But it speaks volumes about their nuclear safety culture. And they mostly ship spent fuel to Europe for reprocessing.
AFAIK it is the first such shipment of high level waste back to them. Obviously an empty HL waste storage facility is completely safe.
They put it into a pond until it is cool enough (in both senses) to ship to Sellafield or La Hague for reprocessing - they are working on their own reprocessing and MOX fuel plant at the moment.
I suspect their high level above ground long term waste storage is almost completely empty. The underground repository is yet to be built. This is the first time the return to sender clause has been used. UK and France were content to be the worlds nuclear dustbin until recently.
The stuff is not yet underground. You can judge the number of very major incidents at the Sellafield site by counting the change(s) of name. The Thorp plant leak in 2005 was almost a bad enough MFU to warrant another rebranding. I could feel mildly aggrieved that the UK is not on JNPP's list of major countries planning to store nuclear waste when Belgium is!
Don't get me wrong here. I am in favour of nuclear power but I don't think their safety culture is quite up to the standard needed. And in the early days it was much much worse.
Regards, Martin Brown