In a clear departure from the existing practice of keeping nuclear waste in borosilicate glass containers, the department of atomic energy wants to bury it underground. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee is pushing for setting up an underground laboratory in an existing uranium mine to study the qualities of the subterranean rock below the mine to see if this can be used to store nuclear waste. The site should not have experienced any “event” in recorded history and should have a cooling mechanism to facilitate the decay of such waste. The Atomic Energy Commission chairman is confident that since India is committed to follow the closed fuel cycle, the life of nuclear waste is halved compared to the process being followed in some countries. Currently, nuclear waste is being stored in a glass matrix by a process called vitrification. This process of solid storage surveillance facility is being practised at Tarapur, where it is stored in an area equivalent to one-fourth of a football ground. This amount of space can store vitirified waste from two 540 Mwe reactors during their full life of 40 years, after which it needs to be transferred to a deep geological repository. A similar facility is planned at Kalpakkam. This repository will have radiation monitors to detect any radioactive leaks in the region, AEC chairman Srikumar Banerjee noted.