UK Radioactive Waste Conditioning and Long Term Management

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UK Radioactive Waste Conditioning and Long Term
Management Some Challenges
by Gregg Butler Professor of Science in
Sustainable Development, Sustainable Environment
Policy Programme, University of Manchester Grace
McGlynn Head of Corporate Social Responsibility,
BNFL, and Associate, SEPP, University of
Manchester
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Starting Points NDA

• On 1 April 2005, the Nuclear Decommissioning
  Authority (NDA) takes ownership of 50B of
  liabilities on the 20 sites formerly owned by
  BNFL and UKAEA
• The NDAs mission is to clean up these sites,
  putting into a passive form the untreated waste
  and returning the sites to a green or brown
  endpoint mainly yet to be decided

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Starting Points - CoRWM

• In July 2006, the Committee on Radioactive Waste
  Management (CoRWM) will make recommendations to
  Ministers on the option, or combination of
  options, that can provide a long-term solution,
  inspiring public confidence and providing
  protection for people and the environment
• Whatever the option is success will require
  not only that the option(s) is/are accepted, but
  that the option(s) are acted on and funded
• The overall NDA plus CoRWM field of activity
  can be visualised as

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Managing the Nuclear Legacy Scoping the Job
Hazard Potential
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Managing the Nuclear Legacy Scoping the Job
Hazard Potential
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Challenges

• If a 50B Government Funded Project went without
  a hitch it would indeed be a matter of note!
• The rest of this presentation poses a few
  challenges, and hopes in some small way to help
  stimulate the successful surmounting of these
  challenges

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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
The NDA mission is to progressively clean up
sites which will mean either waste storage at
many, or a concentration on fewer, sites. The
CoRWM mission is to provide a long-term solution,
inspiring public confidence Both of these
missions will need enough stakeholder buy-in to
make decisions and actions politically
deliverable this is the acceptability challenge.
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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge

• From the BNFL National Stakeholder Dialogue there
  is good stakeholder agreement that
• Wastes should be made increasingly passive
• The creation of wastes should be minimised
• Environmental, societal and economic benefits and
  detriments have to be balanced
• Decision making processes, underlying assumptions
  and data collection must be transparent
• Stakeholder views must be both sought and
  respected

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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
12
The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
13
The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
14
The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
15
The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
16
The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge
This has real implications for a future moving
from 20 NDA sites to a much smaller number as
waste is retrieved, conditioned, and potentially
transported to regional or national management
options
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The Stakeholder Acceptability Challenge

• Every move in this direction would have
• Sites where waste conditioning has finished and
  jobs are lost
• Sites reaching a brown or green end state
• Areas affected by transport movements
• Sites having to accept other peoples wastes
• Relevant experience with proposed transfer of LLW
  from Dounreay and commercial bids for ISOLUS
  both to West Cumbria

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The Resources Challenge
NDA is a Non-Departmental Public Body disbursing
2B in a year to contractors, and being
accountable to Government, with surveillance by
the National Audit Office and various Select
Committees Its planned staffing of around 200
for the whole NDA looks very small against the
need to also make sure that the right things are
done in the right order, and that the strategy
(rather than the administration) of spend is
effective.
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The Funding Challenge

• The White Paper Managing the Nuclear Legacy
  tasked the NDA with systematically and
  progressively driving forward clean up of the
  nuclear legacy
• As long as nothing major goes wrong on nuclear
  sites, there are many more vote-winning things a
  Chancellor could spend money on than clean-up
• Funding cleanup is likely to be a challenge in
  both the long and the short term

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The Funding Challenge

• This challenge was recognised in the White Paper,
  which stated (in Section 6.1) that
• Managing nuclear liabilities cost effectively
  requires financial flexibility and competent long
  term planning. There is some flexibility within
  the budgetary settlements agreed with funding
  departments as part of the Spending Review
  process, but three-year settlements are, almost
  always, shorter than the timescale for major
  decommissioning projects. In the past, nuclear
  clean up has also been seen as a low priority for
  funding purposes relative to other programmes

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The Funding Challenge

• And continued that
• Experience to date with UKAEA has therefore been
  that settlements have tended to be the minimum
  necessary to address safety and environmental
  needs and that limited funding has been available
  for other projects

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The Funding Challenge

• Nuclear site cleanup is about reducing the
  hazard potential of the site while maintaining
  safety and environmental protection

• Nuclear sites cost money to run for maintaining
  safety, environmental protection, security and
  the like
• The first tranche of money given to a site will
  go on these activities
• Money above this level can be spent on cleanup
  and progress in cleanup thus varies with funding
  one can envisage various funding patterns

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Site Cleanup Spend Patterns
Doing the job
M per annum
Playing at the job
Playing with fire
Time
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Current value
Time - Years
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The Funding Challenge

• Raising discount rate gives large incentive to
  delay cleanup
• Actually experienced by UKAEA
• The discount rate essentially defines what
  concepts such as inter-generational equity mean
  in practice
• Cleanup (NDA) and Long Term Waste Management
  (CoRWM) surely need to run on financing
  assumptions which are either explicitly the same
  or explicitly different
• A suitable subject for stakeholder engagement!

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The Funding Challenge

• Managing the Nuclear Legacy consulted on
  funding via a Segregated Fund or a Segregated
  Account,

• to avoid the funding problems
  already noted for UKAEA
• Virtually all respondents wanted the Fund
• What weve got for the 05-06 budget is the
  Spending Review with all the pitfalls which
  were so well expressed in the White Paper

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The Funding and Resource Challenge - CoRWM

• Last time the UK had a failure in its radwaste
  policy was the Nirex debacle in 1997 it cost us
  around 500M
• CoRWM has a limited budget for public and
  stakeholder engagement before making its
  recommendations for future options in 2006
• The resources the Canadians are putting in to one
  waste at nine sites can be judged at
  http//www.nwmo.ca/ as compared to
  www.corwm.org.uk. for six categories of waste and
  20 sites

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The Regulatory Challenge

• The NDA is set up to achieve progress in cleanup
  while balancing societal, environmental and
  economic factors.
• We have some processes to achieve these balances
  one of them is called BPEO
• If we were to use this process sensibly, giving a
  transparent balance of all factors on a UK basis
  then limited resources would be most effectively
  used
• BUT the current trend is to more and more BPEOs
  which can lead to stakeholder fatigue and the
  absence of UK optimisation

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The Regulatory Challenge

• In the old days, at least UKAEA and BNFL owned
  the problems and tried to optimise their
  respective bits of the programme
• Now only the 200 brave souls in the NDA will give
  an Australian Lager for the overall optimum NDA
  are the only people who own the problem

• NDA therefore have a real job on and must hold
  the ring against licensees, Treasury and
  regulators, all of which will, left to their own
  devices, act as single-interest groups.

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The Regulatory Challenge
Stakeholder scenarios and alignment
From a presentation by Peter Wylie, British
Nuclear Group, October 2004
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The NDA Mission

• What exactly are the NDA being tasked to do?
• The NDA mission from MNL (reflected in the Energy
  Act) is developing coherent strategy for clean
  up which makes best use of available skills and
  resources. Its focus on delivery of that
  strategy will also ensure that the job gets done
  in a manner which enhances safety and
  environmental performance whilst delivering best
  value for money. It will match the response to
  the scale of the task and the timescales involved
  and make the whole process more open and more
  transparent.
• But it needs a strategy and plan to deliver this
  mission

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So What is Needed?

• Ongoing stakeholder engagement about UK policy
  issues preferably in ways which enable balances
  between different factors to be much more
  explicitly examined and defined
• A current bad example the new DTI policy on
  decommissioning encourages examination of
  different site end points with local stakeholder
  involvement

• meanwhile the HSE
  consultation on delicensing recommends a one in a
  million risk to the maximally exposed individual
  and emphasises ALARA
• So whatever end point is reached on most sites -
  itll be a licensed end point!!

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So What is Needed?

• Many things that the NDA are committed to by MNL
  and the Act but more importantly things that
  seem to be in line with the approach to date of
  the Chairman and CEO
• Put measures, including discount rates, into the
  mission to reduce the UKs nuclear liabilities so
  that overall success or failure can be judged
• Make sure the NDAs strategy puts specific
  methodologies in place to attain the balance of
  factors sought both for cleanup and for the
  continuation of plant operation

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So What is Needed?

• Consult on what the methodologies and balances
  should be, say what is adopted, and tell how the
  methodologies are to be used
• Make transparent what is NDAs strategy, and also
  make transparent where the ability to deliver
  this is put at risk by external considerations
• Report regularly (both NDA and site contractors)
  on progress being made and hazard potential
  reduction being achieved

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And are we going to get it??

• BNFL and UKAEA had limited ability to resist
  political and regulatory pressure
• The money NDA is spending is now clearly OUR
  money so getting value for money into the
  balance can be seen to benefit everyone
• NDA occupies the position, and can acquire the
  power, to hold the ring and transparently
  manage a success story