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1-9 Safe-Keeping
Is Safe-Keeping of Radioactive Waste Preferable to Disposal? The Importance of Semantics
In the course of our ongoing dialogue on concepts, Colin Allan and Paul Fehrenbach have suggested ‘safe-keeping’ as a potentially helpful concept in examination and assessment of used fuel management approaches. This paper, originally prepared for Global 99, is reprinted here with the permission of the authors.
This paper suggests a definition for the concept of ‘safe-keeping’ in the context of used nuclear fuel management. “The internationally agreed objective of radioactive waste management is to manage radioactive waste in a manner that protects worker safety, public health and the environment, now and in the future, and, in keeping with the principle of sustainable development, to do so in a way that minimizes the burden passed to future generations. While waste management often entails a number of intermediate steps such as interim storage, the end state is usually considered to be final disposal. As with other terminology used by technical people, disposal is precisely defined within the waste management community to mean placing waste in a state with no intention of retrieving it. However, the term disposal is often interpreted by the general public, and, in some case, by the broader technical community, in its usual sense to mean “to discard” the waste. This leads to a variety of false perceptions that are difficult, if not impossible, to correct. The authors believe that some of these mis-perceptions could be addressed by moving away from the use of the word “disposal” and adopting another term in its place, including a re-statement of the end objective. The objective would be to place the waste in a state of “Safe-keeping” where it could be left indefinitely, potentially forever, pending decision making in the future. Ideally, to minimize the burden placed on future generations, such Safe-keeping would not require further intervention to maintain safety, and to ensure safety, if institutional control were lost, it would be passively safe in the long term."
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