Cumbria County Council's Development Control and Regulation Committee has given planning permission for a new vault to store low level radioactive waste (LLW) near Drigg, just south of Sellafield in West Cumbria.
The site has stored similar waste for the last 50 years, but capacity was due to run out in the next year or so, meaning a new 110,000 cubic metre vault is needed. The new Vault 9 will be 185m long, 137m wide, with walls up to 5.5m high and will be built and operated by LLW Repository Ltd (previously BNG Sellafield Ltd).
Vault 9 is expected to take around 700 ISO steel containers per year, with two-thirds of waste arisings coming from Sellafield and the rest coming from MoD sites, other nuclear power stations, hospitals, universities, medical companies and the oil industry. The new vault will be able to hold 5,500 ISO steel containers - meaning it will have an operational life of around eight years.
The planning permission is for the LLW to be stored rather than disposed of and the waste will be fully retrievable.
The impact on road traffic in the construction of the vault will be minimised by the use of rail transport - 131 rail deliveries will transport the 185,000 tonnes of construction materials needed to build the vault and a further 48 deliveries will be necessary for the 63,000 tonnes of aggregates required for void filling and drainage works on Vault 8. LLW Repository Ltd plans to have two train deliveries per day.
In December, plans were announced for a new Community Fund to recognise the service made by the people of Copeland in hosting the LLW repository. Following negotiations between Cumbria County Council, Copeland Borough Council, Jamie Reed MP and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the Government announced it would pay £1.5m a year into the fund for every year that the repository is operating; in addition to an initial endowment of £10m, which would start the fund off.
The details of how the fund will operate, and how payments are to be made, still need to be finalised. However, the overriding principle will be that that the fund is managed to provide a benefit to the residents of Copeland even after it has ceased to receive waste.
Cllr Geoff Prest, Chairman of the Development Control and Regulation Committee, said:
"The people of West Cumbria are well-used to living alongside the nuclear industry and are well-used to low level radioactive waste being stored near Drigg. But the fact that capacity in the old vaults is now running out after 50 years gave us an opportunity to reconsider the principle of using this site for storing low level radioactive waste.
"It is clear that something had to be done quickly, otherwise there would be nowhere to store this waste. I am confident that this new vault will be more efficient, higher-tech and safer than anything that we have seen built in this country before. It is also important that other areas in the country build their own low level waste repositories so that more waste can be stored at the place it arises."
ENDS
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