Working with nuclear waste demands a clear grasp of the past and careful plan for the distant future.

The timescales involved mean it is necessary to keep a record of what waste you are dealing with and where it has come from and require the vision to anticipate what activities may affect it in the years to come.
At the Low Level Waste Repository, near Drigg, West Cumbria, the nature of nuclear waste has created a unique set of circumstances where the site is beginning the process of closing down with over 100 years’ work still left to do. 
The story of the repository began during the Second World War when the 100 hectare site was requisitioned to be used as the site for the Drigg Ordnance Factory, with around 3,000 workers producing hundreds of tonnes of TNT every week. Five of these people gave their lives for the war effort when they were killed in accidents at the site.
However, with the advent of the nuclear age in the 1950s, the area was used to dispose of the increasing amount of low level contaminated waste produced at sites around the UK.

This included material contaminated during the Windscale fire at the Sellafield site in 1957. "The nuclear industry was really starting to get going in the late 1950s so the UK needed a secure place for disposing of lower activity waste," said Martin Walkingshaw, chief operating officer at Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), which operates the repository.
Alongside its work at the facility, NWS is delivering a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) as a long-term solution for the most hazardous radioactive waste.

Martin Walkingshaw, chief operating officer at Nuclear Waste ServicesMartin Walkingshaw, chief operating officer at Nuclear Waste Services (Image: Nuclear Waste Services)

Between 1959 and the early 1990s the method for disposing of the waste - which typically arrives by rail from nuclear, military, medical and other sites around the UK - was to tip it into trenches from the back of trucks and then bury it in a similar way to conventional landfill.
A different approach was then adopted from the mid 1980s of placing the waste in steel containers for disposal in a concrete vault.

This approach was fully implemented by 1995, and in 2008 Cumbria County Council granted permission to create a second engineered vault with capacity to dispose of 5,500 containers. Containers of low-level radioactive waste are filled with grout, a mixture of Portland cement, pulverised fuel ash and plasticiser, to hold material in place and provide a firm foundation for the multi-layered ‘cap’ that will eventually cover the site.