The Problem Of Atomic Waste (Part II)

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But let's suppose for a moment that this "back end" of the nuclear cycle does become successfully hooked up and large amounts of spent fuel are reprocessed. What then would become of the millions of gallons of highly radioactive, long-lived liquid wastes that would be generated annually?

This particular question has vexed the nuclear establishment from the start. The original solution for high-level wastes from the American nuclear weapons program was simply to store them in tanks above the ground.

Such a naive solution has been envisioned for reactor wastes, too. Indeed, one official of the AEC actually testified that this agency would guard the wastes for the required 500, 000 years (that is, for half a million years after the last nuclear power plant closes down). One would have to look a long way to find a better example of bureaucratic chutzpah! Imagine a government agency (or a government, for that matter) lasting for 100 times the length of recorded history, let alone carrying out an assigned task for that period of time! Consider, also, that during the 500,000 years that the AEC would be "on guard", several ice ages could be expected to come and go.

The fact of the matter is, we don't need a crystal ball to evaluate the AEC's performance when it comes to containing radioactive wastes. At the AEC's Hanford Facility in Washington state, for example, wastes have leaked out for years. Some 150,000 gallons escaped into the soil in 1973 alone! We can only hope that those radioactive liquids don't migrate through ground-water channels into the Columbia River. . with unhappy consequences for the citizens of Portland downstream. And we're sorry to say that the record of the AEC (now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—NRC) at its Savannah River, Georgia site (and elsewhere) is hardly more encouraging.

It's abundantly clear to anyone who has seriously considered the problem that surface storage facilities—no matter how cleverly engineered—are, at best, temporary expedients for the treatment of high-level wastes. This, of course, has led to an extraordinary diversity of suggestions for the permanent disposal of these deadly materials.

The solution that we admire most was suggested in the 1950's by our friend Prof. Joseph H. Camin of the University of Kansas. He recommended that the wastes be dumped in active volcanoes, so that they could then be lofted into the atmosphere and come down as fallout. (In those days, the AEC had a big propaganda campaign designed to persuade Americans that fallout was actually good for them!)

Camin's tongue-in-cheek solution, however, has been almost matched by some seriously proposed ones. It's been suggested, for instance, that radioactive wastes be loaded on rockets and blasted off the earth to pollute the solar system. Of course, the record of the technological boondogglers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration makes it perfectly clear that we wouldn't have to wait very long for a rocket to blow up on the pad or in the atmosphere and create a large-scale radiation catastrophe.

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