The grave of nuclear waste under the sea costs 83 billion USD

A giant undersea grave planned to store Britain's growing amount of radioactive waste will become the country's most expensive and lengthy major infrastructure project.

The Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) project has been delayed for so long that Britain now needs to tunnel through 36km2 ^of rock to create a massive underground cave to contain radioactive waste accumulated over 7 decades of electricity production. civil nuclear, according to Telegraph. The latest estimates from scientists at the Nuclear Waste Service (NWS), the unit in charge of the design, indicate the project will take more than 150 years to complete at a total cost of $83 billion. That cost puts the project far ahead of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant ($57.8 billion) and the HS2 London - Birmingham railway ($75.3 billion), the two largest construction projects in the UK. up to now.

The Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) will be located several kilometers below the seabed. (Photo: Yahoo).

The volume of the royal auditorium Albert Hall is 100,000m3 ^, the amount of radioactive waste alone requires space equal to 8 Albert Hall auditoriums. The cave complex would need to be larger than the waste and include additional tunnels, so the UK would need to excavate twice the volume of rock. The radioactive waste includes 110,000 tonnes of uranium, 6,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel and around 120 tonnes of plutonium, most of it stored at the Sellafield site in Cumbria.

The completed project will be even larger because the estimates do not include waste generated by the next generation of nuclear power plants the government is planning to operate. British authorities have not yet decided where to locate the GDF, but after five decades of consideration, the number of potential locations has been reduced to two. One is located off the coast of Lincolnshire , near the popular seaside resort of Mablethorpe. The other site is off the coast of Cumbria around Copeland , another tourist area. For both locations, the design idea is to dig a tunnel 1,067 m deep, from there dig many horizontal tunnels several kilometers below the sea surface.

There, workers will dig giant silos in impermeable clay and mudstone. Scientists hope they could provide the ultimate repository for Britain's nuclear waste. Once filled with nuclear waste, the bunker will be filled with cement and permanently sealed.

Britain had to carry out such large-scale remediation measures due to the nature of radioactive activity. For example, the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years while that of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years. That means Britain's nuclear waste will remain dangerous even after human civilization disappears. According to Neil Hyatt, director of scientific consulting for NWS, pointing out the enormous scale of the project, storing huge amounts of waste safely for long periods of time, will never come cheap.

Nuclear waste management has been a problem for decades. Claire Corkhill, a professor at the University of Bristol and a member of the government's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Council, said that without a place to store waste, the nuclear industry cannot be sustainable.

Meanwhile, environmental organizations such as Guardians of the East Coast in Mablethorpe and South Copeland Against GDF in Cumbria are organizing protests and collecting signatures on petitions. According to Richard Outram, the organisation's secretary, the tourism industry in the two areas will disappear if they become nuclear waste dumps. During the year 2022, Mablethorpe alone recorded 4.5 million tourist arrivals.