Drink up: Peter Dutton needs one billion empty Coke cans to store his nuclear waste
Australia’s federal opposition leader Peter Dutton claims that: “If you look at a 450-megawatt reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year.”
Let’s help him out with the maths.
Here are the figures on waste generated across the nuclear fuel cycle to operate one conventional light-water uranium reactor (1,000 megawatts (MW) or 1 gigawatt (GW)) for one year:
1. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of low-level radioactive tailings waste at uranium mines (unless it is an in-situ leach mine, which doesn't produce tailings waste but does pollute groundwater e.g. the Beverley Four Mile and Honeymoon mines in SA).
Here's a rough calculation: 10 million tonnes of low-level radioactive tailings waste are generated at the SA Olympic Dam uranium mine per year to produce enough uranium for 25 power reactors, which equates to 400,000 tonnes of tailings waste per reactor per year.
That equates to approx. 230,000 cubic metres or 1,050 million (1.05 billion) Coke cans of tailings waste … just to produce enough uranium for one reactor for one year. (The volume of one Coke can is 380 cubic centimetres or 0.00038 cubic metres (m3).)
2. About 170 tonnes of depleted uranium waste at enrichment plants (to supply one reactor for one year). That equates to 34 m3 or approx. 89,000 empty Coke cans.
3. 25-30 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (high-level nuclear waste) per year. The volume is about 10 cubic metres. Mr. Dutton would need 26,000 empty Coke cans. There is no operating deep underground repository for high-level waste anywhere in the world, and the only operating deep repository for intermediate-level waste, WIPP in the USA, suffered a chemical explosion in an underground nuclear waste barrel in 2014 due to lax management, cost cutting and inadequate regulation.
Another 300 m3 of low- and intermediate-level waste generated at a conventional 1 GW nuclear power plant per year, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. This comprises contaminated equipment, liquid waste, etc. Another 790,000 Coke cans.
There are also large and problematic waste streams at nuclear reprocessing plants if the spent fuel is reprocessed (about one-third of spent fuel is reprocessed, the other two-thirds is stored pending disposal). Let’s assume the spent fuel is not reprocessed.
Overall, to hold the waste generated across the nuclear fuel cycle to operate a 1 GW reactor for one year, Mr. Dutton needs over one billion empty Coke cans per year.
Excluding the front-end waste (at uranium mines and enrichment plants), and including only the waste generated at nuclear power plants, Mr. Dutton needs 816,000 empty Coke cans per year.
Just the spent nuclear fuel alone requires 26,000 empty Coke cans per year.
Small modular reactors
The Coalition proposes large, gigawatt-scale reactors in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, and small modular reactors (SMRs) in SA and WA.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume Mr. Dutton’s 450 MW SMRs are based on conventional light-water uranium technology, like the US NuScale design or the UK Rolls-Royce design or Russia’s floating plant.
And let’s ignore complications like plans to use higher-enriched uranium fuel (known as HALEU) in SMRs (resulting in lower volumes of more toxic waste) and let’s ignore SMR inefficiencies (resulting in more waste per unit of electricity generated compared to large reactors).
So we can simply scale the figures down from a 1 GW reactor.
For a 450 MW SMR (the size contemplated by Rolls-Royce), Mr. Dutton would need over 450 million empty Coke cans per year to accommodate waste generated across the nuclear fuel cycle.
Excluding front-end waste (at uranium mines and enrichment plants), he would need 367,000 empty Coke cans per year.
Just the spent nuclear fuel alone would require about 11,700 empty Coke cans per year.
A question for Mr. Dutton: what does he plan to do with all those Coke cans filled with nuclear waste?
Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and co-author of the ACF’s new report, ‘Power Games: Assessing coal to nuclear proposals in Australia’.