Construction of a long-term repository for nuclear waste in Sweden requires more study, the country's Land and Environmental court said Tuesday.
The court's ruling went counter to the recommendation of the SSM, the Swedish nuclear power regulator, which recommended the repository which would be built at Forsmark in southwestern Sweden, The country currently stores 12,000 metric tons of spent fuel at a storage facility near the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on the east coast, facing the Baltic Sea.
It is expected the repository would take 10 years to build. However, a decision on whether or not to go forward with the project – a decision that will have to be made by the government – will not take place this year, according to Reuters reporting on a statement received from Environment and Energy Minister Karolina Skog.
The Land and Environmental court said that safety of the repository was not guaranteed. “There is still uncertainty about the ability of the capsule to contain the nuclear waste in the long term,” the court said.
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I can understand, and would support, if the Swedish Land and Environmental (L&E) Court rejected or stalled the license for the Forsmark repository due to majority public opposition in the affected communities, but for the L&E Court to dabble in safety and risk is not a credible reason for doing it. Put simply, certainty and deep geological disposal of long-lived, highly-radioactive waste may not meet the next 250,000 years. The overprotective, defense-in-depth, assumptions and algorithms embodied in the related repository performance and post-closure public health and environmental risk analyses and their respective "models" thus serve to ensure that unknown features, events, and processes (FEPs) do not trigger or support releases of radionuclide that may reach the biosphere. SSM as well as a broad range of professionals with relevant education and experience have periodically reviewed and commented upon the aforementioned analyses during the past 20+ years. However, the L&E Court chose to go against the nation's designated regulator as well as international experts and and expert groups, which, unfortunately, only serves to compromise public trust in SSM.