There are no major safety concerns about nuclear waste management in South Africa, the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) said in Cape Town on Wednesday.
NNR Nuclear Technology and waste programme manager Thiagan Pather was speaking at a public participation forum.
The forum was part of a workshop on radioactive waste management. Pather said the only problem he was concerned about, when it came to nuclear waste management, was the inadequate tracking of nuclear sources. Sources constitute small devices that contain radioactive material.
”What we’ve had is one or two instances where these sources have ended up for example in a scrapyard where you do not know who the owner is,” he said.
Pather said this could only happen when someone had ”lost control” of a source tracking process.
He said the NNR needed to liaise with government departments to refine their tracking system for sources.
However, the head of radioactive waste safety for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Didier Louvat, said the key international safety concerns around nuclear waste management were ”quite different”.
Louvat said there were three major areas of concern.
The first was the nuclear waste management from the former defence programme in Russia.
The second was the management of the uranium industry in certain parts of the former Soviet Union.
Louvat said in this case, they had ”a very very serious problem of radiation and potentially affecting a lot of people”.
Thirdly, Louvat said, newcomers to the uranium mining industry, particular from some parts of Africa like Malawi, needed to adopt good nuclear safety practices.
He said the IAEA had ”just formed a group to check good practices and to really try to encourage and even sometimes enforce these practices.
Environmental activist group Earthlife Africa said they had a lot of safety concerns about how South Africa was managing nuclear waste.
”The pools [where nuclear waste is currently being stored] are getting smaller and smaller and people are only looking into these things now. These are things that should have been done a long time ago,” Earthlife Africa health campaigner Keenan van Wyk said.
Earthlife Africa believed government was planning to store more nuclear waste at unused mines in Vaalputs in the Northern Cape.
He said this would be a ”bad idea”.
”We all know what the consequences of nuclear waste are. It can lead to cancer, it can go into your water system.”
The workshop, — hosting about 100 nuclear experts from all over the world — will run until Friday. – Sapa