Is The New UK Deep Coal Mine A Covert Nuclear Waste Dump

First UK deep coal mine in decades to go ahead

www.bbc.co.uk...

We feel this is a technically difficult coal mining area . . .

www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk...< br />
A technically difficult mining operation very close to a large quantity of high level nuclear waste.

In the long term, high-level radioactive waste (HLW) will need to be stored in a geological underground repository . . .

www.power-technology.com...

Depending on the site, some mines can be used for other purposes . . .

www.westcumbriamining.com...

This is what they did with the Dounreay Shaft. Dug the hole first, then said, "Oh look! A deep hole! What a coincidence! Just the place to dump our radioactive waste."

a reply to: Kester

Tax payer money redistributed to pay off corporation's debt, sounds about right.

Socialize the risk privatize the profits.

Could they one day turn round and say, "lets use this for nuclear waste"?....Sure.

Are they deliberately opening up this mine as a way to store said waste....am not so sure, I don't t think there is anything more to the OP other than pointing out that they "could" do this.

Personally I think it goes against all environmentally friendly claims the government can say they have to allow this but I guess that's a totally different topic.

Sounds like a double win to me. If the area is geologically stable and the waste can't leak out afterwards it sounds like a way to get the real deadly stuff sequestered away in the hope that in a few hundred years we can develop a way to deal with it. And if we go away well...It just sits there for millions of years.

What I would hope for is we get to a Star Trek type utopia where they could go back into the mine and load the stuff onto a cargo carrier. Then just shoot the trash into the Sun and no problems. Or figure out how to manipulate the flow of time and just age the waste by a few million years. Then it's just lead.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Sounds like a 2 birds 1 stone type of deal. UK being an island is going to be short on their own resources making the ones they do have important and probably aren't left untapped as in larger more resource rich countries that have more flexibility to do so. Also being short on space probably struggle finding places to dump nuke waste.

a reply to: Kester

Good spot mate but worth remembering that we make a lot of profit taking other nations nuclear waste (which we unashamedely used in our Brexit negotiations!).

Deep underground seems better than Sellafield......

a reply to: Kester

Absolutely not.

The structure of the UK government would make keeping something like that secret all but impossible. Most of The functions in the UK government are handled by the civil service which is a non partisan body that exists outside of politics. In order to do something like that you would have to involve the civil service, and they would have to do things that are illegal (the UK has a lot of laws regarding the process that would need to be broken in order to get this through in secret), and asking the civil service to brake the law is like lining them up and giving them the phone number of the whistleblower hotline.

You'd need several years of public discourse just to get the idea of the ground. That's how they do things in the uk. Everything has to be done by the book of not at all. It's why it takes them 5 years just to propose a new road or train line.

a reply to: Kester

I wouldn't put it past them;

Plutonium Dumped off Channel Isles

Investigations by the Jersey authorities have revealed that thousands of drums of nuclear waste dumped in the sea just north of the Channel Islands contained plutonium, contrary to claims made by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

...More than 58,000 drums filled with nuclear waste from sites such as Harwell and Aldermaston were dumped 10 miles north of Alderney between 1950 and 1963 in an area known as the Hurd Deep.

..."Some drums disposed of in 1951 contained plutonium/polonium-contaminated laboratory waste, probably from Aldermaston," said Dr Romerill. "While such disposal was permissible at the time, such plutonium-contaminated waste would no longer be considered as "low level'" and would be disposed of deep underground."

The Hurd Deep is not far from me.

originally posted by: ntech
What I would hope for is we get to a Star Trek type utopia where they could go back into the mine and load the stuff onto a cargo carrier. Then just shoot the trash into the Sun and no problems.

I've actually always wondered why they don't already dispose of nuclear waste that way.

Its not exactly like they'd need some futuristic sci-fi type technology to do it. I mean, just pack it all into a rocket and shoot it out into space... problem solved, right?

a reply to: Subaeruginosa
Its not energy efficient to use rockets to send nuke waste into the sun-theres thousands upon thousands of tonnes of it already.
Plus it would cost to much and make our bills rocket

And if there is an accident,we could end up polluting the atmosphere and whole planet with radioactive particles and wipe out all life on Earth.

Its all round not a good idea.

So first off, countries need a fall back for energy. While coal is the worse fo the lot in terms of pollution etc, there is alot of it and it makes sense in the term of an emergency reserve.

In order to be able to mine coal you also have to maintain the requisite know how and the only way to do that is to actively practice the skill. its the same reason you will see Navies building ships they may not need simply to preserve an industrial base.

Its an island so having a backup system is always a good idea.

Now for the waste idea. If its geologically safe, at some point we will need to address the issue of what to do with 70+ years of radioactive waste. Interment in a deep hole for now is our best bet.

While the star trek solution seems cool, the risk of rocket failure would make it prohibitive at best. Furthermore, it would be incredibly expensive