Undiagnosed nasties lurk in nuclear 'ponds'

They look like grotesque open-air swimming pools - and they contain some of the UK's biggest problems regarding nuclear waste.
Built 50 years ago at Sellafield, the "ponds" were part of the cooling process on the nuclear bomb development programme and then the Magnox reactors, built in the 1960s, to generate electricity.

After the UK moved to better reactor technology, these ponds - two uncovered, one covered - were half forgotten. Records were mislaid and even birds flying overhead would add their contribution to the 100 metre long, 20 metre deep, 40 metre wide constructions.

But lurking in the water (officially described as "sludge") are vast quantities of old machinery and equipment from the reactors - such as the Magnox cladding.
Now, however, the ponds - these three and another three closed pools which were built to better standards more recently - are top of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency's (NDA) agenda.

The NDA is spending a third of its £1bn budget this year on Sellafield, including work on the ponds and an assessment of how much they have leaked their radioactive contents into the soil around them.

The costs of processing the waste could well be greater than was first imagined - especially since the scale of the problem and how much land is contaminated is not known. For instance, the NDA recently increased its cost projections for cleaning up the UK's nuclear total legacy by 12% to £63bn.

The NDA's duties at Sellafield are deemed so important that they were spelled out in the Energy Act 2004 - and must be completed by April 2007.

The reason for focusing on this long-neglected part of the nuclear waste programme is the current debate on whether the UK should build more reactors. The government knows that it could not move towards a nuclear future while the legacy of the past is not just untreated, but undiagnosed.

Nirex, the government-owned body in charge of setting standards on nuclear storage and decommissioning, is clear that a lot more information needs to be obtained before physical action can be taken to deal with the problems of the pools, contaminated land at Sellafield, and similar issues in other locations, such as the waste shaft at Dounreay on the Scottish coast.

Francis Brown, one of the senior scientists at Nirex, told Guardian Unlimited: "The storage ponds may be cracked and leaking. A big problem is trying to identify where the contamination has taken place and how big it is. Soil has been moved around - and so the contamination has moved around."

The Environment Agency - one of the regulators of the nuclear industry - has similar views. A spokesman said: "We've got a wide variety of radioactive waste in the UK. Some of it needs to be characterised in more detail."

The problems the UK faces in dealing with nuclear waste are not just about the real nasties in their pure forms - the plutonium, uranium and spent nuclear fuel which can stay radioactive for thousands of years.

In addition - because of our military history - the UK has a large number of different radioactive substances and it is difficult to be sure how these all react with each other and to other elements and conditions.

So while Finland - which is building another new reactor - has less than 30 different types of nuclear waste, the UK has 1,119, according to Nirex's latest radioactive waste inventory.

British Nuclear Group (BNG) - which currently manages most operations at Sellafield, including the ponds - sounded more confident than the regulators.

"We've got very, very good, detailed records," a spokeswoman said.

But BNG, and everyone else involved, will soon find out just how good those records are. BNG uses a small submarine to assess the equipment and compounds lying in the Sellafield ponds - but it will have to persuade Mr Brown and his colleagues that they are totally sure of what every milligram contains.

"They have to demonstrate that they know what they've got," Mr Brown said.

By the time the public turns its gaze to such issues - when the current nuclear debate is further down the road - the nuclear industry and its supporters hope that the ponds, their contents and the soil they contaminated, will have been dealt with.

This means turning the waste into solid form - much safer to handle and store than a gas or liquid - by mixing it with concrete and storing it in 500-litre drums.

Environmental group Greenpeace believes that nobody knows the true scale of the problem.

"Whatever inventory is given now will not, by any means, be the final figure," the pressure group's spokeswoman Jean McSorley said.

The NDA may or may not reach its target date of April 2007 for dealing with the ponds. Although BNG is sounding confident, no one else is prepared to say exactly what lurks in the water.





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Useful links
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