China says it has ample storage facilities for radioactive waste

China currently boasts ample storage facilities for both low-level and high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power generation, said Liu Lu, director general of radiation source safety supervision, in a news conference on Wednesday.

More than 90 percent of waste generated in nuclear power plants across the country are with low-level radiation. Under rigid supervision, a 1-million-kilowatt nuclear power unit usually generates no more than 50 cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste a year, she disclosed.

It's a regular practice for nuclear power plants to store these low-level radioactive waste for a period of time before transporting them to specialized facilities for centralized disposal, she said. Before 2022, however, there was no such specialized facilities in China.

She said the problem has been resolved as Longhe disposal site, the first in the country for disposing waste from nuclear power generation, went into operation in July 2022.

"With a planned capacity of 1 million cubic meters, this disposal site can meet the disposal needs of radioactive solid waste generated by about 100 nuclear power units in China over a century of operation," she said.

With the majority of its nuclear power facilities operating at a relatively young age, she said the country now also has adequate capacity to manage the limited amount of high-level radioactive waste that has been generated by these facilities.

Most of the high-level radioactive waste generated in nuclear power plants are spent fuel, Liu said. After being removed from the reactor core, they will be first cooled in a spent fuel pool for several years before being transferred to specialized dry storage facilities for long-term storage.

Still containing useful materials, such spent fuel will only be transported to deep geological disposal site for permanent storage after these useful materials are extracted, she said.

With an average age of less than 10 years, nuclear power facilities in China have not generated a large amount of high-level radioactive waste. While each unit is equipped with a spent fuel pool, there are more than one dry storage facility for spent fuel in some nuclear power bases.

"Therefore, the current storage needs for spent fuel generated by nuclear power plants in our country can be met," she said.