The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb.
The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
Maybe, maybe not? Until tested it's hard to know if a nuclear umbrella is more than bluff.
That said, with US indifference from 1939 fresh in the memory I can see how they wanted the bomb.
Nuclear bombs from the US were always under US control, even if positioned outside the US.
They really weren't, the nominal US control over them was always a figleaf to appease the requirements of Congress.
If you look into the history of US nuclear sharing you'll find that what these NATO countries wanted was independent nuclear capabilities in the event of an emergency. That's what they got in every way except formally on paper.
A relevant excerpt from "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser:
> [...] Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun. “All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open—all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.” Foreign personnel weren’t supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.”
This was especially annoying from an ally which had learned much of the foundation essential to the endeavour from British Tube Alloys research.
France saw this happen and drew a very similar conclusion.
Yes.
That statement is correct.
Literally, actually, and factually the techniques and technologies used in the 1940s and 1950s that led to the Windscale fire at Sellafield, which is the root of most of the cost are gone. Dead.
The bulk of the cost are the remains of the Windscale Piles (1950/1951) and the Legacy Ponds (1960). Little that people did 70 years ago when it comes to nuclear waste storage and disposal is acceptable or legal today.
What you yourself wrote is true.
The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return.
The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically.
* I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive.
Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.