)

the regulators would ensure that standards were maintained while Environment ministers would remain responsible for the overall strategy of waste management; and implementation of strategy, in particular through the provision of treatment and disposal facilities would fall to the nuclear industry and generating boards.

How these roles were to be articulated was not clearly defined. The split between strategy-making and implementation, and the relationship between the two (i.e. between the state and Nirex), were to be negotiated, while proposals for facilities were made.73 On an institutional level, the formation of Nirex must be seen as an attempt by the industry, and the AEA in particular, to wrest back control over policy-making for waste management and disposal which it had effectively lost in 1977. The end of the sea dumping The lead which the CEGB took in proposing the organization which became Nirex is related to a rising concern about the availability of the sea-dumping route for ion exchange and other wastes from reactors which it is now under pressure to treat and dispose. This new enthusiasm for waste management arose from a mix of reasons. First, the NII had encouraged the disposal of batches of plutoniumcontaminated sludges in store at the Hinkley Point ‘A’ and Trawsfynydd stations. Second, new storage facilities for operational wastes were not economically justified at many of the older stations, where they would

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possibly only be in service for a decade before decommissioning. Third, the main operational constraint on increasing sea disposals to eliminate the backlog of stored wastes was the lack of available treatment and packaging capacity. In the absence of a positive government statement that they would support a continuation of the sea dumping, and due to the uncertainties which hung over it, the generating boards were unwilling to make investments in treatment and packaging processes which might later prove to be unsuitable for land disposal of wastes. Last, Harwell had announced its withdrawal from major packaging activities on behalf of other waste producers. This was in marked contrast to the expansion of waste treatment services at nuclear-research centres across Europe during this same period. It had become obvious from the first comprehensive studies on disposal options that under present rates of dumping all those wastes in store which were unsuitable for Drigg, and were not classified as high-level wastes, could not be disposed of, or even be much reduced. The constraints on expanding sea-disposal rates were both technical and political. Under the London Dumping Convention (LDC) a limit on annual dumping mass had been set which could only be conveniently met by imposing ‘specific activity’ limits for sea disposals.74 Operationally, the most significant constraint introduced by these standards was the alpha-emitter limit.75 This was set at about 1,000 curies per year (alpha) and was, ‘very much a function of past practice, a continuation of which, with minor escalation, [would] not meet the arisings of intermediate-level wastes’.76 A limit of 2,000 curies per year (alpha) had previously been recommended by the NEA, but as a government report of July 1979 stated: Representatives of the other NEA dumping countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) have indicated informally that they would be most unhappy if the UK exceeded this level, and it must be regarded at the present time as the limit of international acceptability. In view of this it would, ‘be necessary to adopt a flexible approach whereby the authorising departments make a judgement about the prevailing climate of international opinion and set the annual limit on the amount of waste to be dumped accordingly’.77 Continuous dumping at the 2,000 curie limit would not account for the inventory of accumulated intermediate-level wastes and PCMs at British nuclear installations. To compensate, the case was sometimes made for a steady increase (approximately 10 per cent per year) from a rate of about 2,000 curies78 into the late 1980s. This more bullish approach was felt by some in the nuclear industry to be politically too risky. The UK was already by far the dominant user of the sea route,79 and to push for an increase in

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operations was anticipated to be damaging for the country in international discussions. With a block on sea dumping, the need for new land-disposal facilities had become clear to all parts of the industry. They remained committed to the sea route, and saw the two options as complementary rather than exclusive. Maximum use would be made of the sea route for plutoniumcontaminated wastes, and it was even recommended in 1979 that Britain should withdraw from the OECD Multilateral Consultation and Surveillance Mechanism if ‘wholly unreasonable requirements’ were adopted within the mechanism. From 1979 on, Greenpeace, through a campaign of harrassment, was instrumental in bringing the sea-dumping operation to the attention of the public. Their campaign reinforced the pressure being brought to bear on the British government in the key international forum, the LDC. In 1982 Greenpeace successfully forced a suspension of the year’s dumping campaign, and by the following year a resolution was passed at the LDC calling for a voluntary 2-year moratorium on sea dumping of radwastes pending the results of a scientific review on the safety of sea dumping. The first impulse of the British government was to ignore the resolution, and plans were made for a dumping operation during late summer. It argued that the credibility of the LDC depended on the consistent application of sound scientific opinion, and that on these grounds a moratorium was unwarranted. This time, preparations for the dump were blocked when the National Union of Seamen (NUS) general council voted in June 1983 that its members would boycott the handling of radwastes. The NUS general secretary, Jim Slater, took great personal interest in this issue, and the change of the union’s policy reflected the increasingly negative attitude of the Trades Union Congress towards nuclear power. The 1983 disposal campaign was to have been made up of material mainly from Amersham International which had been privatized in the previous year. This material had been transferred to Harwell for packaging and was left standing in an uncovered storage area which was soon full. Restrictions on storage capacities were also anticipated at MoD sites. The question of how to dispose of plutonium-contaminated waste from Aldermaston and the naval dockyards had already caused a dispute between MAFF and the MoD before the seamen’s action. For BNFL and the generating boards there were no immediately serious operational impacts of the cessation of dumping. The long period of uncertainty over the future of the sea route, and the recognition from about 1980 on that sea dumping would in any case never be sufficient to dispose of the backlog of intermediate wastes in store, had allowed these organizations to retrench, and investigate alternative processing, packaging and storage methods.

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In an attempt to defuse opposition to sea dumping, the government, in consultation with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), set up an ad hoc scientific review body on the operation. This was one of the few times that the Thatcher government sought actively to involve the union movement in the achievement of consensus. The review, chaired by Professor F.G.T. Holliday, reported in late 1984 with inconclusive recommendations.80 Despite concurrence with almost all other studies that there was no scientific evidence that sea disposals of radwastes were hazardous, the panel considered it ‘untimely’ to recommence dumping operations immediately. Instead, it recommended that the government should await the then pending results of further reviews by the IAEA, LDC and NEA. The Holliday Report did propose that, in the future, sea disposals should be justified within a framework which allowed comparison of sea disposal with land-based alternatives. The effect of the Holliday Report was to give the government some latitude. Sea disposals had been declared technically sound according to present knowledge, so that a balancing of sea and land options could now be more directly written into strategy development. Such a recommendation gave new life to the flagging systems studies which had been embarked upon at the DoE in 1979. In response to the Holliday Report, and using the concepts which had first been proposed in the Flowers Report, the DoE now prepared a report on ‘best practicable environmental options’81 which harked back to the systematic optimizing aspirations of the department’s pre-Nirex search for a co-ordinated, national, disposal strategy for radwastes. Radwaste management at Windscale/Sellafield post-Flowers Disposals of radwastes in all countries have historically involved diverse approaches—disposals to sea, air and land, packaged or raw, under controlled conditions or outside special control regimes. What distinguishes British practice is that it has explicitly or tacitly relied far more heavily on the sea as a disposal route, both for liquid discharges and for solid and sludge packaged wastes. For reasons of convenience and the traditional distribution of ministerial authority, the regulation of liquid and solid wastes was separated. This dual legacy—a dependence on sea disposals and the separation of regulatory powers—was reflected in the schizophrenic character which radwaste-management planning took on after the publication of the Flowers Report in 1976. One limb of policy thinking became concerned with the development of land-disposal options, the other with defending and justifying disposals to sea. Because they were thought of as equally suitable alternatives for a wide range of waste streams by industry and the regulator with most technical competence (MAFF), their balancing was determined by opportunism and political convenience.

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Although attempts were made during the early 1980s to develop a disposal strategy which incorporated both options within a properly constituted decision-making system, no unitary policy could ever be satisfactorily established. This was not only because the technically-defined management choices to British policy-makers were far larger than elsewhere, but also because it was continually necessary to react to threats to already-operating disposal practices. The closure of the sea-dumping option by the seamen’s action of 1983 is one threat which was realized. Liquid discharges to the sea from the Windscale site (from 1981 on known as Sellafield) were similarly under progressive pressure through the period following the Flowers Report. Once more, the reasons for this are a complex enmeshing of the institutionally structured and the accidental. In many ways they demonstrate most clearly the uncoordinated multiplicity of radwaste-disposal strategy and practice in Britain. Radioactive discharges from Sellafield have been one of the main determining factors of the regulation of radwastes in the UK since the early 1950s. We showed above that the operational factors which have most perceptibly set the bounds of British waste management practice— the storage under water of irradiated Magnox fuel and the management of liquid wastes from reprocessing operations at Sellafield—are both historically linked to levels of liquid radioactive discharges from the site. This unique centralization of operational pressures conditioned in an important way the underlying management philosophy of radwaste management. It created the central dilemma which later came to be known by the slogans ‘dilute and disperse’ and ‘containment’, and set down the infrastructural, economic and institutional terms by which these two objectives were resolved. When the balance of containment and dispersal came to be questioned, it was the exigency of continued reprocessing due to Magnox spent-fuel corrosion which reinforced the inertia of commitments which determined management practices. The whole fuel cycle was characterized by extreme inflexibility, which in turn made it brittle to forces of change. Sellafield’s discharges can be said to have seeped into the whole gestalt of British radwaste management and regulation. Although the Flowers Report said very little about discharges, the DoE became increasingly insistent from 1978 onwards about the need for a ‘fall-back’ option for reducing radiocaesium discharges in a more effective way than the zeolite ponds which had been pressed into service in 1976. The ion-exchange facility, SIXEP, was to be attached to the new spentfuel storage and handling plant (FHP)82 being constructed in conjunction with THORP, but would also filter water from the older Magnox fuelstorage ponds in B30. In the event, the plant did not begin operation until late in 1985 due to a set of delays caused mainly by the low priority which the plant had been afforded up until late 1983.

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Two events galvanized the simmering debate about the health effects of the Sellafield discharges. This led in turn not only to a recasting of the balance of ‘dilute and disperse’ and ‘containment’ within management practice, but also to a transformation in the institutional relations of radioactive discharge regulation and an intensified political sensitivity of radwaste issues in Whitehall. These consequences point to several features of the radwaste situation in Britain during the early 1980s. First, public opinion had become an increasingly important, although not determining, factor in decision-making. Second, the lack of a co-ordinated radwaste policy had created institutional imbalances and tensions which could only be worked out when it was perceived at the highest levels of government that a demonstrably strengthened regulatory stance vis-à-vis the nuclear industry was politically necessary. Third, there were good grounds to believe that regulations applied over the previous 30 years would now be regarded as unacceptable in terms of the hazards they produced for local populations. In this sense the scientific basis of radiological protection in Britain, which had been called into question at the Windscale Inquiry, now suffered a new and more wounding assault. On 1 November 1983, Independent Television (ITV) broadcast an investigation into increased levels of child cancer which had been discovered on the West Cumbrian coast by a television researcher working on a documentary about cancer rates among workers at Sellafield.83 By reinterpreting epidemiological evidence, the programme suggested that a link might exist between discharges from Windscale during the 1950s and the excess child cancers it had discovered. Within 24 hours the government had responded to the programme by setting up a committee of inquiry under the chairmanship of the eminent medical scientist, Sir Douglas Black. The Environment Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, also restated his department’s policy, admitting obliquely to the difficulties it had had in forcing change on BNFL: It has for some time been the aim of the authorising departments to reduce the discharges of the most significant substances…. We will be considering in the light of technological developments whether yet further reductions should be sought. He also promised a reduction of alpha discharges to 200 curies by 1985, down from the 6,000 curies per year limit then in force.84 Just a week after the Black Committee had been convened, a serious accidental discharge of radioactivity occurred at Sellafield which would seriously undermine the impact of the committee’s report. The incident had been the result of an earlier operational error in the management of washings from the decontamination of reprocessing line vessels in B205 during a routine shut-down. This had precipitated a number of discharges

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of active liquids and suspended solids by BNFL over a period of a week while the initial error was dealt with.85 One such discharge containing high levels of activity coincided with a well-publicized attempt by Greenpeace to block Sellafield’s marine discharge outlet. Several members of the Greenpeace party were contaminated. Later discharges of washings containing solvents and crud86 formed a slick just off Sellafield on 18 November which, due to the calm sea conditions, was washed ashore. After an initial notice to stay off a small section of beach in mid-November, the DoE advised the public on 7 December to avoid ‘unnecessary use’ of a 12-mile stretch of beach near the Sellafield plant. BNFL cleared debris from the beaches affected, but the government’s advice to stay off them remained in place until well into the following summer. The manner of the discovery of this accident, and its widespread polluting effects, caused the November 1983 beach incident to become a watershed for regulatory and waste-management practice. In London, news of the incident was seized upon by the DoE as an opportunity to harden discharge regulations and to push for a more interventionist role in the licensing of nuclear plant. It was felt that the reassurance which might have been provided by the Black Report had been negated by the industry’s own incompetence, and that new initiatives on discharge reduction were now politically necessary. Given that the operations at Sellafield were vital to the interests of civil and military nuclear programmes, it was necessary to bolster its regulatory credibility again. In due course, a report on the incident by the DoE’s Radiochemicals Inspectorate was lodged with the Director of Public Prosecutions, for him to examine the possibility of prosecuting BNFL under the Radioactive Substances Act. Additionally, a police investigation was launched in January 1984. It turned out that BNFL had not in fact contravened any of the limits set in the discharge authorization for the site, and could claim that the incident did not constitute a breach of ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ (ALARA) conditions. The company was nevertheless eventually found guilty of failing to meet the ALARA criterion, together with a number of subsidiary charges, and was fined a nominal sum. Chief witness against the company had been the Radiochemical Inspectorate, symbolizing the DoE’s hardened attitude towards the authorization of discharges from the Sellafield site. The Carlisle Crown Court case caused deep embarrassment for both BNFL and the government. Partly because of the frustrations of a prosecution which had demonstrated its relative powerlessness, the DoE began searching for a new criterion for authorization which could produce a progressive reduction of discharges. The Department now sought to impose discharge limits which allowed BNFL much less room for deviations from short-term operational norms (i.e. according to what was

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technologically possible, rather than limits which were set according to the environmental potential for radioactivity). This was politically necessary because Jenkin had found it hard to defend discharges from Sellafield which were some hundred-fold higher than those at the only comparable facility, La Hague in France.87 One means of achieving this was by hurriedly subscribing to the ‘best available technology’ (BAT) criterion,88 which had been proposed for radwaste discharges by the Nordic group at the Stockholm meeting of the Paris Convention in June 1984.89 This criterion was later rewritten in discharge authorizations as the ‘best practicable means’ (BPM) to conform with more traditional pollution-control principles.90 In that same month the DoE’s ‘National Strategy’ document, submitted to the Sizewell ‘B’ inquiry contained a commitment to reduce discharges to ‘as near zero as possible’. In December the Environment Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, made a further announcement in parliament on Sellafield discharges, this time setting discharge targets for 1995 and 2000, the first matching La Hague, the second complying with the BAT criterion. All these statements show a gradual tightening of the government’s public position over sea discharges from Sellafield and with it a radical re-interpretation of the ALARA criterion, principally due to the more forceful role played by the Environment Department. Its intervention makes apparent the malleability of all the concepts—ALARA, ALARP (‘as low as reasonably practicable’), ALATA (‘as low as technically achievable’), BAT, BPM91—which have been used to frame and justify British waste-management practice. Although they sound dispassionate and neutral, they represent the institutionally embedded attitude towards radwaste management. This institutional regime is constituted by a number of actors—BNFL, NII, MAFF and DoE—executing a number of engineering studies for alternative modes of waste management; ranking these options according to certain criteria, such as lowest cost and radiological burden; and then setting design and operating limits on the plant to be constructed. A large number of different types of decision therefore influence the design of a new plant, concerned at one extreme with detailed engineering problems and at the other with more general perceptions, at a ministerial level, of what level of discharge would be politically defensible. Clearly all of these actions are mutually dependent, and in practice the options which are acceptable to all sides will be relatively limited for this reason. Change can only come about when there is a shift of power between the institutions involved in the design and licensing process. The events of November 1983 are significant because they precipitated such a variation in the balance of power, if only temporarily. The basic discretionary principle of regulation in discharge authorizations was maintained (DoE and MAFF should decide with the operator what level of discharges are acceptable at each site), but now it

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took on two new dimensions. First, it was to include the provision for continuing and enforceable improvements in technology. Second, because reduced discharges implied that increased volumes of wastes would be retained at nuclear sites (in the form of ion exchange resins, solvents and sludges), there were consequences for the development of new waste treatments which had to be considered systematically. The shift in priorities had forced a more explicit elision between regulation principles and strategy development, and it is in this sense that the beach incident had wider implications for radwaste policy generally. UK Nirex and the embrittlement of disposal policy The ‘broad strategy’ for UK radwaste disposal post-1981 consisted of three options: shallow land burial (Land 2); deep land burial (Land 3); and sea dumping, for which provisional activity limits had been set.92 Sites for the two land-disposal facilities were announced by Patrick Jenkin in October 1983, about 1 month after the NUS had blocked that year’s proposed sea dump. They were a worked-out anhydrite mine owned by ICI at Billingham in Cleveland (Land 3) and the site of a storage depot owned by the CEGB at Elstow in Bedfordshire (Land 2). The announcement came after acute public anxiety had already been aroused in both areas, and quickly led to popular protest similiar to that experienced by the then stymied high-level-waste drilling programme. Petitions were signed, actions planned, but by early 1984 the Billingham proposal had been dealt a severe blow when, due to local trade-union pressure, ICI reversed its earlier support for the proposed repository and stated publically in March that it was opposed to the plan. From then on work on the site was effectively ended. The strategy of picking only two sites, while arguing that both repository types were required by a comprehensive disposal strategy, was a risky path for Nirex to follow. Although the site-search programme was ostensibly different from the AEA’s of 1976 to 1981, since in this case all parties agreed that the objective was to construct repositories, the earlier experience had clearly affected the industry’s judgement of how best to approach the problem of site identification and characterization. By naming only two sites it was possible to avoid a spread of effort on planning procedures and inquiries, but at a cost for the whole programme. It became more difficult to argue that adequate sites had been chosen without having conducted wider geological investigations at more sites. To overcome some of these blockages, a formal assessment procedure for land-disposal sites was published jointly with the Billingham/ Elstow announcement,93 and it was stressed that no final decision had been made on the choice of sites. The nature of the planning procedure to be invoked in either case was, however, left more open. At first it was announced that there would be

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two planning inquiries at each site, the first to establish a site’s suitability, the second dealing with the disposal of radioactive wastes themselves. The viability of this process was thwarted by the ICI statement. No real further progress was made until February 1986 when the second Nirex programme was announced. This new programme contained a further redefinition of the objectives of Nirex and government policy. There was to be a change in the site-choice procedure which would now include at least three different possible locations, but the Land 3 repository type which would have held alpha-emitting wastes was now dropped in favour of just a single, shallow land repository which would hold lowlevel wastes and ‘short-lived’ intermediate-level wastes. Moreover, a different planning process would be followed. Instead of a multiplicity of public inquiries, the government would use a Special Development Order (SDO) laid before parliament to authorize the first, geological investigation, stage of the site-choice procedure. Only one public inquiry would now be held at each site to assess the results of this survey work, and the published inspectors’ reports would be used by Nirex in the final choice. The sites involved in this new search process were not announced until late February. They were Fulbeck, Killing-holme, Bradwell and Elstow, all situated in central and eastern England; and each had a sitting Tory member of parliament, two being government ministers. During the previous month the Environment Committee of the House of Commons published a pithy criticism of government radwaste policy,94 which included a recommendation that near-surface disposal facilities only be designated for low-level wastes. The committee also proposed that to overcome public suspicion, the nuclear industry should embrace ‘Rolls-Royce’ solutions to the management and disposal of its wastes. In the face of mounting pressure being brought to bear in private and public, and on the advice of RWMAC, the government announced in early May 1986 that no ILWs would be emplaced at the new Nirex shallow burial site. It was argued that the decision had not been made for technical reasons but because a ‘gap’ existed between scientific and public perceptions of risks associated with such a facility. Such a claim contrasts sharply with the argument used by the government in the LDC and elsewhere that technical criteria alone should inform waste-management decisions. It also points to the confusion which existed in government circles about how to formulate a disposal policy during this period, and to the contradictory effects of a purely managerialist orientation to policy. The government’s response to the Environment Committee’s report came in the form of a White Paper which argued that there was still a need for a deep disposal facility, but that this would not be available for at least another decade. In saying this, Nirex’s function had been turned upside down. Low-level waste disposal now become the priority, while

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decisions on intermediate- and high-level wastes were deferred. Planning for disposal had reverted to a position closely resembling the pre-1976 position, although now with the loss of the sea route. From a previous position where early disposal of intermediate wastes was regarded as of first importance, at least by the CEGB, the industry was now arguing in unison that: ‘there is no overwhelming technical, operational or economic argument in favour of early disposal’.95 According to this account, the industry had never concurred with the sense of urgency which the Flowers Report had injected into policymaking in government.96 Equally, it was argued that apart from advising the government that disposals take place over longer time periods, the industry itself had no authority to decide on disposal strategy. That was a matter for political will. Nevertheless, there are clearly economic, operational and safety penalties which arise out of uncertainties in disposal strategy, not only in having to provide new storage capacities, but also in terms of decisions on treatments and packaging. The change in the industry’s position must therefore also be seen as arising out of new conditions which were perceived as reducing such operational uncertainties. The first of these was the dramatic reduction in the volume of waste arisings at CEGB sites from about 1982. Concomitantly there had been a progressive fall from 1980 in the volumes of waste disposed of to Drigg and a projected extension of its life. Restrictions on previously available disposal routes and the rising costs of disposals to Drigg had forced major waste producers to reduce arisings by sorting, compaction or incineration. Second, the 1982 sea dump had been devoted to CEGB wastes so that its most pressing backlogs had been cleared. Third, innovations in at-reactor treatments were coming into operation. At Trawsfynydd an ion-exchange resin-solidification plant started processing material in 1985, and planning was begun for a pilot plant to process Magnox debris at Dungeness A. Conditioning was also moving on apace at Sellafield. Decisions were made on two encapsulation plants using cement as the matrix for fuel hull debris and other intermediate-level-wastes. Further, a preliminary decision had been made on a treatment facility for shredding, sorting and packaging alpha-contaminated wastes. The final coup de grace to Nirex’s first series of proposals was played out some 6 weeks before the 1987 general election. It was announced by Nicholas Ridley, the Environment minister, that Nirex would not be proceeding with the site investigations for the LLW near-surface facility. Of all the decisions made up until this point, this one was most blatantly concerned with short-term political gain. The official version of events which led up to the cancellation is that a leak to the Press of an unsolicited exchange of letters about the costs of different disposal options between the chairman of UK Nirex, John Baker, and the Environment Secretary,

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Nicholas Ridley, forced a change of policy. The letter purported to show that the marginal costs of LLW disposal in a deep repository constructed for ILWs would be only marginally greater than the cost of shallow burial. Baker therefore proposed the third major revision of Nirex strategy since 1982: I consider we should now contemplate switching Nirex efforts away from the…work on the four shallow sites and concentrate on the development of options for the deep disposal of intermediate-level wastes with the additional intention to piggy-back low-level wastes into the same facility.97 In fact Nirex had conspired to bring about the demise of the shallowburial programme. Cost figures for shallow and deep repositories were produced, even though detailed engineering drawings or costings were not yet available for the shallow repositories, and while the four site surveys were still continuing. Not even a conceptual design yet existed for the deep repository. The leak of the Baker letter was from Ridley’s own department to the Daily Telegraph. This tawdry affair again displays the wanton expediency with which radwaste policy has been treated by British governments. It transpired that the whole Nirex disposal strategy had been in jeopardy since the abandonment of the Billingham scheme in early 1985. With the February 1986 redesignation of the shallow land repository to take only low-level wastes, the remaining logic for the programme was cut away. New research, completed as part of the DoE’s BPEO work, showed that the annual disposal capacity for an engineered trench would be too small to make a real impact on the inventory of low-level wastes.98 The engineered trench could never have been an option suitable for bulky low-level wastes, but would act only as a substitute for many of the less voluminous waste types otherwise disposed of at sea. Without a new shallow land-burial site taking low-level wastes, the costs in a system having only a trench facility would be dominated by the costs of storage of more highly active wastes. The differences for system costs, should a deep disposal route for intermediate wastes not be available until the year 2030, were estimated at £450–800 million. This compared with a total cost for non-high-level waste disposal ranging from £800–2,100 million.99 Extremely significant savings on storage costs would therefore be made by reverting to a strategy of early deep disposal of ILWs. All these factors, taken together with the rising costs of the engineered trench option and the acute political pressure of the moment, meant that Nirex’s third programme had to be jettisoned. Once more the reasons for these developments run deep. In retrospect one can see that the withdrawal of the Billingham proposal in March 1984 already spelled

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the demise of the Nirex programme. The critical facility was a land repository for intermediate wastes. Because of the complexity of the whole system, the tenuous position of the DoE within it, and the continuing lack of systematic assessment, this was not fully realized until it was already too late. The emerging consensus on deferring radwaste disposal The government announcement of 1 May 1987 on the Nirex site-search programme was the inevitable culmination of the government’s lack of conviction about radwaste disposal policy and changing economic and operational factors affecting waste disposal. Besides providing information, little remained of the strategy-making role for the DoE set out in the 1982 White Paper. A vacuum had consequently re-appeared in policymaking during the intervening years. On one side the nuclear industry was developing new waste-management approaches, in response to operational and regulatory pressures caused by the lack of disposal routes. Their principal criterion in searching for new disposal routes was cost. On the other stood a government without real commitment to a disposal policy, and which perceived few penalties to discarding policy positions. There is a crucial difference between policy evolution in Britain, and Sweden and West Germany. In the latter two countries weighty political commitments hold radwaste (and fuel cycle) policy in place and animate its implementation. In Whitehall radwaste disposal policies have no more than a nuisance value. Why have successive British governments been so ambivalent to a coherent disposal policy for radwastes? In large measure their disinterest is explained by the indifference shown by the nuclear industry towards the disposal of radwastes other than large-volume, low-level wastes. When the industry’s economic interest was identified with early disposal of ILWs, government policy followed suit. As we have shown, the relative urgency in addressing waste-management issues in the period 1977 to 1982 was not caused by the strictures of the Flowers Report alone, but by industrial concern over waste arisings and storage costs. The ease with which changes in policy and the closure of available disposal routes have been accommodated during the 1980s, and the proliferation of new justifications with each new policy, show that the strains these factors placed on waste producers (BNFL, CEGB, SSEB, and AEA) have been successfully negotiated, usually by finding specific, if temporary, solutions to problems as they arose. Besides continuing disposals at Drigg, and the fourth incarnation of the Nirex site-search programme announced in late 1987,100 a de facto policy of storage therefore now holds for all radwaste types. This may have some distinct advantages, but storage runs counter to the expressed

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aim of government policy, and negates the search for an integrated management strategy. In the pursuit of an ideal conception, safetymanagement options and disposal routes cannot be separated: The basic objective…is to ensure as far as possible that waste management procedures are optimised in respect of a total system, extending from the creation of wastes to their final disposal.101 [The italics are mine.] Ergo, each time a disposal strategy collapses, a reconsideration of treatment options must follow. These instabilities became especially acute in respect of the land/sea disposal choice, treatment requirements remaining less specified for the first than for the second, via the international review system. However, the ‘optimizing’ approach has not led to rigorous and robust decision-making, but to a constantly evolving management problem of high complexity with different waste streams becoming subject to disposal policies while others are ignored. We must ask what place there is in Britain for a strategy in the ‘pure’ sense in which it was envisaged in the early 1980s, and to which lip service is still paid. If an integrated, optimized strategy is in order then the question of who should have responsibility for formulating it, industry or government, remains open. Another question which arises out of the experience of the 1980s is about the appropriateness of the goal of disposal itself. Given that this may now be the main point of argument, how is the problem of urgency and timing of disposals to be resolved in the coming years? Although the propriety of the goal of disposal has been endorsed by all recent government and parliamentary statements on the subject, it has increasingly met with more systematic opposition from environmental, planning and local government organizations.102 Even the 1986 Environment Committee report proposed storage above ground of longer-lived wastes for about 100 years followed by a period of monitored storage in a repository for up to a further 100 years. With governments loath to take the political risks over disposal sites, and the industry prepared to provide long-term storage facilities if the need for them arises, there is no strong reason why storage should not continue to be the effective policy for the rest of the century. The Nirex site investigations at Sellafield and Dounreay seem to be less vulnerable to local opposition because both areas have long associations with the nuclear industry. National and international opposition will continue, however, with the Irish and Norwegian governments protesting against the two sites being used for radwaste disposal. Whether future governments will be able to stick with the programme as it is now planned, leading to a repository being opened by 2005, is almost impossible to say. Past

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experience suggests not. This may not matter to the main parties involved. An unholy alliance appears to exist between the industry and its opponents on the central question of disposal. Both sides are unwilling to court unpopularity by taking seriously the responsibility which radioactive wastes have left them. Planning for AGR and PWR fuel: the unravelling of the logic of civil reprocessing By the mid-1980s the logic of civil reprocessing in Britain, which had been sustained through the Windscale Inquiry, was coming unstuck. This development has a bearing on radwaste policy because, as we have seen, spent-fuel reprocessing has been a prime influence in shaping the operational and regulatory setting for waste management. Symptoms of the generating boards’ own disenchantment with reprocessing include the long negotiations over contracts to reprocess AGR fuel, the CEGB’s submission to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in 1981 and more recently the protracted talks over ‘fixed price’ contracts. The British generating boards were learning what the West German utilities had known in the early 1970s, and the Swedish utilities had recognized by 1976— that reprocessing could not be justified on commercial grounds and that the strategic arguments for it were not well founded. There are several reasons why these realizations penetrated policy-making rather late in Britain. Magnox reprocessing has always been a basic tenet of spent-fuel management in the UK. However, when the CEGB and SSEB came to planning for the AGR fuel cycle, the imperative of spent-fuel corrosion under water seemed less pressing.103 BNFL’s competence was also in question. Operational blockages at Windscale during the mid-1970s, and the Head End accident in 1973 which demonstrated the technical difficulty of reprocessing, showed to the generating boards the risks of their extreme dependency on BNFL. For Magnox fuel this dependency was viewed as inevitable, for AGR fuel there was felt to be room for manoeuvre. By the early 1980s, having gained some experience with AGR fuel storage and looking to experience abroad, the alternative of dry longterm storage seemed cheap and technically proven. Lastly, the costs of reprocessing continued to escalate rapidly and were expected to continue rising at least until the late 1990s. With decreasing uranium and enrichment prices, the back-end was taking up an ever larger proportion of total fuelcycle costs. For the CEGB, as with the German and Swedish utilities before them, these costs seemed unwarranted and avoidable. As the organization put together its case for the Size well ‘B’ (PWR) the commitment to reprocessing was once more critically examined. Events

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at Sellafield in 1983 confirmed the scepticism which had built up by demonstrating that reprocessing had become liability in the battle for public support of nuclear power. Matters were patched up in 1986 when the generating boards at last signed a large contract with BNFL. The reasons for the boards’ sudden capitulation remain obscure, but there appears to have been a desire on the part of government to staunch a public debate about fuel-cycle policy. A withdrawal of industry support for the THORP project was seen as too damaging: it threatened the lucrative Japanese contract, it was out of kilter with the Thatcher government’s enthusiasm for nuclear power, and would perhaps fatally weaken one of Britain’s major companies. For the electricity generating boards, the main consideration was assured spentfuel storage capacity without threatening possible future changes of opinion on reprocessing. Contracts were signed in late April 1986 and came accompanied by a series of statements on reprocessing policy. At the signing, Lord Marshall of the CEGB elaborated distinct approaches for each of the three British power-reactor types. Magnox fuel would continue to be reprocessed for logistical, power generation and safety reasons. This was essential in order to maintain electrical output. He also argued that public opinion was unlikely to accept the direct disposal of Magnox fuel. The proposal for PWR fuel was less specific. Sizewell ‘B’ would have storage capacity for spent-fuel discharges equivalent to 18 years’ operation. Extensions of wet or dry storage would be possible even after this period. Decisions on PWR fuel reprocessing were therefore being deferred. Advanced gas-cooled reactor fuel-reprocessing policy posed the most intriguing questions. Here a dual-track policy was described. First, contracts to reprocess 1,320 tonnes of spent AGR fuel were signed with BNFL (sufficient for about 7–8 years’ fuel discharges with reactors operating at expected reduced capacity). Second, a proposal was made for a spent-fuel dry store of unspecified size, to be constructed jointly by the CEGB and the SSEB. Marshall argued that due to remaining doubts about AGR fuel corrosion beyond 10 years’ wet storage, a dry store was the only technology with which to introduce the desired flexibility to decision-making in the future. The case of AGR fuel clearly demonstrates how far the CEGB had gone by 1986 in planning for relative independence from BNFL. Actually cutting the umbilical chord with Sellafield proved to be beyond the generating boards, and neither was it resolved during the frenetic bargaining which led to the withdrawal of the nuclear programme from the electricity privatization in late 1989. A final decision on a dry store, to be sited at Heysham, remains in limbo. Partly this is because there are no operational pressures on the new operators, Nuclear Electric, to decide. The early AGRs have, almost without exception, operated well below

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their design rating so that less spent fuel has been produced, some may even be closed down altogether before the end of the century. Furthermore, capacity at Sellafield to store AGR fuel (about 2,700 tonnes) is greater than the current contracts. Overall there is quite a lot of slack in the system. The nominal throughput at THORP has been increased, leaving open the option of further, cheaper reprocessing capacity when the need arises, perhaps in about 1997/8. It remains to be seen how the new ownership arrangements, the abandonment of the fast reactor programme, and the moratorium on new nuclear stations will affect reprocessing strategy. It seems obvious that the need to produce more plutonium in Britain has now evaporated altogether. A stockpile of some 30 tonnes is already in store at Sellafield, slowly degrading but without a likely use in sight. In this context it would be remarkable if the ties which bind reactor operation in Britain to the reprocessing lines at Sellafield do not begin to unravel. 5.5 Conclusion As in the Federal Republic of Germany, reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has had a determining influence on the development of radwaste management and disposal policy in the UK. Reprocessing inflicts five main costs on waste disposal policy. First, it adds significantly to the technical complexity of the wastemanagement task and enormously increases the volume of wastes to be dealt with. Storage of radioactive materials—Magnox fuel, swarf, and highly active liquors—has produced a series of unexpected technical problems with wide-ranging operational, economic and political effects. With the increasing tendency to condition and package radwastes at source, this problem of complexity may be partially resolved, but it has taken more than 30 years for this to happen. This problem of technical complexity and large volumes may not have mattered if management systems had been developed to cope with them comprehensively as they arose. Too often, in the drive for production and cost-cutting, such provisions were not made. Second, the differentiation of the basic unit of material, the irradiated fuel rod, into a variety of fractions of liquid, semi-liquid and solid form, presented clearer opportunities for employing a ‘dilute and disperse’ policy of radwaste disposal in the UK than in the other countries investigated here. Whatever its scientific grounds, the principle of ‘dilute and disperse’ has come to be seen in the 1980s as an irresponsible policy. More than anything else, it has sapped the credibility of the industry’s and government’s waste policies. Third, and closely linked to this, the regulatory framework for the control of radioactive wastes was historically founded on the distinction

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between discharges into the environment and the storage/burial of solid wastes. This introduced a severe weakness into the regulatory system, which were exploited once the policy of dispersion came under pressure. The tension between the roles of the DoE and the NII in this regard, have borne this out. As a consequence regulators were never able to speak with one voice, but always saw their own remits as contrary. Fourth, the power of the regulators has been deliberately weakened when compared with nuclear licensing authorities in Sweden and West Germany (at least post-1976). Neither the DoE nor the NII were allowed to function independently, but always within the rigid framework imposed by the imperative of reprocessing. While the DoE was given a nominal strategy-setting role, which promised to look at the management and disposal problems in a systematic way, it was never allowed to implement such a plan. The NII meanwhile was forced, from the early 1970s, into an extremely close relationship with operations at Windscale; the bottom line was that the reprocessing lines must stay open. Fifth, and bringing all these strands together, the strategic and commercial interest of successive British governments in protecting reprocessing from serious challenge has meant that the back-end of the nuclear-fuel cycle has never been open to full parliamentary or public scrutiny. In Germany and Sweden, radwaste policy only became truly dynamic when a legal linkage was established between reactor licensing and back-end policy. Such a linkage has not been made in Britain, and the only principles which now motivate decision-making are the need to strip radwaste of its newsworthiness and the need to find cost-effective measures. This logical cul-de-sac has produced a situation where long-term storage is now seen as politically and economically the most desirable option. There is, therefore, a paradox at the centre of radwaste policy in Britain. Although the regulatory regime is highly centralized, there has never been any firm political base for management policy. Because of this, resistance to radwaste disposal planning and practice at the margins—protesters at the public inquiries in 1980, the crew of the Atlantic Fisher, or activists in Greenpeace boats—has generally been successful. Nirex is now in its fourth incarnation and looks likely to be successful in its latest project only if the geology below Sellafield proves not to be completely unsuitable as a site for a deep repository. In the end it is the ambivalence of British governments to the proper role of the state in developing disposal options which has been the main cause of the current impasse. The position of the present government appears to be that its role should be held at the minimum of the oversight of site licensing, that the industry itself should be left to plan for and justify its own storage or disposal options to general and local publics. The government feels that policy-making should be left to the producers of wastes.

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This is a position which could still be conveniently held preprivatization. Although nuclear power and its fuel cycle is to remain in public hands, the debate and revelations about costs of 1988 and 1989 are certain to have some effect. The future of reprocessing seems less sure, and with no nuclear programme to defend, the regulators may find it easier to take a stronger position in their dealings with the industry. Waste management will also be progressively overtaken by the demands of civil and military decommissioning, although there is now talk of extending the lifetimes of the older Magnox stations. Decommissioning will sooner or later, depending on how fast old installations are taken down, add greatly to the arisings of radwaste in Britain. The present relative surfeit of storage space will then become a serious shortage, and questions about the sustainability of a storage strategy will come to the fore. Just as the costs of decommissioning have been the nemesis of nuclear privatization, so its waste-management aspects may eventually force commitments which have been so absent in Britain in the past. Another key change would be the winding down of civil reprocessing, and the removal of its associated inhibitions to a broad-based and durable policy on disposal. Notes and references 1 Figures as at 1st January 1986 (see HMSO/RWMAC, Eighth Annual Report, pp. 78 and 81). 2 The site licence is an administrative measure, setting out: conditions for radiation protection and monitoring; the design, construction, installation, operation, modification and maintenance of plant at the site; emergency measures; the control of discharges; and the handling, treatment and disposal of nuclear material on or from the site. Licences are awarded under an ‘operator demonstrates safety’ principle within a closed consultation process. Unlike licensing procedures in other countries, safety assessments are not published. 3 The NII became part of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the Department of Employment (DEmp) in 1975. Before that it was attached to the Ministry of Power, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Trade and Industry (1971–5). 4 Nuclear Installations Act, 1965; Section 1(1)b (iii) and Section 7(1)b (ii). 5 These two departments are known as ‘authorizing departments’. 6 There are several further elements of British law with force in this area. They include: the Radiological Protection Act, 1970 under which the National Radiological Protection Board was created, NRPB provides government departments and others with advice on radiological protection standards; the Control of Pollution Act, 1974 which empowers local authorities to acquire information about aerial discharges; the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974 which set out an ALARP principle for health and safety at premises using hazardous substances; the Dumping at Sea Act, 1974 by which Britain entered the London Dumping Convention; and the Food and Environmental Protection Act, 1985 which introduced new procedures for licensing sea-dumping operations.

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7 Sea disposals were covered under a number of international agreements and mechanisms. Up until August 1975 sea disposals were not formally regulated. Dumping of wastes was carried out by the UKAEA and Ministry of Defence under an informal arrangement with the MAFF. In 1967 joint dumping of wastes from five European countries was co-ordinated by the European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA), based on the British operation. In 1975 the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and other Matter (the London Dumping Convention, LDC) came into force. The Convention set in place a non-binding international regulatory machinery for sea disposals, designating the IAEA as the competent body for defining which wastes would be prohibited for sea dumping. The LDC machinery was supplemented in 1977 by the Nuclear Energy Agency’s (OECD/NEA) Multilateral Consultation and Surveillance Mechanism for the Sea Dumping of Radioactive Waste, in order to standardize practices and procedures for sea disposals from member states. This regulatory apparatus has been in abeyance since 1983. 8 For this account I have relied in large part on Margeret Go wing’s (1974) study, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952. 9 The last Magnox station, Wylfa (ordered 1963, commissioned 1971) was not constructed with wet, spent-fuel stores. Dry, gas-cooled (three carbon dioxidecooled with two air-cooled stores for lower heat-rating fuel added later) silos were installed instead. 10 The Independent, 9.11.88, p. 5, col. c. 11 HMSO, (1977). 12 Unlike ‘storage’ and ‘disposal’, which have specific meanings connected with the maintenance or ending of institutional control, ‘burial’ means just that. In fact, the stream running through the Drigg site has been regularly monitored for radioactivity since the early 1960s. 13 Lewis (1976) p. 84. 14 HMSO (1976) para. 338. p. 131. 15 The Nuclear Industry Radioactive-waste Executive. Its name was later changed to UK Nirex. 16 In the maximum, 17.8 TBq yr–1 (=0.06 TBq alpha-emitters) could be discharged into the Thames from AERE, AWRE, and the Radiochemicals Centre, Amersham. The form of authorization devised under the AEA Act, of specifying monthly maxima for radium, other alpha-emitters, 90Sr, and other beta-emitters, held right up until the late 1970s when more specific numerical limits were set for a number of nuclides. 17 In 1950 one operation dumped 375 tons of packaged radwaste; in 1960 this had risen to thirteen operations which dumped 2,560 tons of waste. 18 IAEA (1967). 19 Report of the Legal Panel of the IAEA (The Rousseau Report) (unpublished). The Russians and Poles argued in this committee for a complete cessation of sea disposal activities. 20 The Department of Energy announced in May 1988 that it would not resume sea dumping of drummed wastes, but held open the option of dumping decommissioning wastes at sea. The Ministry of Defence also still hopes to dispose of decommissioning wastes from submarines to the sea. Source: HCH, 27.5.88, col. 233. 21 A high-level group composed of representatives from the AEA, the authorizing departments and academics, set up in 1948. 22 The three aims of radwaste disposal are set out later in the report: (a) a dose limit set at 0.3 mSv week–1; (b) a collective dose limit of 500,000 persons Sv;

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and (c) to do all that is reasonably practicable, having regard to cost, convenience, and the national importance of this subject, to reduce doses far below these levels. See HMSO (1959) para. 117, p. 34. 23 Radiological protection was considered primarily as a global problem, rather than a question of control in localities, as it is now through the concept of critical groups. As the head of the Radiochemical Branch at Harwell put it sometime later: There is no ‘safe’ level of exposure, and any figure chosen as a ‘maximum permissible’ level can only be determined by predicting as accurately as possible the consequent genetic damage and deciding what level of damage is acceptable; this decision is essentially social and political, rather than scientific. Glueckauf (1961) p. 162 24 HMSO (1959), para. 9, p. 3. 25 They included the first and still operative classification of very low-level wastes in terms of their disposal route: very low-level waste ==400 BqKg–1; ‘dustbin disposals’ ==400 kBq in any 0.1 m3 bag; and ‘special precautions disposals’=4 MBq per sack (long-lived), 40 MBq per sack (short-lived). 26 HMSO (1959), para. 130, p. 37. This early antipathy towards land disposal was echoed by another AEA scientist in 1961: ‘In more densely-populated areas…it is unlikely that this method [of disposal] will be adopted’ (Amphlett and Sammon, 1961). This view persisted in the AEA until the early 1970s. Here commenting on a 1973 EEC working party: The UK appeared to be in the forefront in comments that geological disposal was taking too high a proportion of the budget. Our misgivings were largely due to the unlikelihood of a UK site being found (we are re-examing this), [and] the political factors which would militate against an international disposal site and transport difficulties. UKAEA (1975) para. 246, pp. 45–6 27 Radioactive Substances Act, 1960; Section 10(1). 28 HMSO (1959), para. 12, p. 4 29 The first and most highly-active liquid-waste stream, containing mainly separated fission products, arising in reprocessing. 30 A military facility for reprocessing low burn-up fuel. 31 Cowing (1974) vol. 2, p. 109. 32 Ibid., p. 110. 33 In comparison with other nuclear programmes the requirement for spent-fuel transport has been very large in Britain. Annual fuel consumption at Britain’s Magnox stations ranges from 83 MTHM yr–1 to 209 MTHM yr–1. Considering that the fuel was transported in casks holding 2 MTHM each, up to 100 spent fuel casks have to be annually dispatched by each station. Source: Piran (1984). 34 To contain this volume of fluid would have been highly inconvenient even on a large site like Windscale. More important, the demand for stainless steel for tanks of this size would have dislocated Britain’s chemical industry which also had a high demand for the material. 35 This account is based on Warner et al (1972). 36 This was only the first in a series of leaks which were to occur from these tanks. Source: Health and Safety Executive (1977) para. 92, p. 16. 37 The rate of effluent arisings depends on the performance of the evaporators and the nature of the feed, which depends on the burn-up of the fuel. By the early

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1970s concentrates were varying from 33 MTHM processed to 55 MTHM for fuels with higher burn-ups. Up to 50 m3 of highly-active concentrates could be produced annually at Sellafield. Proof of evidence to the Windscale Inquiry by Warner, para. 134 (cited in Stott and Taylor, 1980, p. 94). 38 Berkeley, Hinkley Point A, Trawsfynydd, Oldbury and Hunterston A all recorded radioactive discharges of over 50 per cent their authorized limits for non-tritium nuclides into the late 1970s. Source: DoE (1978) p. 35. 39 Beta discharges up threefold (1965–71), then a further doubling (1973–5), alpha discharges showed an elevenfold increase between 1965 and 1974. Source: HMSO (1984b) 47–8. 40 Wynne (1982) p. 143. 41 Cf.Harrison (1982); ICRP (1985); and NRPB (1987). 42 Clelland (1976). See also the AEA’s plans to bury glass cylinders in concrete pits with active cooling devices (HCH, 18.7.61, vol. 644, col. 1042). 43 It was later found that they would be extremely inconvenient to dispose of in a repository (see Department of the Environment, (1981), Section 6). There had earlier been thoughts of re-melting the glass and casting it into a more suitable shape for disposal after an initial cooling period. Alternatively, there would be no disposal. For example, a parliamentary reply in March 1973 stated: ‘A relatively small bulk of radioactive wastes arising from reprocessing …will need to be stored…for some hundreds of years. A fraction of this waste may need to be stored for an indefinite period.’ (HCH, 15.3.73, vol. 852, col. 437 WA). 44 Grover (1979). 45 Hill and Grimwood (1978) p. 43. 46 HMSO/RWMAC First Annual Report, 1980, p. 25. 47 Hill and Lawson (1982). 48 HMSO (1986) para. 10, p. 2. 49 The CEGB intended to order an additional 24 GW(e) of nuclear capacity between 1974 and 1983. 50 HMSO (1977). 51 HMSO (1976). 52 Ibid., para. 428, p. 162. 53 Patterson (1985) pp. 110–27; Williams (1980) pp. 261–311; Stott and Taylor (1980) pp. 17–20; Pearce et al. (1979) pp. 130–40. 54 HCH, 28.7.76, vol. 916, col. 261. 55 Note that the same argument was employed by the BMI in relation to LWR fuel in 1976 when arguing for a German reprocessing option. 56 HMSO (1978) para. 8.32. 57 Mancuso et al (1977). 58 Gray et al, (1976). 59 Ibid., p. 1. 60 In March 1982 King told a RWMAC meeting that his rejection of the AEA’s appeal at the Cheviots public inquiry was because doubts had been raised about ‘the usefulness of the drilling programme on the grounds that the particular programme proposed would not necessarily have told us much about the Cheviots as a whole’ (i.e. their general suitability for radwaste disposal). The IGS, on the other hand, continued to argue that its remit was not to elucidate the geology of the different areas, but to do site-specific geological research on a much smaller scale. 61 Mather et al. (1982) p. 168. 62 Statement by Michael Heseltine, HCH, 24.7.79, vol. 971, cols 215–19. 63 The Loch Doon application was rejected because: ‘its association in the minds

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of the public…with the possible disposal of nuclear waste will have a detrimental effect on the social, economic and physical well-being of the community’ (cited in SCRAM (1980) p. 9). 64 Statement reprinted in HMSO/RWMAC Third Annual Report, May 1982, Appendix B, pp. 49–50. 65 HMSO/RWMAC First Annual Report, May 1980, Appendix G, pp. 49–50: The Advisory Committee is in no doubt that it will be unable to discharge its responsibility to advise the Government on policy in this field unless it is in possession of all relevant information on the options. (The italics are mine.) 66 67 68 69

HMSO (1982) para. 12, p. 7. Keen (1983) vol. 2, pp. 311–12. Mather et al. (1982) p. 172. A simple British example was the re-specification of a deep trench as requiring only a 15-metre overburden of clay, rather than a 30-metre covering, following the discovery at Elstow of unsuitably thin clay beds (see Blowers and Lowry, 1985). 70 PCM wastes containing >15 g/drum Pu. Plutonium is classified at Sellafield as: 15 g/drum, HEPA filters and decommissioning wastes. 71 Duncan and Brown (1982). 72 ‘We think serious consideration should have been given to the possibility that containment in an engineered storage system might be the best way to deal with solidified high-level wastes for decades or even centuries’ (HMSO/ RWMAC Second Annual Report, May 1981, pp. 21–2). 73

The Environment Departments will continue to develop a broad strategy for the effective and environmentally acceptable management of wastes, against which the industry’s performance can be assessed. The Executive will develop comprehensive plans for dealing with the various waste types, on the basis of a study of the realistic options, and in consultation with the Environment Departments and MAFF; and will put forward specific proposals, which will be assessed against the strategy. (HMSO (1982) para. 61, p. 18)

74 Usually expressed as curies per tonne. 75 ‘A Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter’ (the London Dumping Convention), INF CIRC/205, IAEA, 1974. The limits set in Annex II which are legally-binding to all signatories (as revised in 1978) are (i)

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