Jan 2004 - Issue 1

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Legacy of America's Nuclear Waste

America has the huge stock of Nuclear waste in its homeland which needs to be safely destroyed. The nuclear waste is so huge it can take years and still not end. What government has been doing in this regard and what are the scientific options, let's explore.

World War II was still being fought in the Pacific during the first week of August 1945, a time when my father and I were vacationing in Atlantic City, New Jersey, eating soft-shell crabs and lazing by the ocean. In a games arcade I fed nickels to a toy machine gun and fired at Japanese Zero fighters flitting across a screen. On the boardwalk, rifles shouldered, platoons of United States soldiers marched and sang:

The Stars and Stripes will fly over Tokyo,
Fly over Tokyo, fly over Tokyo,
The Stars and Stripes will fly over Tokyo,
When the 991st gets there. . . .

One morning my dad showed me a newspaper with red headlines that said a huge bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. The bombs were so big that the boys of the 991st wouldn’t have to go to Tokyo after all.

HYSTERIA:

By the mid-1960s, the height of the Cold War, the U.S. had stockpiled around 32,000 nuclear warheads, as well as mountains of radioactive garbage from the production of plutonium for these weapons. Just one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of plutonium required around a thousand tons of uranium ore. Generated from uranium bombarded by neutrons in a nuclear reactor, the plutonium was later separated from the uranium in hellish baths of acids and solvents still awaiting disposal.

A long deferred cleanup is now under way at 114 of the America’s nuclear facilities, which encompass an acreage equivalent to Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Many smaller sites, the easy ones, have been cleansed, but the big challenges remain. What’s to be done with 52,000 tons (47,000 metric tons) of dangerously radioactive spent fuel from commercial and defense nuclear reactors? With 91 million gallons (345 million liters) of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, scores of tons of plutonium, more than half a million tons of depleted uranium, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste? And with some 265 million tons (240 million metric tons) of tailings from milling uranium ore less than half stabilized littering landscapes?

HOW MUCH WASTE?

For an idea of scale: Load those tailings into railroad hopper cars, then pour the 91 million gallons of waste into tank cars, and you would have a mythical train that would reach around the equator and then some.

GOVERNMENT's PLANS:

In a decade, real trains and trucks carrying high-level waste may head to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the government's choice and a controversial one, for a permanent repository. In addition to storing the waste, contaminated soil and groundwater must be treated and stabilized, nuclear reactors decommissioned, buildings demolished, some buried waste exhumed, sorted, and buried again because it wasn't buried right in the first place. The bill for all this will be staggering-perhaps 400 billion dollars over 75 years.

How much nuclear waste in its VARIOUS FORMS exists in the U.S.? The story continues... Next page »

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