Final Project

Almost everybody has heard of the first, some might have read about the second somewhere, but not many remember the last. 

Three Mile Island was a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, providing the electricity for many Americans after World War II. In 1979, however, due to mismanagement and faulty equipment, an accident occurred, leading to a partial meltdown of the reactor and the release of radioactive gases too small to have caused any damage. Chernobyl, however, was far worse. The same reasons were to blame for the disaster in Chernobyl in former Russia that caused the deaths of hundreds in the blast and hundreds of thousands in the years to come. Inhabitants in the area developed thyroid and other forms of cancer from having come in contact with the radioactive gases emitted after the blast. The water, soil, and air in Chernobyl are still unsafe, and scientists predict that it will take another hundred years for the region to get rid of the remnants of the contaminants. Fukushima, though not as deadly to the people, was as disastrous to the environment. The nuclear accident here was not caused by human error or faulty machinery but an earthquake and tsunami that due to emissions of radioactive particles led to the establishment of a 20 km exclusion zone around the power plant along with the eventual evacuation of residents within the area. Scientists and researchers came to realize that nuclear accidents could occur at any moment beyond our control and power. 

While there are many people concerned about nuclear accidents as a potential major threat to human life and the environment, the same people are not as well versed in the dangers that nuclear waste poses for us and for future citizens of the planet. In 2011 all the people heard and talked about the big event in the news media: Fukushima. Not as many, however, heard or were as concerned about where all the nuclear waste, produced by such power plants as the one in Fukushima, was going. And, for the most part, it wasn’t – and still isn’t – going anywhere. Many people throughout France, Japan, and especially America – three of the biggest producers of nuclear energy – take the “Not In My Backyard” as an attitude and slogan in their strong protests against the government that has tried to find ways to dump the accumulating waste somewhere. In 2002 President George W. Bush tried to push for the construction of a nuclear waste storage facility in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada, many miles away from civilization, but the people living in Las Vegas, one-hundred miles away, protested strongly, and in 2010 President Obama stated that he would try to halt the process due to concerns about earthquakes and especially groundwater flow in the area that could penetrate the vault and allow the waste to seep through and escape. If nobody wants the nuclear waste buried in their backyards, then what is to be done with it? Should the plants keep on accumulating the waste until better technology in the future affords us a chance? Nobody today approves of the waste put into barrels and thrown deep under the sea, a common practice, for example, among the British decades past. 

Nuclear waste can take many forms – gas, liquid, and solid – and is a toxic remnant of nuclear energy production. It is the material that nuclear fuel becomes after it is used in a reactor. Although it looks exactly like the fuel that was loaded into the reactor, the contents are not quite the same. Before energy was produced, the fuel was mostly uranium, oxygen, and steel; afterward, many of the uranium atoms have split into various isotopes of almost all of the transition metals on the periodic table of elements. Sometimes called spent fuel, nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive and remains so for thousands of years; depending on the impact of the blast, it could remain in the soil, water, and air for one-hundred thousand years, about as long as modern human beings have been on the planet according to some estimates. When the waste first comes out of the reactor, it is so toxic that if we stood within a few meters while the waste was unshielded, we would receive a lethal radioactive dose within a few seconds, leading to acute radiation sickness and death within a few days. Now, we can temporarily suspend its potential deadly effects by keeping it (always shielded) underwater for a few years until the radiation decays to levels established to be safe by the nuclear physicists; all of these scientists agree that water is an excellent shield. Afterward, large storage casks made out of concrete are used to house the waste, or it can be transformed into glass, which is sealed inside stainless-steel containers. The “resting place” for the waste is the next step, which is what the controversy is all about. The now transformed waste can either be stored in underground tanks, silos, or “laid to rest” very deeply and far below the surface of the Earth for at least 10,000 years at sites approved by the government, such as the Yucca Mountains in Nevada. 

What has just been described refers to high-level waste or HLW. This type is the most dangerous, posing the biggest problem, causing public controversy and outcry. There is also low-level and intermediate-level waste. Low-level waste, often coming from hospitals and laboratories, can be compacted, incinerated, and buried under the earth causing only negligible damage; it can also be stored at the site in which it was created. Intermediate-level waste, such as reactor components and chemicals, are more radioactive, so more care is needed for its disposal. It can be made into solid form (concrete) and buried deeply underground. High-level waste makes up only a small fraction of all nuclear waste but accounts for 95 percent of the radioactivity given off by nuclear waste. That’s why it’s extremely dangerous and must be dealt with in the most delicate fashion. 

So what is all the controversy surrounding the disposal and storage of nuclear waste? As mentioned earlier, as a result of contact with these deadly radioactive elements, we can experience long-term damage to our health, such as cancer and cell mutation; as a hereditary disease, it can be passed down from one generation to the next, causing future thousands of children whose parents were affected to suffer horrendously and eventually die in pain. Another major concern has to do with high-level waste (HLW). Because HLW comes from spent fuel that is highly radioactive and extremely hot, it has to be cooled producing even more waste. For example, in Fukushima silos used to store the toxic water were leaking, leading some of the scientists working there to consider releasing hundreds of tons of the water to the Pacific Ocean simply because “[s]toring massive amounts of water on-site is not sustainable,” according to Dale Klein, a former chairman of the U.S. nuclear regulatory commission now leading the nuclear reform committee in Fukushima. Lots of water is necessary for the cooling-down of the spent fuel. Also, although HLW seems to be just a small fraction of the total nuclear waste, this does not mean that there is not a lot of it. An average nuclear power plant produces about 27 tons of spent fuel every year. 12,000 tons of HLW is produced worldwide every year. If something goes wrong in the way of leakage in one of the underground storage sites or a meltdown in the power plant, which still stores a lot of these HLWs because nobody wants them, then the harm it can produce to us and the future inhabitants of the world for the next one-hundred thousand years can be cataclysmic and immense. 

Patsy T. Mink, Congresswoman from Hawaii, wrote journal in Fordham Environmental Law Review entitled Nuclear Waste: The Most Compelling Environmental Issue Facing the World Today stating: 

A solution must be found for this environmental hazard. We’ve poisoned the earth, not just for our children or our grandchildren, but for thousands of years to come. How can we dispose of something that will exist in a hazardous state for over 100,000 years? Although we have no place to put it, we continue to produce nuclear waste in copious amounts. When do we stop? How many rivers need to be poisoned? How many animals have to be destroyed? How many crippled and deformed children need to be born? How many people have to die before we decide to stop producing nuclear waste and start disposing of it? ... Solutions to the nuclear waste disposal problem are not self-evident, but we must invest as much intellectual, scientific, and political effort in finding solutions as we invested in creating the problem during the Cold War and arms race. 

Humankind created nuclear energy and used it in the most devastating fashion in the form of the atom bomb during the end of World War II to stop the military power of Japan, leading to the arms race between Soviet Russia and the United States with each harnessing the power of nuclear fission basically to harm others and maintain political power over the world. Today nuclear energy has been used to provide electricity to the billions of people throughout the world, helping to reduce the release of carbons from fossil fuels. Ms. Mink, however, seems to be telling us that nuclear energy and nuclear waste go hand in hand and that ultimately nuclear energy does much more harm than good throughout the world. Recently, thorium has been used in scientific research and in nuclear reactors with promising results as a safer, less radiotoxic counterpart to uranium. However, the kind of “solution” that Ms. Mink is looking for is more expansive and radical. Nuclear waste is “the most compelling environmental issue” because its impact is incredibly long and permanent.