7.2. Waste management strategies

7.2.1. The need for a clear policy and strategy

Following establishment of a suitable organisational structure within any country, it is necessary to formulate an overall waste management strategy. This strategy should define how protection of humans and the environment from harmful effects of radiation from wastes is intended to be assured at present and in the future. Increasingly, it is also being recognised that this environmental safety objective must be complemented by an important security aim – i.e., the strategy must also consider how to prevent the malicious use of hazardous radioactive materials. In addition to a reference strategy and plan of action, it is important to identify key decision points, to define how decisions will be taken and to ensure that sufficient resources will be available for all of the actions foreseen.

Extensive guidance on such issues is given in the international consensus documents produced by the IAEA. These include reports on The Principles of Radioactive Waste Management (IAEA, 1995) and on Establishing a National System of Radioactive Waste Management (IAEA, 1997b), both of which provided input for the Joint Convention. The IAEA emphasises that its Member States should develop an agreed policy for waste management and then a strategy to implement this policy. Crucial elements of the strategy are the description of how all radioactive wastes will be safely managed, what facilities must be implemented to enable this and when these facilities should be operational.

For the case of long-lived wastes, in particular SF and HLW, the most common strategy culminates in deep geological disposal. Some countries have this solution firmly anchored in their legislation or in their declared government policies. Examples are numerous; they include e.g., Belgium, China, Finland, India, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, the USA, etc. France is an exception, since the 1990 Law passed there specified that, in addition to geological disposal, two other management options (longterm storage and transmutation) kept open up to a 2006 decision point. The new French Law requires geological disposal, but still keeps options open. Less formally, some other countries have a policy of keeping other options open, even if geological disposal is the reference scenario (e.g., partitioning and transmutation is followed by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain and Japan).

The most obvious recent exceptions to the general commitment to geological disposal, however, have been the UK and Canada. In both these countries, a review of all conceivable options is underway, following the failure of the repository development plans of NIREX and AECL, respectively, to win sufficient public support. The course followed in the UK and Canada reflects a different approach to the process of establishing a national strategy, with very extensive pubic consultation at an early stage (see also comments in Chapters 4 and 9). The organisations charged with this consultation work (CoRWM and NWMO, respectively) have recently come out in favour of a staged geological disposal programme, but no official policy has yet been announced in either country. Canada has, in fact, done a great deal of work on a generic disposal option, which is available to it if it chooses to pursue this course. Moreover, the major utility OPG recently reached agreement with a local community for implementation of a deep geological disposal facility for LLW from reactor operations.