Nuclear Waste Radioactivity Mostly Disappears After 40 Years: Advocacy Group

‘Within 500 years, you could hold a spent fuel bundle in your hands without risk to your health,’ said Canadians for Nuclear Energy President Chris Keefer.

A general view of the Mochovce nuclear power plant in Mochovce, Slovakia, on Nov. 6, 2023. Janos Kummer/Getty Images

The president of a Canadian nuclear advocacy group has addressed concerns about nuclear waste, saying the radioactivity mostly disappears after 40 years.

Australia is now considering taking up nuclear power after the federal opposition said it would adopt the policy if it wins the election next year.

Since the declaration in June, there has been ongoing debate about the feasibility of nuclear, including concerns around cost, the length of time required, whether a workforce can be trained up, and disposal of nuclear waste.

Australia banned civilian nuclear power in 1998.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has on several occasions, said the amount of waste produced by the preferred small modular reactor (SMR) was small and the size of a can of coke per year.

However, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen refuted this, saying on social media that an SMRs would generate around 12,500 such cans each year.

How Nuclear Waste Is Managed in Canada

Canada has operated nuclear power plants commercially since the 1960s and currently has a fleet of five stations with 22 reactors across three provinces. In the province of Ontario, nuclear accounts for around 60 percent of the power grid.

At a recent inquiry hearing into nuclear power, Chris Keefer, president of the Ontario-based Canadians for Nuclear Energy, said there was a straightforward process for disposing of used fuel rods.

“Our fuel is removed from the reactor. It’s stored in a deep pool, kind of like a swimming pool, but seismically very robust,” he told the Select Committee on Nuclear Energy.

“It cools off for about five or six years, and it’s packaged into concrete and steel canisters, which then sit in a large warehouse.

“These casts are robust. They last hundreds of years.”

The president noted that he had toured those facilities with a dosimeter, a device used to measure ionising radiation exposure. He found there was less radiation exposure from the facilities compared to sitting on a plane and flying from Canada to Australia.

Moreover, Keefer said nuclear waste went through exponential radioactive decay in just a few decades.

“Within 40 years, 99.9 percent of that initial amount of radioactivity is gone … and within 500 years, you could hold a spent fuel bundle in your hands without risk to your health,” he said.

Expert Speaks on Earthquake Risks

The Committee also questioned Heather Hoff, the co-founder of the California-based advocacy group Mothers of Nuclear, about how nuclear power stations in the United States coped with earthquakes.

Hoff, who worked as an operator at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, said the station was among the most robust facilities in her community.

Hoff explained that Diablo Canyon was constructed with the deliberation of potential seismic events.

“You might also know that when Diablo Canyon was originally designed, we knew there was an earthquake fault off the coast, and then later on, we discovered another fault even closer to the plant.

“[This] sounds terrifying, but when we did all the analysis to see what kind of different shaking or increased ground movement that might put on the plant, we found that even with a new fault, there was still enough margin.

“The plant was designed to such a high standard that even with more shaking, the vital systems would not be damaged.”