The most frequently voiced and likely still the most passionately felt objection to nuclear energy you will encounter today is nuclear waste. People tend to get upset, reasonably enough, at the creation of what they perceive to be an immensely hazardous substance that will last for millions of years, poisoning plants and animals and no doubt glowing with an otherworldly light.
The perceptions are of course wrong, and lack vital context on how nuclear materials are managed and just how dangerous they are compared to other hazards. There are many excellent essays on this already and there is no need to endlessly repeat them. Simply put, nuclear waste is an everyday industrial operational challenge, not a planetary threat. With appropriate management, the environmental impacts can be kept rather benign.
It can be safely assumed that public fears relate mainly to what we in the industry would call ‘high-level waste’, as this is the most long-lived and radioactive material. It is unclear whether this frightened fraction of the public understand the different categories of nuclear wastes – the differences in radioactivity, half-lives, volumes, physical forms and management practices – but they probably do not. If they did, then they would be more than halfway to putting risks in context and their fears to rest.
It is after all hard to maintain a sense of mortal terror at a picture of some dirty gloves and used overalls. It’s at least plausible with a fuel assembly, although correctly realising this is the subject matter rather than yellow barrels with glowing green ooze is a step in the right direction.
At this point however things start to get linguistically tricky, since most high level ‘waste’ refers to spent nuclear fuel and, well, as everyone in the industry knows, this is technically reusable. Some countries have plans to recycle this material. A few even do that already.
The relative merits of the once-through versus the closed fuel cycle is a debate for another time. Suffice to say that while fuel recycling is possible there is still a long way to go before we might expect it to be the global norm. For many countries today recycling just does not make a lot of sense. A lot of spent nuclear fuel is currently destined for direct disposal.
One result of the ‘spent fuel versus waste’ nomencalture debate is that in public communication, the first response to concerns over nuclear waste is often an expert wanting to tell them that what they are talking about is not actually waste.
This can be headache inducing – changing all instances of the phrase ‘nuclear waste’ to ‘spent nuclear fuel’, where that is even accurate, can come across more like sleight of hand than a genuine attempt to improve understanding and build support.
The funny thing is that this actually seems to work. If you talk to nuclear communicators on the ground doing stakeholder engagement for real projects, many will tell you not to use the ‘W’ word as some people react very negatively towards it. A simple change of language means you don’t get that emotional response and can more readily establish a social license.
Which is cool, but what happens later when that person either works out or is told that spent nuclear fuel is the dreaded nuclear waste bugbear, and the industry spokesperson just obfuscated? Does this really help to build trust? There seems to be a high potential for such a strategy to backfire. This word substitution is, at best, a delaying tactic. It does provide a chance for other knowledge to sink in without gut-level rejection getting in the way though.
An added complication is that the steps industry outlines to deal with the material in question sure makes it sound like it’s a hazardous waste. The evergreen science author Malcom Grimston has frequently pointed out the absurdity of trying to tell people that nuclear energy is safe and then outlining, in painful detail and scary jargon, all the steps we take to make it so. Similarly, if you are trying to convince someone that a material is not a waste but then tell them you need to eventually bury it 500 metres+ underground to isolate it from the natural environment for at least 300,000 years, well that’s a non sequitur. Get your story straight.
In fact, the nuclear industry has responded to public waste fears over the decades by introducing management practices and disposal expectations well beyond those required for other potentially hazardous substances. Massive concrete pools and storage casks, fully-funded programmes for future geological disposal, ever-diminishing dose tolerances for nuclear workers – it’s an impressive list.
Depending on which nuclear experts you ask this ratcheting of requirements is either a point of great technical pride or an overly-reactive mistake which has added unnecessary cost and complexity to nuclear operations. We have taken an excessive engineering and regulatory ‘hammer’ to what is mostly a psychological and educational ‘nail’. Relatively few recognise that while this is meant to assure the public of the safety of our industry, it often makes them more afraid of it.
The same debate exists around nuclear industry safety practices as well. Of course, it is more a theoretical debate than a practical one, as in reality so much of the nuclear industry is dedicated to precisely these two matters. Whether ideal or not, sky-high standards for safety and waste management are the reality of the nuclear industry today. There is little sign of this changing anytime soon.
In truth, there is no great mystery over when or whether it is correct to call spent nuclear fuel nuclear waste and it’s strange this subject gets as much attention as it does. Everyone innately understands that the difference between waste and valuable material is entirely subjective. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and so forth. The difference between whether something is garbage or a resource boils down purely to what you intend to do with it.
Acceptance of this ambiguity should also apply in the nuclear case. In practice it means that we don’t need to be quite so paranoid about correcting every instance where spent nuclear fuel (of uncertain future destination) is labelled as waste. While spent nuclear fuel is the technically more correct term, if your stakeholders are calling it waste then that’s probably what you should call it too.
So it’s ok to refer to spent nuclear fuel occasionally as ‘waste’ even if it may end up being eventually re-used. The industry should focus more on enhancing public understanding and putting risks in context rather than being language-police.
Alas it is not the end of things, because increasingly it is not the public we have to convince. It is regulators and governments.
Radioactive and nuclear materials are typically allowed to move across borders and be bought and sold by various responsible actors. By contrast, radioactive wastes are not, with many countries maintaining import and export restrictions. Nuclear materials are considered a key input for science, energy, medicine and industry. Nuclear wastes are an environmental burden that gets dealt with per intergenerational equity and the polluter-pays principle.
The distinction between precisely which radioactive substances are classified as resources and which as waste suddenly becomes very important to operators and advanced technology developers, with decisions potentially quite arbitrary. Industry and its regulators do need to periodically reappraise some of these materials, as well as the accepted conventions of nuclear waste management and disposal.
To be clear, there is no doubt that sufficient management and disposal funds are entirely integral to sustainable nuclear operations. Internalising potential externalities remains key. However, insisting on national approaches to management and disposal just blocks the creation of future effective international markets for processing, recycling and disposal services. This situation really begs for change.
The industry needs to get more comfortable with nuclear waste. This means being charitable towards people who might apply the label a bit loosely, but it also means getting rid of some of the mindsets that currently prevent the establishment of practical solutions. Because arguably the best solution for nuclear waste concerns is still actually getting it into the ground.
