Being Responsible: The Sign at the End of My Lane

A sign at the end of my lane reads “No Nuclear Waste Dump Anywhere”. Since the sign was on my deck for the summer, I know what questions people ask. 

FYI background information: Nuclear waste is made up of radioactive elements. Radioactive elements decay and as they “decay” they give off both radioactive particles and energy as they become a different element. For example: radium changes into radon gas when it decays. The release of the particles (or energy) can affect cells. Special radioactive elements are used in controlled circumstances to treat cancer because it kills cells that are rapidly dividing preferentially to normal cells. However, it also kills normal cells and can cause cancer, inheritable defects and developmental abnormalities.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) proposes a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) which they claim to have the ability to monitor for a century - at which time they abandon it, so, in fact, NWMO is proposing a Deep Underground Dump (DUD). 

The questions: 

First: “Why not put the waste back in the ground where it came from?” Some time ago, that would have been my question too.

Bad idea.

First: it is not the same kind of thing. The waste is hundreds of times more radioactive than the ore that was taken out of Saskatchewan. It contains some 200 or more brand new radioactive elements, some more lethal than others. While computer models predict how each element will decay (and each decay chain is known), no one really knows how the combinations will chemically or physically inter-react as they change through time. At the one existing North American underground dump, the WIPP facility in Carlsbad, intended to last “thousands of years”, no one still knows why radioactivity was released because they cannot get close enough to examine it.

Second: Packaging the stuff doesn’t work. Radiation changes things over time – the iron and/or copper that makes up the containers is constantly barraged by nuclear particles that change the elements. If an iron atom is changed into an atom of a gas, salt or even different kind of metal, the container gradually “rots”. In fact, this is reason nuclear power plants “wear out” and need “refurbishment”. 

Third: The Cost. Federal government has already spent more than $700 million on the six year long Seaborn Panel that recommended against a Deep Geological Repository. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has spent millions and plans to spend millions more. And then there is the cost of building the dump site, creating the containers and shipping them across Canada – there exists already enough waste that it will take trucks driving continually a couple of hours apart for a couple of decades to get the current waste to Saskatchewan – is practically unfathomable. Virtually all of these eventually billions of dollars will come out of the public purse. Creighton is still under consideration for a DUD.

Second question: "What do you propose? Saskatchewan may as well make money from the waste?"

The Candian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and the US Environmental Protection Agency propose that the stuff remain in the containers in which it is currently stored where it can be monitored – after the six to ten years that it spends under water until it is “cool” enough to be stored. The containers regularly assessed and breaches repaired early. The waste would be readily accessible if a technology were developed that sustainably recycled them.

The EPA called it “Rolling Stewardship”. The beauty of the plan would be that when the nuclear power plants are decommissioned, they can virtually be decommissioned on the spot! There would be jobs into the future as far as humans exist. 

We’ve created the waste, for our children and our children's children, we need to manage it responsibly.