Identifying future risks to nuclear decommissioning: understanding the UK’s landfill infrastructure challenges

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority needed to understand how evolving waste management legislation and market dynamics could impact their ability to dispose of radioactive waste from decommissioning activities over the long term of their decommissioning mission. CEA’s strategic assessment provided the NDA with critical insights to safeguard radioactive waste disposal infrastructure across the UK’s decommissioning programme for decades to come.

Landfill landscape

Policy shifts toward waste reduction and recycling are reducing the volume of waste going to landfills in alignment with the Waste Hierarchy. While environmentally positive, this trend threatens the financial viability of landfills, as volumes decrease, resulting in several operators closing sites before they have reached capacity. This trend has already been realised in Scotland with the announcement to close a geographically important landfill site, forcing waste to travel longer distances and increasing both costs and carbon footprint.

Our approach

CEA led a collaborative project with TÜV SÜD and specialist partners, combining waste industry knowledge with extensive stakeholder networks to map the evolving landscape. CEA led two workshops and individual interviews with key players across the waste management sector from environmental regulators (Environment Agency, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, National Resources Wales) to landfill operators, waste producers, local planning authorities (representing Nuclear Legacy Advisory Forum and Scottish Council Committee on Radioactive Substances) and government departments including DEFRA.

Our established relationships across the regulatory and operational community enabled positive engagement and brought together stakeholders who rarely have the opportunity to discuss shared challenges. Environmental regulators, waste management operators and policy makers discovered they were addressing different aspects of the same, systemic issue, creating opportunities for better coordination.

Results

Our analysis revealed this wasn’t just a nuclear industry problem, but a systemic challenge requiring cross-government coordination. We delivered a variety of products to map out the landfill infrastructure including planning information to support the quantitative capacity model on disposal of commercial and radioactive waste developed by TÜV SÜD, policy position statements, and stakeholder insight reports. Rather than just providing a traditional report, we also created a strategic presentation that clearly communicated findings and actionable recommendations that can be shared more widely in the NDA.

These products identified specific pressure points over the coming decades, while our stakeholder engagement revealed the rapid decision-making timelines of commercial operators versus the longer planning cycles of nuclear decommissioning. This evidence enabled the NDA to have a better understanding of future challenges and how to mitigate these through more structured engagement with government departments and the rest of the industry.