What to do with spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste is the great unanswered question of nuclear power. The spent nuclear fuel pools in the one hundred U.S. nuclear power reactors will all be full in five years unless massive amounts of temporary storage casks are built to hold the spent fuel until a permanent repository is built. Best estimates are that there will not be a permanent geological nuclear repository in the United States before 2050. Other nations with nuclear power face similar problems.
France, Sweden, and Finland have selected preferred sites for geological repositories for high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel and begun construction. The U.K., Germany and Switzerland are involved in site selection for a repository. A 2004 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency urged all countries with nuclear waste disposal problems should cooperate in exploring multinational repositories. The report said that such multinational repositories would improve world safety and security. The International Panel of Fissile Materials issued a report in 2011 that stated that although the idea of multinational spent fuel geological repositories has been discussed, there has been very little progress in exploring that possibility. The benefits of multinational geological repositories include taking advantage of economies of scale, providing more time for nations to consider different fuel cycles and help to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
A report titled ‘Management of spent nuclear fuel and its waste’ has just been published by the European Commission’s in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre, and the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council. The report points out that even with a closed fuel cycle where the spent fuel is recycled to create more fuel, there will still be nuclear waste generated that will have to disposed of in geological repositories. Although there has been a great deal of research around the world on deep geological repositories for nuclear waste, there is still no operational geological repository anywhere. All European nations with nuclear power are encouraged to immediately implement deep geological repositories.
The report pointed out that specifying a policy for dealing with spent nuclear fuel is an important part of planning for nuclear power and that there must be financial and technical support for developing ways of dealing with spent nuclear fuel. The report said that a nuclear power program must be a long term commitment that includes permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel as well as operation of nuclear reactors. The waste disposal will have to monitored for a century or more. Any permanent geological repository must " guarantee the very long term safety of long-lived and high level waste." Any safety functions must not depend on human intervention which will be problematic at best and must be able to withstand changing circumstances such as seismic activity and extreme weather conditions. Of course, education and training of staff are critical for safe long-term storage of nuclear waste and the report says that sharing of training materials and research facilities will be important.
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/default/files/jrc-report-anagement-spent-fuel-and-waste.pdf
