PROJECT 2: The nuclear waste economy: (im)mobility, risk and materials science
This project provides
- An examination of the international trade in nuclear waste from the 1950s to the present-day, documenting and accounting for the global economy in nuclear waste and its attendant spatial division of labour; and
- an analysis of how used nuclear fuel is moved to, into, within and through a nuclear reprocessing plant.
Nuclear waste is a topic of immense salience, not least in the UK, where the issue of a further generation of nuclear power stations has again emerged onto the energy policy agenda. In simple terms, a nuclear reprocessing plant is a chemical processing facility. Used nuclear fuel is delivered to the plant, pulverised and dissolved in nitric acid. The liquid is then separated into three streams inside the reprocessing plant: uranium (generally in the form of uranyl nitrate); plutonium (generally in the form of plutonium nitrate); and highly radioactive fission products. The recovered plutonium and uranium is either manufactured into new fuel or stored (in principle, for future use as fuel). The highly radioactive waste liquid fission products are mixed with other materials and turned into solid material, for future disposal – although this remains a matter of some controversy. In the UK context, nuclear fuel has been re-processed at Sellafield since 1952, and some 15,000 tonnes of uranium has been recovered as fuel via reprocessing. However, with the development of the THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant) facility, this activity took on a new dimension. Construction of the plant began in the 1970s but was not finished until 1994 and the plant eventually became operational in August 1997 (although it is currently closed following a leak of highly radioactive fuel in May 2005). The THORP plant has re-processed some 5,600 tonnes of nuclear fuel, producing plutonium and uranium in such large quantities that in practice only a tiny proportion will ever be re-used as reactor fuel - and hence must be stored virtually indefinitely. Re-processing has involved a spatial shift of highly toxic wastes, over half of which has been imported from 34 energy companies in 9 countries (including Germany, Japan and Switzerland). Indeed, the economies of THORP are such that a global trade is essential to ensure sufficient flow of raw materials to keep the plant going. The THORP facility thus forms a key node in a global network of flows of highly toxic nuclear waste, and forms the hub of the second part of this project.
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© The Waste of the World 2009
