Mungo Soggot and Christian Figenschou
SOUTH AFRICA’S main nuclear waste dump has been leaking radioactive material for years. Metal drums filled with radioactive waste and buried at the Atomic Energy Corporation’s (AEC) Vaalputs site in the Northern Cape have leaked, while concrete blocks used to contain more dangerous waste have also failed.
Documents in the Mail & Guardian’s possession quote a senior AEC official slating Vaalputs management, warning of heavy radioactive leakage at the site stretching back years, and alleging that Vaalputs also stores high-level radioactive waste – in breach of its licence.
It also emerged this week that Vaalputs’s operations have been suspended, on the orders of the Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS),apparently amid concerns about its management. AEC confirmed the moratorium and said it was struggling to meet the requirements of its licence because of declining government funding.
The leakage and Vaalputs’s subsequent suspension fuels fears about South Africa’s nuclear waste programme. Leaked material can remain a health hazard for hundreds of years. Last year, massive amounts of radioactivity were discovered around Pelindaba, site of the apartheid regime’s uranium-enrichment unit, where drums of waste had been hastily buried.
The potential danger from the Vaalputs leakage was starkly underlined by recent floods in the area, which could have carried the radioactive material further afield. It sits close to the town of Springbok. One of the main advantages of Vaalputs trumpeted by the AEC when it was licensed in 1990 was that its Namaqualand location was in a low-rainfall area.
Industry officials said this week the sequence of events pointed to serious weaknesses in the AEC’s nuclear waste management.
The Council for Nuclear Safety started investigating last October after AEC officials noticed leaks from 22 metal drums containing low-level nuclear waste. The waste includes low-level solid waste – used protective clothing and equipment – and intermediate-level waste, such as filters and resins.
The drums were sealed with clay – which should contain the leakage – but the council decided Vaalputs’s operations would be suspended until such problems had been overcome. ”The moratorium included any waste, not just from Koeberg,” said Eskom’s spokesman on nuclear affairs, Tony Stott. ”Vaalputs can’t receive anything.”
Council representative Tienie Fourie added: ”The moratorium will remain until new measures are in place.”
The AEC had not reported any leaks before those leading to last October’s probe, Stott said, but an AEC representative said this week there could have been leaks which had not been discovered. While conducting its probe, the council had also discovered leaks in concrete drums stored in Vaalputs’s trenches.
When reports emerged last month about the leaks from the concrete drums, AEC’s head of nuclear waste, Brian Hamilton-Jones, blamed the unusually cold weather for corroding the concrete, and on the longer intervals between Koeberg’s waste shipments. He said blocks of waste had been ”standing for two to three years in the trench waiting to be covered”.
Hamilton-Jones said an investigation on how the leaking blocks should be handled was under way. AEC chief executive Waldo Stumpf added: ”This is no crisis, and no danger of contamination exists.”
A representative for AEC this week confirmed the moratorium, but said the site was surrounded by clay and designed to cater for such leaks. Any perception of mismanagement was due to its ”insufficient manpower to perform according to its CNS licence” which he blamed on dwindling government support.
But the official quoted in the M&G’s documents paints a far more worrying picture of Vaalput’s activities. He also said that although Vaalputs is only designed and licensed to handle low- and medium-level waste, some high-level radioactive materials have been buried there ”because we have no other place to dump them”.
”At this present stage there is a whole lot of hassle about the nuclear storage. In the bins, that is solid-cast bins, where they store about 500kg of nuclear waste … they have proved that within 18 months it leaks through a 30cm metal hole,” the official said. ”They are burying [waste] 500m underground but there is no way it can be stored for 500 years because it is leaking. It is seeping through.
”What they have done now is they are putting plastic liners to line the outside of the pit and what they are doing is they are using a muddy sludge to try and contain it because water is the only thing that contains the radioactivity and this is basically the way things stand at the present stage.” The official, one of AEC’s most senior employees, made the comments about 18 months ago.
The Vaalputs dump was set up to handle waste from Eskom’s Koeberg. Eskom trucked the waste up to Vaalputs every three weeks until 1994 when it began storing it at Koeberg, shipping it to Vaalputs in bulk every three years.
Stott said it seemed that the AEC had not ”thought through the implications of Eskom stopping it [its regular deliveries]”. The longer interval between dumping Koeberg’s waste at Vaalputs had meant radioactive slabs were left far longer before being covered.
Stott said Eskom had cut the frequency of deliveries to Vaalputs to encourage Koeberg to cut down on its waste, and to cut trucking costs. Another Eskom official said Eskom had faced public protest about the waste shipments from towns lining the road to Vaalputs.
Eskom said the storage of waste at Koeberg was temporary and ”perfectly safe”. A representative said Koeberg was licensed to store nuclear waste. Stott said the CNS had checked Koeberg’s facilities – housed in a concrete bunker – and given them the all- clear. Eskom said recently that Koeberg had almost used up its capacity to store spent nuclear fuel and would invest R80-million to expand that capacity.