THE PROBLEM OF ATOMIC WASTE
(Page 3 of 4)
The magnitude of our radioactive waste problem was made
clear in a 1974 study by the now-defunct Atomic Energy
Commission. The AEC calculated the amount of hot waste it
expected would accumulate in the United States by the year
2000. Then the commission figured out how much air would be
needed to dilute these materials to the so-called "maximum
permissible concentration", or MPC. (At the MPC an
individual who breathed the wastepolluted air would receive
no more than four times the average exposure caused by
natural radiation sources.)
RELATED CONTENT
And the AEC discovered that—by 2000 A.D.—the
amount of air required to safely dilute the United States'
inventory of atomic wastes would be 7,300,000,000,000 cubic
kilometers ... approximately 1,750,000,000,000 cubic miles.
This number represents a block of air 12,000 miles on a
side: a mass large enough to cover the entire planet to a
depth of 4,000 miles!
And one hundred years after that, 456,000,000,000 cubic
miles would still be necessary. Add one thousand years, and
the figure is still 36,000,000,000 cubic miles. And even a
million years later (1,002,000 A.D), approximately a
billion cubic miles of air would still be
necessary to reach the MPC.
Remember, too, that these incredible volumes of atmosphere
would only serve to dilute the radiation that still
remained in wastes that the AEC expected to have
accumulated by the year 2000. The figures don't even take
into consideration any wastes that might be produced
after that cutoff date!
The staggering size of these numbers helps to drive home
the magnitude of our nation's nuclear waste disposal
problem. Still, there are those in the
government-industry-nuclear establishment who would prefer
that the public didn't understand how overwhelming
this problem actually is.
General Electric, for example, states reassuringly that the
annual wastes produced by a nuclear power plant are
equivalent—in size—to about one aspirin tablet
for every person served by the installation.
This statement is a two-dimensional lie. In the first
place, University of California physicist John P. Holdren
has calculated (using AEC data) that "high level"
wastes—in their most concentrated form—actually
amount to a mass the size of about ten aspirins for every
person served.
And those high level wastes are only the most
radioactive residues of the fuel. There is an additional
five tablets' worth of waste per person in the form of the
intensely radioactive remains of the alloy tubes that
held the fuel. Furthermore, intermediate-level and
low-level wastes—which contain some very dangerous
and long-lived isotopes—amount to well over 3,000 of
those aspirin-tablet-sized portions of deadly material per
person each and every year.
