“Let’s just put it back into
the ground – isn’t that where it came from in the first place?”
The problem with radioactive
waste is that no one knows what to do with it. “Spent fuel” is thousands of
times more radioactive than before it entered the reactor as fuel. As the “spent fuel” decays, it produces
gasses and heat – the build-up of either can cause explosions. No one
knows exactly how many new radioactive elements are in the waste nor do they
know exactly how the decay will proceed. Radioactive decay is like a river
flowing in one direction that cannot be stopped or dammed nor have its
course changed. Each element eventually will reach a stable status, in
the case of radioactive waste, about 250,000 years from now or more.
The fact that the nuclear
industry has been looking for solutions to the waste problem for over fifty
years doesn’t mean that they have found a solution. It means that they have
done a lot of looking. Currently the Canadian "solution" for low and intermediate
level waste is an "out of sight, out of mind" solution, a “Deep Geologic Repository” (DGR) which the Nuclear Waste
Management Organization (NWMO) claims will be monitored for a hundred
years. NWMO is continuing its search for
a site for high level waste.
NWMO reassuringly states
that waste will be safely surrounded by bedrock – seemingly unaware that bedrock
is no longer bedrock when it is broken into and chopped up into caverns.
The Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, after twenty years of preparation, was
opened in 1999 to store nuclear weapons waste for 10,000 years. A mere fifteen
years into operation, in February 2014, it spewed radioactivity into the
atmosphere from storage areas located 2,130 feet underground. Twenty-one workers were contaminated with plutonium-239
(half-life of 24,000 years) and americium-242 (half life of 141 years). Other workers
were hampered in their search for the leak by the high radioactivity in the
caverns.
The problem with a plan, any
plan to contain the waste, is that radiation changes the atoms with which it
comes in contact. Gamma rays can bump electrons out of nuclei turning an atom
of iron or steel into something else. Alpha and beta particles can be absorbed
by an atom of nickel turning it into something else – perhaps a radioactive
gas? In any case, no container can be guaranteed to outlast the waste itself.
Since
any waste depository will have the same result: unmonitored waste decaying its
way through its containers to eventually contaminate the environment, in 1995 the
US National Research Council introduced the concept of “Rolling Stewardship”,
essentially continuing to do what is currently done but in a formal manner.
Nuclear waste is monitored in above the ground containers, the responsibility
for which is passed from one generation to another. The waste is immediately
accessible should leaks occur but also in the event that new technology be
found that would either harness its potential or somehow “neutralize” it. Generations
of jobs would be assured. The problem of leaving a detailed message for our
descendants – what language, what signs, etc – would be solved. (more at http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/050/documents/p17520/95904E.pdf)
The
Nuclear Waste Management Organization calls their plan “Adaptive Phase
Management,” an admission that all is not known. It sounds a lot like “Rolling
Stewardship”, adapting as they go along.
There
are no examples of “Rolling Stewardship” just as there are not examples of
successful Deep Geologic Repositories. As time goes on, one by one the DGR’s
fail, the Carlsbad event being the most recent. Without planning to do so,
rolling stewardship is happening. Already the generation that made the waste
(and benefited from the nuclear power) has bequeathed it to another generation.
It is time to quit wasting money looking for a DGR, admit that we are going
to have to continue to monitor it in site and call it what it is - garbage for our descendants. What a way to be remembered!
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