THE PROBLEM OF ATOMIC WASTE
(Page 4 of 4)
And this "understatement" of the volume of radioactive
wastes (by a factor of more than 3,000) is actually the
less dangerous side of General Electric's lie. The company
committed an even more serious deception when it placed
emphasis on the amount of the radioactive
materials, rather than on the extremely high
toxicity of these wastes. As Professor Holdren put
it, "If a tablet were to be an apt comparison, it would
have to be a cyanide tablet . . . and even that would not
do justice to the actual toxicity of the fission products."
(As a matter of fact, one-year-old radioactive waste is at
least 100 times more toxic, by volume, than
cyanide.)
RELATED CONTENT
We look forward to the day when the nuclear industry will
be honest enough to announce that "The wastes produced
annually by a nuclear power plant are equivalent in size to
only several hundred cyanide tablets per person served."
But even that unlikely candor would be misleading, because
cyanide can be easily detoxified.
Radioactive isotopes, on the other hand, can't be
decontaminated either easily or rapidly. In many
cases the only practical thing to do with these dangerous
poisons is to wait until their own slow decay can render
them harmless .. which can take a very, very long time.
If humanity does embark on a fullscale fission power
program it will, in essence, be grabbing an almost immortal
tiger by the tail. Our next column will examine the
question of whether or not—if we do grab the
beast—there's any safe way to let go.
Details on the nuclear waste problem, radioactivity,
and related subjects may be found in Ecoscience:
Population, Resources, Environment by Paul R. Ehrlich,
Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren ($19.95 postpaid from
W.H. Freeman and Co., 660 Market Street, San Francisco,
California 94104), especially Chapter 8. Professor
Holdren's analysis of the "aspirin tablet" fraud appears on
page 450.
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