Amusing Nuclear Press Releases

I didn’t expect to find something funny when researching nuclear energy but I did.

I found myself confused by two press releases (1, 2). They weren’t technically complex, just bizarrely similar. Both roughly said that the UK government has decided to store its nuclear waste in one underground facility and will begin searching for a suitable location. My confusion was that the world nuclear news site dated them 11 years apart.

I’ll spoil they mystery now and tell you the original sources were also both 11 years apart.

In 2008 the U.K. released a white paper on managing radioactive waste safely. One of the things they talked about was finding a site for the geological waste disposal. A single site to handle UK nuclear waste.

In 2019 the deputy director for the decommissioning, radioactive material and geological disposal facility sent a letter which contains the sentence:

“This National Policy Statement sits alongside the ‘Working with Communities’ policy document that was published in December 2018, which sets out the process for how we will work with communities to find a location for a geological disposal facility. That process is now underway.”

This department has a decent budget (just the admin for nuclear decommissioning authority increased by £8.2 last year) and though nuclear waste disposal isn’t simple, choosing a location for where to do it shouldn’t sit at the 11 year point on the timeline of how long it takes us to do things.

When gauging my scale of the complexity of challenges that humanity can overcome the book “Now it can be told: the story of the manhatten project” has made it clear to me where our speed limit for innovation, design, and building can be.

11 years and

“That process is now underway”.

We really are the B Arkers from Golgafrincham attempting to design the wheel but getting stuck on what colour it should be. Let’s do better.