EU battles to lock down radioactive waste forever

Europe offered new plans on Wednesday to lock away forever lethal radioactive waste, but the proposals attacking hopelessly inadequate disposal facilities drew a stinging rebuke from environmentalists.

Half a century after atomic power was first produced in Britain, the European Union’s nuclear energy-producing countries stand accused of future negligence without a single “deep geological disposal” site equipped to withstand up to an estimated one million years of decay.

As a result, the EU’s executive arm tabled for the third time legislative proposals that would see states pushed to build the kind of facility deep in the earth’s crust that it says scientists claim is the only way to protect nature’s balance.

“We have to make sure that we have the highest safety standards in the world to protect our citizens, our water and the ground against nuclear contamination,” said EU energy commissioner Guenther Oettinger, specifying that depths should be “a minimum of 300 metres”.

The proposals immediately fell foul of anti-nuclear Greenpeace, whose “dirty energy” campaigner Jan Haverkamp termed them “sub-standard”.

“It would take an engineering genius to safely bury white-hot, highly-dangerous nuclear waste deep underground for longer than mankind has been on the planet,” he said.

“We fear a disposal facility could rupture high-level nuclear waste into the water table for hundreds of thousands of years.”

Quite simply, added leading German Green EU lawmaker Rebecca Harms, the plans “do not address citizens’ concerns given the danger posed by radioactive waste”.

Mr Oettinger acknowledged that two similar initiatives were previously batted away by states but insisted this one “will not be blocked” under post-Lisbon treaty majority voting.

The commission is targeting adoption next year and said states would then have four years to nail down a “concrete timetable” for constructing facilities, including “the financing schemes chosen”.

The commission wants nuclear power plant operators “to put money aside for the financing of future disposals”.

Producers would not be allowed to export nuclear waste to countries outside the EU for final disposal.

Current schemes offering so-called “interim storage” are given a lifespan of “maximal 50-100 years,” the commission said, meaning waste “has to be retrieved and repackaged”.

Spent fuel and radioactive waste “need continuous maintenance and oversight”, it said.