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The geological storage of nuclear waste

The French law passed in 2006 on the sustainable management of radioactive materials and wastes establishes storage in deep geological formations as the reference solution for the “permanent disposal” of high-activity long-lived radioactive waste. In 2000, France opened an underground laboratory in Bure (northeastern France) to study the feasibility of this solution, and in particular the confinement properties of clay deposits 500 meters below ground. In a report submitted to the government in 2005, the ANDRA (National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management) concluded that this option was indeed viable.
Should this type of disposal be approved following a public consultation scheduled for 2013, the first radioactive “parcels” could be buried at the Bure site in 2025. According to the researchers, the containers protecting the vitrified nuclear waste will be able to withstand corrosion by moisture for around 1,000 years. After that point, underground water will begin to corrode the vitrified waste, but so slowly that it will take 100,000 to 200,000 years for radioactive elements to be released into the clay deposits. Even then, radioactivity is expected to diffuse very slowly in the clay.
As there are still scientific uncertainties, there is no plan to permanently seal the underground storage galleries of the Bure site before 2125, which should provide enough time to opt for a different solution if necessary. Even so, it seems fairly obvious that it will be impossible to guarantee continued awareness of these contaminated sites from generation to generation over hundreds of thousands of years. By way of comparison, we no longer understand the meaning of the megaliths at Stonehenge, which were erected a mere 5,000 years ago. Nonetheless, burying nuclear waste is currently considered to be the “least worst” solution.