The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 148

Guest: Neil Hyatt, Chief Scientific Advisor and Malcolm Orford, Head of Major Permissions and at Nuclear Waste Services

UK's nuclear Geological Disposal Facility

In this week's podcast we’re talking about the tricky challenge of safely managing and disposing of the UK’s expanding stock of nuclear waste. Creating a Geological Disposal Facility.

For more than 70 years, the UK has benefited from nuclear technology - generating low-carbon electricity, advancing medicine, supporting industry, and contributing to national defence. 

Alongside those benefits comes responsibility. 

Because the most hazardous radioactive wastes produced over those decades will remain radioactive for many thousands of years.

And while they are currently stored safely at a number of surface facilities across the country, - as we heard on the podcast in episode 126 last year – those stores require ongoing monitoring, management, and periodic rebuilding. They are secure for the short to medium term - but they are not permanent solutions.

My guests today are tackling that very issue. Malcolm Orford is Head of major permissions and Neil Hyatt, chief scientific advisor at Nuclear Waste Services who are leading the hugely ambitious and challenging project to develop a Geological Disposal Facility for long term disposal of this waste.. 

As we will hear, it is one of the largest environmental protection programmes in its history: a deep underground facility, between 200 and 1,000 metres below ground, designed to isolate higher-activity radioactive waste within engineered vaults and rock formations, using a multi-barrier system to keep it safely contained long after today’s institutions no longer exist.

Nuclear Waste Services is leading this programme on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Its dual challenge is to find a suitable geological site and identify a willing host community in which to embed the facility. 

Progress is being made with community partnerships established in Cumbria, alongside extensive scientific evaluation, engineering studies, and international collaboration. But it all comes at a huge cost over vast timescales and in often uncharted technical grounds.

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