Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim that the annual waste generated by a small modular nuclear reactor amounts to the size of a Coke can is a hard claim to swallow, experts say, with such facilities likely to generate multiple tonnes of high-level radioactive waste each year.where a Coalition government would build seven nuclear reactors, vowing to overturn the federal ban on the controversial energy source and complete the first two facilities by 2037.
Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe of Griffith University’s school of environment and science said it was safe to say an SMR would generate many tonnes of waste per year, and it was likely that waste would be more radioactive than the waste from a large-scale reactor. Dutton’s Coke can reference appears to be based on previous claims by the global nuclear industry, which says the waste a large-scale reactor would generate from supplying one person’s annual energy needs would fill one can.
There are no permanent repositories anywhere in the world capable of storing high-level radioactive waste, but Finland and Sweden are preparing to open deep underground storage sites.By way of comparison, a 1000-megawatt coal plant, the same size as a large-scale nuclear reactor, burns more than 3 million tonnes of coal a year and generates around 300,000 tonnes of ash.