Arius Assembly with new organisational members

Arius Assembly of Members (AoM)

The 2006 extraordinary AoM took place in Baden on 25th of October 2006. The Management Executive was able to report on a successful year, with significant progress being made in promoting the concept of shared multinational repositories and much effort being invested into getting the SAPIERR-2 project started up. Members used the opportunity to exchange information on the status of waste management in their countries and to discuss the potential impact of recent world-wide developments such as the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative (GNEP) mentioned in a further news item. Plans for the work programme in 2006 were presented, discussed and agreed and the budgeting process initiated. The regular annual meeting will take place in March of 2007.

SAPIERR-2 up and running

Attendees at SAPIERR-2 inaugural meeting in Switzerland

After a protracted period of negotiations over the summer on the most appropriate organisational structure of the contract, the SAPIERR-2 project started on November 1st 2006 and the first project meeting took place in Baden on 29th November 2006. The scope and technical content of the project had been accepted very early in the negotiations and all parties saw this as a logical and necessary continuation and completion of the feasibility study concept of SAPIERR. In the finally chosen project structure, the official EC Coordinator is COVRA from the Netherlands. COVRA will work closely with Arius which has been responsible for the specification of work packages and will coordinate the evaluation of their results. The core team of participants and work package leaders includes representatives from organisations in 8 countries: Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. In addition, a SAPIERR Interest Group (SIG) is being established to strengthen ties to the numerous organisations in other countries that would like to follow the progress of the project.

Ewoud Verhoef and Charles McCombie checking the SAPIERR-2 work plan

The precursor project, SAPIERR-1 (2003-5), was designed to help the European Commission clarify basic questions affecting the issue and to identify new research and technical developments that may be needed to implement regional solutions to European radioactive waste storage and disposal. Twenty-one organisations from fourteen countries took part in the project, which addressed legal aspects, inventory questions and possible options and scenarios for regional storage and disposal facilities.

The top level conclusions from SAPIERR-1 were:

• The potential benefits of multinational, regional facilities are recognized widely throughout the EU.
• The most obvious benefits are in the economic area, where shared repositories would lead to substantial reductions in expenditure throughout the Community.
• Many or most of the problems faced by regional repository initiatives are common to those being tackled by national disposal programmes, in particular concerning the task of siting the facility.
• If shared regional stores or repositories are to be implemented, even some decades ahead, efforts must already be increased now.
• Before greatly enlarging the scale of the work on regional stores or repositories, a structured framework should be established.

The objective of SAPIERR-2, also a two year project, is to develop the feasibility studies of SAPIERR-1 in order to propose a practical implementation strategy and organisational structures that will enable a group of countries to create a formalised, structured organisation that could be established from 2008 for working on shared EU radioactive waste storage and disposal activities. The SAPIERR-2 objectives are:

• The development of an organisational framework and a project plan to facilitate debate on the establishment of a modestly sized, self-sufficient, European Development Organisation (EDO) that can work in parallel with national waste agencies.
• To make further studies of key issues related to economics, design, public and political attitudes and the safety and security of shared storage and disposal facilities.
• To achieve and document the consensus on a preferred way forward that could take place after 2008.

The six main technical work packages within the project and the responsible organisations are:

• preparation of a management study on the legal and business options for establishing an EDO (ENEA,Italy)
• study of the legal liability issues of international waste transfer within Europe (Decom,Slovakia)
• study of the potential economic implications of European regional stores and repositories (Arius, Switzerland and Galson Sciences, UK)
• first considerations of the safety and security impacts of implementing regional repositories (SAM, UK)
• survey of public and political attitudes towards regional stores and repositories and of approaches to involving communities in decision making Enviros, Spain)
• development of a strategy and a project plan for the work of the EDO (Arius, Switzerland)

The immediate tasks of an EDO would be agreeing a progressive, slow, staged strategy that would lead to the definition of potential host countries and eventually, to potential storage or repository sites, and, in addition, defining a parallel science and technology programme that could be addressed by the EDO after its initiation.

The worldwide revival of interest in nuclear power has led to numerous meetings being arranged on the subject – and, today, the nuclear community fully realises that no discussion can neglect the important topic of waste management. For this reason, Arius was involved through 2006 in various conferences, often as a guest speaker putting the case for geological disposal in general as well as for multinational cooperation as a means to ensuring that such disposal is available to all nations, however small.

The first of these special events was the IBC Conference on “Radioactive Waste Management: the next step – confidence, safety and implementation” which took place in London from 12th to 14th June, 2006. The invited speakers included key figures from national waste management programmes in Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Republic of Korea, UK and USA, as well as representatives of the IAEA and the NEA. Days two and three were chaired by Charles McCombie of Arius, who also presented a paper on “Internationalising the Back-End of the Fuel Cycle”. This was coupled with an interesting paper by Tom Isaacs of LLNL and the two papers together served as a discussion basis for animated exchanges with the audience.

On June 19th to 23rd, the IAEA held its regular meeting on Management of Spent Fuel from Nuclear Power Reactors in Vienna. The meeting was attended on behalf of Arius by Neil Chapman, and an Arius paper was presented as a poster on “The Role of Spent Fuel Storage in Multinational Approaches to the Backend of the Fuel Cycle.” 

Shortly afterwards, a further invitation led to an Arius talk on 27th June in Paris at the “Conference on the Role of the Private Sector in Financing and Building Next Generation Nuclear”. The paper presented was titled “The dependence of nuclear energy expansion on national and multinational progress in waste management” and it served as background for a panel discussion on waste management, during which Arius was able to highlight the huge economies of scale that can result from shared repository implementation projects.

A rather different opportunity to put waste disposal and multinational cooperation into a wider context occurred in August, at a special workshop organised in Sicily within the scope of the 36th Session of the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies. The session on “Global Nuclear Power Future” included invited specialists on all aspects of the fuel cycle. The experts produced a document with final conclusions, including the remark that:

“Ultimately, geologic repositories with or without reprocessing will be required for disposal of spent fuel or high level waste.  These could include international facilities operated jointly or by private firms regulated both by environmental agencies and by IAEA.”

and recommending that:

“Nations should move urgently to develop a viable international regime for fuel leasing and take-back under satisfactory non-proliferation and environmental standards”.

Yet another invitation for Arius resulted in September in participation in a Wilmington Media two day conference on the “European Nuclear Power Debate", held in London in the same week as the annual Symposium of the World Nuclear Association, of which Arius is a member. The activities involved at the Conference included participation in three different panel sessions, one of which allowed Arius to show the now well-known overhead illustrating vividly the unthinkably high number of separate repositories that Europe will need if there are no shared projects.

In January 2007, the US Department of Energy published its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Strategic Plan (GNEP-167312, Rev 0). The brief document provides a timely and useful overview of the GNEP vision and of how DOE intends to implement this. The three goals stated are:

• Wider-scale use of nuclear energy
• Decreasing risks of proliferation and nuclear terrorism
• Addressing the challenges of disposal

All of these are of great importance for global environmental, safety and security reasons. 

The plan concentrates strongly on technological issues associated with enhancing the US capabilities for undertaking key fuel cycle activities. It highlights also the view that GNEP can postpone for a long time the need for a 2nd repository in the USA, provided that the facilities for advanced fuel cycle operations are brought on line. The strategy is however, very weak of one key point – how to win the support of other nations and thus achieve success in the area of enhancing global security. The point is that GNEP can work on the hoped for global scale only if the “P” for partnership includes also the smaller or the new nuclear programmes around the globe that are to be prevented from having fuel cycle facilities (enrichment and reprocessing) that are their right under the current NPT that they have signed up to.

Why should small countries welcome a new regime that even more firmly creates a two tier status in the nuclear world? Unless the USDOE can offer greater incentives than at present there is little or no incentive for them to buy in to the GNEP initiative. Currently, for enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction and reprocessing there is a already a sufficiently competitive market. With GNEP, this competitive market can only shrink. What extra incentives are being offered? The only tangible additional service offer is the take back of spent fuel. This could in principle be extremely attractive since deep geological repositories for limited amounts of wastes are very expensive and are also difficult to site for both technical and societal reasons. Removing the disposal problem from small nuclear programmes could outweigh the possible disadvantages that GNEP might bring them. 

But can GNEP remove the problem? Currently the stated principles include “taking back spent fuel for recycling”. Will the USA (and other Tier 1 GNEP countries) be able to accept foreign HLW for final disposal? The situation concerning radioactive wastes or spent fuel is, in fact, even more problematic than this. Small countries with existing modest inventories of spent fuel will have little incentive to send future spent fuel arisings to a foreign recycler if they anyway have to implement a national deep repository. Moreover, even those countries that initiate civilian nuclear programmes under a GNEP agreement for returning spent fuel will have small quantities of other long-lived radioactive residues from activities in power production, research and industry – and these must also be disposed of in a geological repository. 

In summary, the back-end issues associated with GNEP are so open that no global impact can be guaranteed. To achieve the laudable global environmental and security goals, the back-end must be directly addressed. Multinational geologic repositories for all types of long-lived wastes must be made available either by Tier 1 fuel cycle supplier nations or by a third party country willing to implement such a facility.

Arius provides members with a quarterly Newsletter (all issues of which are available to non-members: see "Newsletter" link on the left of this page) and a database service.

Arius also acts as a clearing house for the provision of advice or support to individual members on technical waste management topics or on the organisation of specific studies.