Nuclear Waste Piling Up in United Kingdom

摘要

The UK government has launched a process to find a volunteer community who would be willing to host a £12 billion geological disposal facility for nuclear waste. It's about time - the initiative comes after seven decades of successive governments putting the decision off. The situation is similar in many other countries, with dangerous nuclear material being stored unsafely because of political inaction. In the UK, nuclear waste is currently kept in safe but high-maintenance conditions, with some canisters deteriorating, at Sellafield in Cumbria. This is costing tax payers £3 billion per year. The new geological disposal facility is a vast underground bunker, to be buried around 500m below the Earth's surface. It is intended to safely store approximately one Wembley Stadium's worth of highly radioactive waste that has been generated over the past 70 years. Here, it will be isolated from the biosphere -and human populations - for the 100,000 years it will take for the radioactivity to decay to safe levels.