Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR NORMAN
HARRISON, MR
SANDY MCWHIRTER,
MR MARC
MURRAY AND
DR BETH
TAYLOR
19 JANUARY 2005
Q20 Mr Sarwar: Presumably
most of your employees live in Thurso, which is too far away from
any major centre of employment? Once Dounreay is decommissioned,
of course these people will move away to find jobs in other parts
of Scotland and the United Kingdom. Do you not think that Thurso
will become little more than a ghost town?
Mr McWhirter: I think if we did
nothing that would certainly be the case, but as I think we have
demonstrated in the statements we have made on the socio-economic
development plan, we plan to work with both the local enterprise
agencies to ensure that that does not happen.
Mr Harrison: I do not think this
is a direct answer to your question, but painting the picture
of a society in Caithness and North Sutherland, there is a culture
that a number of people work on the oil and gas rig industry,
and they are itinerant, working away from home and then returning
home for fixed periods. That in my mind is not an ideal situation
for any area of society, but it does reflect the flexibility and
tenacity and the skills of the population there to take on additional
work and take it on an itinerant nature if necessary. That does
not answer your question, but it is just painting a bit more of
the picture.
Q21 Mr Sarwar: When members
of this Committee visited Dounreay they were told that the famous
fast reactor sphere would not be dismantled but retained, possibly
as a science exhibition or education centre. Is this still the
intention? If so, how many jobs do you think such a centre might
provide?
Dr Taylor: I would just like to
just mention the Caithness Horizons project, which is linked to
this, and this is where we decided about two or three years ago
that rather than invest money in refurbishing our rather elderly
visitor centre next door to the site we would put money into a
partnership with the town council and the Heritage Society, and
we hope there are other people like Scottish Natural Heritage
that will join us eventually, but we are the core three partners,
to refurbish Thurso town hall and create there a real high quality
visitor centre, which is about a lot more than Dounreay but would
include the Dounreay story, that hopefully could be the start
of building more on the tourist potential of Caithness. Lots of
people will tell you that Caithness has just as many natural and
archaeological attractions as Orkney, and yet if you look at what
the Orcadians have managed to do compared with what Caithness
has done, then they are owed a huge compliment. It would be so
lovely if—it needs more than just this project, but we do
hope that this project could be a kicking-off point for a tourist
industry in Caithness.
Mr Harrison: It is actually a
great compliment to Orkney, the way they have organised the tourist
attractions, but this is not point scoring; there are more archaeological
sites in Caithness than any other county in the UK, it is just
that a lot of them are not terribly accessible, and this is certainly
not a developed tourist industry.
Chairman: I am sure Alistair Carmichael
is not going to bite—
Mr Carmichael: You will bear in mind
the importance of quality as opposed to quantity.
Chairman: I was wrong. He did bite. Did
you want to come back on this, Ann McKechin?
Q22 Ann McKechin: Yes.
Since we have asked for evidence we have actually had quite a
large number of submissions that have come in from the Caithness
area, including the Dounreay Action Group[1],
and they perhaps seem to be a little more sceptical about the
proposals for alternative employment and economic development.
A number of them, their argument is that there is an argument
for Dounreay to be established as a fully serviced and licensed
nuclear site and for a new nuclear energy site to be created in
the UK with Dounreay being foremost because of the skills and
experience which have already accumulated over the years. I appreciate
that obviously you are not responsible in any way for commissioning
of nuclear energy units or for the policy in this regard, but
clearly it is a subject of concern in the local area, and clearly
there seems to be perhaps some level of support. I do not know
if you want to comment on how you think that is, and whether you
would want to have a nuclear energy plant on the site, and whether
or not that is feasible.
Mr Harrison: I
think I gave some high-level views and, as you rightly pointed
out, the UKAEA—our focus at Dounreay is the environmental
restoration of the site, and our business has no input to the
debate about future nuclear generation or indeed the building
of one. But as a personal opinion it is beyond doubt that the
skills both to construct and commission a modern nuclear power
plant undoubtedly exist in Dounreay, and certainly if such a programme
were to exist I am sure it would be seriously considered. I emphasise
that that is a personal view. I do not know whether my colleagues
want to add anything to that?
Mr McWhirter: I think we all have
very personal views, and there is a theory that says if you lock
ten nuclear engineers in a room for more than four hours you will
end up with ten separate reactor systems being designed, and they
will all be different, and they will be different to anything
else that has ever been invented. I think we have to look at the
Dounreay site and see what it is. It never was a nuclear power
station. Some of the infrastructure that is there may well be
able to support a nuclear programme, but it would need to be modified
very significantly. What I am perhaps more excited about would
be the skill sets that we have in our workforce, because we are
having some difficulty at the moment, as you can probably gather,
with the costs associated with nuclear decommissioning. You may
ask why that is the case, and the answer is very simple: that
is that the plants that were designed in the 1950s and 1960s were
designed to operate; they were never, ever designed to be decommissioned.
We now know how difficult it is to know what the tricks of the
trade are. The number of times that people say "Gosh, if
only they had!"—and we know now what they ought to
do. My view is that if the UKAEA has any role whatsoever to play
in the renaissance of nuclear power it would be to feed in the
expertise that we are now gaining in decommissioning in order
to have a solution for the design of the new build.
Chairman: Can we move on now and look
at the management of radioactive waste. David Hamilton?
Q23 David Hamilton: Chair,
I am not going to continue the debate about nuclear energy, because
that would take us to the $20,000 question—or I should have
said the $20 billion question—so I am not going down that
road. In your paper you indicate three types of radioactive waste
produced at Dounreay: exempt, low level, intermediate level. Can
you explain to us in more detail how low-level and intermediate-level
waste are currently being managed and disposed of? I take the
view that the vast majority of the public out there, like many
of the politicians, do not distinguish between all the different
parts of nuclear. I think this is a most important area, and I
would like to get some clarity in relation to that part of it.
Mr Harrison: I can go down the
areas in turn, really. When we are talking about low-level waste,
certainly we are producing—we have in the past and we will
be as we decommission the site—large volumes of low-level
waste. I have some figures here: 33,000 cubic metres of low-level
waste have been disposed of historically. The historical disposal
route for low-level waste was in the form of pits excavated and
constructed on the site, running through the tens of years of
our disposal of low-level waste on the site. Those pits—there
were in fact six in total—are now full, and those pits have
now been sealed over. Our next approach, as we produce new volumes
of low-level waste, is we are looking to establish an approved
route to transfer volumes of that low-level waste to the repository
at Drigg in West Cumbria, as one route for disposal of waste.
Secondly, we are entering into and progressing through a process—more
initials, I am afraid—BPEO—the best practicable environmental
option—for disposal of low-level waste. One of the significant
options that we are considering is on the site of Dounreay, for
disposal of Dounreay low-level waste, we are looking to establish
a further repository where it can be stored in what would be potentially
a retrievable manner. It would be stored in underground storage
areas, so that is a very high-level view of our approach to low-level
waste. One area that is very important in this business that we
are in is environmental restoration—it is a curious business
that produced waste—and it is very important both environmentally
and managerially in terms of the cost that this waste is streamed
appropriately. What we have at Dounreay and we have expertise
elsewhere in the company is the expert knowledge on how best to
stream this waste. You can appreciate that if a large container
of material was categorised as low-level waste, if in fact half
of that is exempt waste which can be disposed of in a normal licensed
manner into normal landfill, the cost of that exempt disposal
is considerably less as opposed to disposal of low-level waste.
So it makes damned good environmental sense to put great effort
into the streaming of this waste, and extremely good cost sense
in saving money again for the taxpayer. That represents a big
managerial effort for the site to correctly and appropriately
produce these waste streams. Beth, do you want to give any more
detail on the LLW BPEO before I move on to ILW?
Dr Taylor: Yes, if this is of
interest. It is one thing which we were very proud of, actually,
that we went through this. The point of this Best Practical Environmental
Options process is really to compare apples and pears, as I understand
it: you have to balance costs and things like transport against
any impact on the environment or the volume of waste you produce,
and the only way to do that is to weigh all these different impacts
according to how people feel about them. So although Norman and
his experts I trust to tell me what those impacts are, we or they
do not have any better handle on what the best balance between
the different attributes might be, so it is really important to
get people, get the public, involved in that, really. We did go
through a process with the low-level waste BPEO where we had a
number of different panels of stakeholders who all sat down, took
a day, went through this, evaluated where they felt the right
balance ought to be, and we then wrote this up and put it out
into the public domain for comments from other people. For us,
this is not something we have been used to doing, and we are quite
proud at what we have done with it. That is the BPEO which we
hope will be published, I think, next month now.
Mr Harrison: Yes. In the area
of ILW in terms of the long-term solution a committee, which you
will be familiar with—the Committee on Radioactive Waste
Management (CoRWM)—the long-term solution sits with them,
and they will be making recommendations to ministers next year
in 2006. But the issue for myself and my team at Dounreay is that
we are producing intermediate-level waste—ILW—at the
site as we decommission. Our job is to get this ILW waste into
a stable form that makes it safe for long-term storage or disposal.
A typical example would be in a purpose-built stainless steel
drum, if it is a liquid-based ILW. We mix it in a chemical process,
but essentially mix it with cement and make it into a solid mass
where it is stable, it is contained within the drum, and in the
right storage facilities, it is then in a stable manner and can
be stored for a long period. Our plans show a small number of
secure stores on the site, designed—it is a sort of civil
engineering question this, how long does a concrete structure—how
long is the integrity worth?—but we have said we will target
100 years for these ILW waste stores with the sound and reasoned
view that the recommendations next year from the Committee for
Radioactive Waste Management will be such that on a national basis
decisions can be made, structures built, et cetera, et cetera,
for the national solution to the ILW waste.
Q24 David Hamilton: When
is that report scheduled for next year? When is that report scheduled
to be brought forward? You said 2006.
Mr Harrison: 2006, yes.
Q25 David Hamilton: The
early part of 2006?
Mr Harrison: That is a good question.
Q26 David Hamilton: The
reason for asking, Chairman, is that when the nuclear debate is
taking place this to me is a key element. It is not just about
whether they build power stations or whatever; it is about how
they dispose. If you answered that question, that is why the report
I think is very important, and that question deserves to be brought
back—that would actually assist many politicians.
Mr Harrison: I think we can come
back to you with the exact date of that.
Dr Taylor: It is an issue for
CoRWM, actually, and I do not know whether you are taking evidence
from them as well; but we could certainly come back with more
information.[2]
Chairman: Do you want
to come in on this, Mike?
Q27 Mr Weir: You were
saying that they will be reporting next year, but as I take it
at the moment there is no long-term strategy for getting rid of
intermediate-level waste. One of the things when we visited Dounreay
that concerned us was evidence of what had been chucked in the
shaft, if I can put it that way, over the years, and leakage of
intermediate-level radiation, if we understood it correctly, from
that shaft. How can you reassure the Committee that irrespective
of what CoRWM is going to come up with next year, that the leakages
from the Dounreay shaft will be stopped and there will be no recurrence
of that?
Mr McWhirter: I hope I have some
good news for you here. The Dounreay shaft contains intermediate-level
waste—that is true. The rock in the vicinity of the Dounreay
shaft is extremely impermeable; water does not flow through the
rock. It does, however, flow through the very thin fissures between
the Caithness slabs, and that results in a very, very small quantity
of radioactivity ending up in the environment. By the time, of
course, it reaches the environment it is so dilute that it is
no longer intermediate-level waste, it is low-level waste. Nonetheless
UKAEA recognises that the shaft is an inappropriate disposal facility,
and before we can remove the material that is in there it is necessary
to stop water getting into the shaft. We have in the past looked
at a number of geological methods to stop water getting in, and
we have now fixed on a new technology involving high-pressure
grout into the area, and we have a project underway now, two years
ahead of programme, to inject a grout curtain around the shaft
to prevent it leaking. The effect of that in fact is to remove
the principal hazard which is posed by the shaft, which is a hazard
to the environment rather than a hazard to anyone in the immediate
vicinity. So the answer there is to stop the water getting into
the shaft, that stops the water getting back out, by using technology
that is now available. That actually has a very, very good impact
on the environment. At the moment we remove in the order of 20
cubic metres of water per day from the Dounreay shaft. This is
filtered, processed as appropriate, and discharged to the sea.
Once we isolate the shaft from the environment, even that modest
amount of radioactivity will not reach the sea, so the shaft will
be rendered relatively benign until we get the material out of
there.
Q28 Mr Weir: Do you still
intend to remove the material from the shaft?
Mr McWhirter: Yes.
Q29 Mr Weir: How long
is that likely to take?
Mr McWhirter: The reference strategy
shows a programme of about seven years, however there are many
unknowns associated with the Dounreay shaft. I think it is important
that Members of your Committee should realise how the hazards
associated with some of these plants change over a period of time.
As you rightly pointed out and observed in your question, the
current problem with the Dounreay shaft is an environmental one.
Once we isolate the shaft from the environment then that problem
has gone away. When we start to remove the material from the Dounreay
shaft, the hazard then moves away from the environment to the
people who operate the removal equipment and, more specifically,
those who maintain it. We have a duty of care to use the ALARP
principle—as low as reasonably practicable—to minimise
the radiation levels et cetera that people are exposed to by removing
the material and, indeed, maintaining the equipment. We are still
trying to get the best possible equipment, the best possible methodologies,
to remove material from the shaft. The current thinking is one
of bulk removal, maceration and then, as Norman pointed out, planting
it into a cementitious grout in a stainless steel box. On that
basis, the removal programme should be in the order of seven years.
Q30 Chairman: Thank you
very much. I think we saw the start of that when we were at Dounreay.
Mr McWhirter: You would have done,
yes.
Q31 Chairman: I think
we also heard that nobody quite knew what was down there, that
there are no specific records of what has gone down the shaft,
is that right?
Mr McWhirter: That is true. I
think we have to remember that the shaft itself was licensed actually
as an intermediate-level waste disposal facility, not a storage
facility. In a disposal facility there is no need to keep records,
or at least that was the thinking of the day, on the basis that
you would not ever retrieve it. In a library you keep very detailed
records of where the books are so you can recover them but if
you were to just chuck them in the bin you would not take any
notice at all. Yes, there are some levels of uncertainty. Having
said that, for a variety of other reasons associated with the
fissile material movement we do have records that indicate how
much we feel is in there and we can infer a whole load of other
stuff.
Mr Murray: Can I just add to that.
It demonstrates the sort of challenge that we have ahead of us
that UKAEA is tackling now in order to environmentally restore
the nuclear legacy at Dounreay. The time when the shaft was filled
up, I was not even born. There is an element there that we are
restoring the environment, we are using the best technical approaches
and techniques in order to do that and we are getting there. We
have provided a programme which is funded, which is on an appropriate
timescale and we are doing a very good job of it.
Q32 Chairman: You have
now made the rest of us feel very, very old.
Mr Harrison: Including myself.
Q33 David Hamilton: Can
I come back to the grouting of the shaft. I am not an engineer,
I am an ex-miner. The last colliery that I worked in was just
3,000 feet deep and they brought a South African company in, which
was the best in the world, to try to grout to stop water coming
into the shaft. That was 10 years ago. Over a million pounds was
spent but they could not contain the water, a million gallons
a day were coming through the shaft. How confident are you that
technology has developed and evolved in that period of time that
you can actually stop the water moving through the shaft?
Mr McWhirter: We are very fortunate
because we are only 65 metres deep. If the shaft was 3,000 metres
deep we would have similar problems to those in the coal industry,
I would think. There are new grouting techniques that involved,
in the first instance, cementitious grout that is very, very fine
and goes into the cracks and forms an adequate seal with the differential
pressures that would be consistent with a 65 metre deep excavation.
There are also chemical techniques that we could employ as well
if that was less than satisfactory. It is important to realise
that we remove about 20 cubic metres of water from the shaft,
nothing like the volumes you would be removing from a coalmine,
and even if it were only 95% effective that would reduce the quantity
that would need to be removed to a miniscule amount.
Q34 David Hamilton: To
allow you to get the material out of the shaft that you do not
require.
Mr McWhirter: Yes.
Q35 Chairman: Can you
perhaps tell us how many instances there have been of radioactive
waste and readings that have been found on the beach adjoining
Dounreay or on neighbouring farmland?
Mr Harrison: In terms of particles
that have been found on the adjoining beach at Sandside Bay, it
is of the order of 50 particles. I will give you an exact figure
but it is 50 give or take a couple. Somebody jump in if I am way
out.
Dr Taylor: It is in the 40s but
could we send a detailed statement after this meeting?
Chairman: Yes, thank you very much.[3]
Q36 John Robertson: You
have to appreciate that the biggest thing the population has is
fear, fear of radioactivity, albeit as small as you say it is,
that is leaking out into the water. Can you tell me how far away
have they detected measurements? Does it stop at Orkney and Shetland
or does it go further to Norway or whatever?
Mr Murray: We have undertaken
surveys from Dunnet Head across to Melvich, just along the coast,
of the foreshore environments. Basically there is a cache of particles
just off the Dounreay coast. You will appreciate that the Pentland
Firth between Caithness and Orkney is very, very fast moving and
essentially if a particle was to move into that it would be lost
within the environment, it would not be detected, it would move
into deep water. From an environmental point of view, that is
probably the best thing that could happen to it because it would
be within deep water and it would never be detected again and
never come into contact with the natural environment in that sense.
In essence, we do believe that there is a cache of particles just
off the coast of Dounreay within a sandbank. We undertake diver
surveys every summer in order to try to detect where those particles
are and try to retrieve them and to monitor the movements of the
particles by clearing areas and then going back and re-surveying
those areas. In terms of the quantities of particles the extent
is unknown at the moment because it is an historical feature from
the site. We do believe that the release happened during the 1950s
and 1960s. At the moment there is no way of knowing when that
release occurred and how much was there, the quantity. Certainly
outwith the near shore environment at Dounreay there have been
particles detected to that extent.
Q37 John Robertson: Correct
me if I am wrong, but I am sure I was told that this cache of
radioactivity that you are talking of is on the move and what
started fairly close to the shore has moved out.
Mr Murray: We are fortunate within
the Dounreay environment in that there is a central movement which
should keep it within a certain area. If it goes without that
area then it is lost within the Pentland Firth. We have never
found any particles outwith that area.
Q38 John Robertson: We
were told that when you send your divers down to check that your
divers are getting further and further out. It is not that the
cache is going away, it is just that it is moving.
Mr Murray: Perhaps what is happening
is that we are extending our diver surveys. What we are trying
to do is to develop techniques for remotely operated vehicles
to go out because there is probably more danger in a diver spending
so many hours underneath the water and the danger of a diver being
killed rather than coming into contact with a particle. We are
trying to develop a remotely operated vehicle approach so that
we can undertake wider surveys. We cannot tell you within a parameter
percentage how confident we are where those particles are but
we have a very good idea where they are to the near shore environment
and there are further studies ongoing. We can provide you with
further information on that if you want.
John Robertson: That would be helpful.[4]
Q39 Mr Weir: We have heard
these terms bandied about of "management of waste",
"disposal of waste" and "storage of waste"
and there seem to be conflicting opinions as to what should be
done with waste, whether it should be stored on the surface or
buried in a repository. I wonder if you can address the question
of what is the qualitative difference between storage and disposal.
For intermediate-level waste it does seem to me that there is
no such thing really as disposal, it is stored for a long period,
presumably in some sort of secured site, it could not just be
buried in the ground in a drum and left there. Would it be unfair
to summarise UKAEA's position as being to put the waste in a drum,
cover it with cement and leave the decision of how to deal with
it ultimately to politicians and civil servants? What is the difference
between disposal and storage in these circumstances?
Mr McWhirter: That is an interesting
question and it is one where the general public can easily become
confused.
1 Ev 59 Back
2
Note by witness: UKAEA have submitted their socio economic
plan to NDA. We expect this plan to be public in May/June and
will forward a copy to the SAC when available. Back
3
Not published Back
4
Not published Back
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