Higher Activity Waste Package Records
Ensuring appropriate, accessible records essential for safe interim storage, future completion, transport and ultimate disposition of waste packages.
The NDA group holds and continues to produce a significant amount of information and data relating to all radioactive wastes. Plans for the processing and packaging of such wastes are systematically agreed with LLWR Limited and Radioactive Waste Management Limited (RWM), including expectations for the structuring of associated information and data as records. Similar expectations arise for the systematic management of information and knowledge about nuclear material that has been transferred between sites.
Ensuring that we have appropriate, accessible records is essential for safe interim storage, future completion, transport and ultimate disposition of waste packages. Suitable records are also essential for the future management of spent fuel and nuclear materials, including overseas return and, where appropriate, disposal.
The lack of necessary, accurate and accessible information would impact on the safety case of a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), its operability and associated costs, as well as potentially precluding other possible approaches to managing wastes.
We have worked with RWM, LLWR Limited and waste producers, together with regulators (ONR / SEPA / the Environment Agency / Natural Resources Wales), to establish and implement common standards for waste package records. We are delivering a programme to identify, collate, structure and ultimately digitise information to preserve records for existing waste packages, and to apply learning to the production of records for continuing and future packaging operations.
The absence of appropriate waste package records represents a significant risk to our ability to deliver future waste management solutions, with impacts potentially including a need for repackaging and / or unnecessary design and safety compromises in disposal, as well as impacts on stakeholder confidence in the civil nuclear industry. The cost savings associated with not having to address such impacts could be tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, based on costs associated with repackaging of wastes.