OPINION | DAVID HESS
What’s in a word?
The nuclear sector needs to become more comfortable with the ‘W’ word. Waste is a fact of the nuclear business, and the industry definitely needs to reconsider some of the orthodoxies in how this material is treated
David Hess, Senior VP DeepGeo
HE MOST FREQUENTLY VOICED AND likely still the most passionately felt objection to nuclear energy you will encounter today is nuclear waste. People tend to get upset, reasonably enough, at the creation of what they perceive to be an immensely hazardous substance that
will last for millions of years, poisoning plants and animals and no doubt glowing with an otherworldly light. The perceptions are of course wrong, and lack vital
context on how nuclear materials are managed and just how dangerous they are compared to other hazards. There are many excellent essays on this already and there is no need to endlessly repeat them. Simply put, nuclear waste is an everyday industrial operational challenge, not a planetary threat. With appropriate management, the environmental impacts can be kept rather benign.
It can be safely assumed that public fears relate mainly
to what we in the industry would call ‘high-level waste’, as this is the most long-lived and radioactive material. It is unclear whether this frightened fraction of the public understand the different categories of nuclear wastes – the differences in radioactivity, half-lives, volumes, physical forms and management practices – but they probably do not. If they did, then they would be more than halfway to putting risks in context and their fears to rest. It is after all hard to maintain a sense of mortal terror at
a picture of some dirty gloves and used overalls. It’s at least plausible with a fuel assembly, although correctly realising this is the subject matter rather than yellow barrels with glowing green ooze is a step in the right direction. At this point however things start to get linguistically
©Alexy Kovynev
tricky, since most high level ‘waste’ refers to spent nuclear fuel and, well, as everyone in the industry knows, this is technically reusable. Some countries have plans to recycle this material. A few even do that already. The relative merits of the once-through versus the closed fuel cycle is a debate for another time. Suffice to say that while fuel recycling is possible there is still a long way to go before we might expect it to be the global norm. For many countries today recycling just does not make a lot of sense. A lot of spent nuclear fuel is currently destined for direct disposal. One result of the ‘spent fuel versus waste’ nomencalture
debate is that in public communication, the first response to concerns over nuclear waste is often an expert wanting to tell them that what they are talking about is not actually waste.
This can be headache inducing – changing all instances of the phrase ‘nuclear waste’ to ‘spent nuclear fuel’, where that is even accurate, can come across more like sleight of hand than a genuine attempt to improve understanding and build support. The funny thing is that this actually seems to work. If
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you talk to nuclear communicators on the ground doing stakeholder engagement for real projects, many will tell you not to use the ‘W’ word as some people react very
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