India scouting for sites to store nuclear waste

In a first initiative of its kind, India has begun scouting for deep underground sites to store for several decades the nuclear waste generated from its burgeoning atomic power programme.

As a first step, the Department of Atomic Energy will set up an underground laboratory in one of its uranium mines to study qualities of the rock at the mine bottom to decide whether it can be used to store nuclear waste.

"We are looking for a rock formation that is geologically stable, totally impervious and without any fissures," Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee told reporters in Delhi.

He said the DAE plans to set up the underground facility during the 12th Plan Period for studying the Deep Geological Repository to store the high level nuclear waste.

The site should not have experienced any event in recorded history and should have a cooling mechanism using air draft as the nuclear waste would generate decay heat, which has to be removed.

However, as Indian atomic programme is committed to follow the closed fuel cycle the final nuclear waste may not have long half-life as is the case with some other countries.

Currently, the Solid Storage Surveillance Facility at Tarapur near Mumbai is used to store the high-level waste after being immobilised in glass-matrix by a process called vitrification.

The low and intermediate level radioactive wastes generated during a nuclear fuel cycle are treated in an eco-friendly way.

"The facility at Tarapur has an area equivalent to one-fourth of a football ground. This is sufficient to store vitrified waste from two 540 MWe reactors during their full life of 40 years," RK Sinha, director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, said.

The Tarapur facility, designed and constructed indigenously, has 1,800 silos for storage of double-walled canisters containing radioactive waste.

This waste will remain in the facility for 30 years after which it would be transferred to the deep geological repository, Sinha said, adding that a similar facility is also being planned at Kalpakkam.

The repository will have radiation monitors to timely detect any radioactive leak in the region, Banerjee said.