A planned expansion of the radioactive waste storage site at Vaalputs, Northern Cape, to store highly radioactive spent reactor fuel rods on the surface may threaten local communities’ safety and the province’s food security.
An alarm about the Vaalputs site was raised last week by the Northern Cape section of the TLU agricultural union, with spokesperson Jan Palm decrying what he claimed was “a lack of transparency and public participation” in developing the site.
He said Vaalputs was “located in a sensitive and strategically important agricultural region” and any developments there had “far-reaching implications for organised agriculture, local communities and food security in Namaqualand and the broader Northern Cape”.
Vaalputs lies about 100km southeast of the town of Springbok, Namaqualand, centred on a site of about 10,000 hectares.
The first consignment of low-level radioactive waste (LLW), such as protective clothing, and of intermediate-level waste (ILW), including contaminated reactor parts and fission by-products, arrived at Vaalputs from the Koeberg nuclear power station in 1986.
The LLW is compacted into steel drums and stored in trenches about 10m deep, which, when full, are covered with compacted soil and replanted with indigenous flora; the ILW hand, is mixed with concrete and enclosed in concrete containers lined with metal before being buried at Vaalputs.
According to independent nuclear monitor David Fig in his 2004 book Uranium Road, the original site selection “was highly problematic, an example of environmental injustice in the dying years of apartheid”.
“Candidate sites included Vaalputs, the Richtersveld and the Kalahari. The consultants, considering their options, drew circles around the white-run municipalities in these remote areas of SA.
“Vaalputs topped the list because of low rainfall … deep ground water … and geological stability, though Paulshoek and other indigenous villages, which form part of Leliefontein, are located within 24km of the site. There was no public consultation and local inhabitants faced a fait accompli.”
In June this year, Engineering News reported the statutory National Radioactive Waste Disposal Institute (NRWDI) was seeking to have the Vaalputs operating licence transferred from the National Energy Corporation of SA (Necsa) to itself in July, pending regulatory approval, and was also going ahead with preliminary designs to develop a new interim high-level waste (HLW) storage facility above-ground at the site.
HLW, which mostly consists of depleted reactor fuel-rods whose uranium is still hot and will remain highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, are stored on racks in cooling ponds or in dry storage casks at Koeberg, 30km north of Cape Town.
In March, the NRWDI initiated an environmental impact assessment at Vaalputs of storing the HLW in concrete containers and casks on concrete platforms on the surface as an “interim” measure — because a deep-rock HLW disposal site, which is monstrously expensive, is only pencilled in for development at Vaalputs by 2065.
Meanwhile, Riedewaan Bakardien, CEO of the NRWDI, told the parliamentary portfolio committee on electricity and energy last month that the institute had already awarded an engineering contract for a preliminary design of the HLW storage, saying early cost estimates put the new facility at R1.9bn. A funding plan was being worked out with Eskom and the Development Bank of SA.
“We are mindful of the importance of public consultation in the site selection process and therefore want to assure all stakeholders that NRWDI will comply with all the requirements of the National Nuclear Regulator Act and National Environmental Management Act in terms of public participation,” Bakardien said.
Palm countered: “We are concerned about the extent to which local stakeholders have been included in decision-making processes. Landowners, agricultural organisations and communities must be properly consulted, with clear access to risk assessments, planning documents and alternative options.”
However, National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) spokesperson Gino Moonsamy told Business Day that though the NRWDI’s licence application to run Vaalputs was under consideration and a public information document on this had been out for public comment since March 2021, the NNR “has not received any application for any proposed expansion or upgrade of the currently approved disposal of radioactive waste at the Vaalputs site”.
He said that Vaalputs was “authorised for the receipt and shallow land disposal of solid low level radioactive waste, in metal and concrete containers. Any potential upgrade or expansion of the currently authorised disposal operations would require an application to be made to the NNR”.
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