A second, but arguably equally important, part of KM is an active programme of experience transfer. This is needed to ensure that knowledge and experience is transferred to younger generations as older staff retire, something which has become a real concern in the nuclear power industry as the first generation of staff are now reaching retirement age. Unfortunately, the radwaste industry has taken longer to react to the same pressure and this has to be addressed to a much greater degree in the future. General training initiatives by the IAEA and the EU, among others, are to be applauded, but the first real breakthrough has been the founding in 2003 of the ITC (see www.itc-school.org), a training centre dedicated to experience transfer in the field of repository implementation. As such, this organisation is unique and has proven to be popular and to be fulfilling an obvious international need. Unfortunately, it has, as yet, failed to attract significant, permanent funding and its future thus remains uncertain, something which is incomprehensible, considering the comments above.

Of the two processes discussed above, the first is currently a proposal and the second is a tottering infant which may not get the chance to run – once again, appropriate international action from an organisation such as the IAEA or WANO would seem necessary to ensure that both these initiatives survive and continue to produce the knowledge and staff required to bring today’s repository projects to fruition tomorrow.

10.3.5. Alternative designs and optimisation processes

In recent years, studies of ‘‘alternatives’’ have tended to be rather superficial analyses which fall into a number of classes:

Recycling the old studies of 2–3 decades ago, without proper consideration of the changing boundary conditions (socio-political, economic, environmental, etc.) involved.

Rewriting history, showing that national programmes developed based on a structured repository concept development process (see comments and examples in Chapter 3).

Attempting to obtain funding from the nuclear industry by adding ‘‘and its relevance to radwaste disposal’’ to an otherwise irrelevant academic study.

As noted in Chapter 3, there is no doubt that many simple ideas from the past have been overtaken by technology development or environmental sensitivity. Examples here would include deep injection of liquid wastes and disposal in ‘‘permanent’’ ice fields or permafrost; the former due to concerns about long-term environmental contamination and the latter due to the awareness that, with uncertainties associated with global warming, such features can no longer be confidently assumed to be permanent (or even particularly long-lasting).

These and other concepts may be currently excluded in terms of national or international laws and conventions. Here, however, developments in the future are harder to predict. In a scenario with increasing global affluence, restrictions on an option like subsea disposal might well continue – or even become stricter. Technically, however, such an option provides very high levels of safety and it is not inconceivable that sociopolitical constraints could change dramatically in the future – e.g., if alternatives to nuclear fission power generation fail to emerge and/or greenhouse perturbations lie on the upper limit of the present model envelope, thus provoking populations to consider energy production scenarios which would be considered extreme today.