A Waste Problem

Across the Long Island Sound, the largest newspaper in Connecticut, the Hartford Courant, ran a story with a headline bannered across its front page last month: “Where will state’s nuclear waste go?”

We on Long Island are nuclear-free, with the shutdown soon after it opened of the Shoreham nuclear power plant and the closure of the two nuclear reactors at Brookhaven National Laboratory. But just west of New London in Connecticut are its two Millstone nuclear power plants.

What, indeed, is to be done about nuclear waste, produced in Connecticut and elsewhere?

Decades ago, one scheme was to put it on rockets to be sent to the sun. But the very big problem is that 1-in-100 rockets undergo major malfunctions on launch — mostly by blowing up.

As Forbes magazine has pointed out, because of the “possibility of launch failure,” if “your payload is radioactive or hazardous and you have an explosion on launch … all of that waste will be uncontrollably distributed across Earth.”

So, scratch that idea.

Then there’s been the plan to construct a “repository” for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was designated the nation’s “permanent nuclear repository” in 1987, and $15 billion was spent preparing it.

The very big problem concerning Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump: It is riddled with 32 earthquake faults.

So, that idea was scratched.

Now, Finland has built a nuclear waste site for its four nuclear power plants. “Finland wants to bury nuclear waste for 100,000 years” was the title of an CNBC’s piece about it and how it uses “a labyrinth of underground tunnels.”

The very big problem: Nuclear waste needs to be isolated from life for way longer than 100,000 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2004 ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite its Yucca Mountain regulations to acknowledge a million years of hazard.

“And that’s actually a lowball figure,” says Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist for the organization Beyond Nuclear.

Some nuclear waste stays radioactive for millions of years, notes Kamps: “Iodine-129 that is produced in reactors has a 15.7 million-year half-life.” After a half-life, a radioactive material is half as radioactive as when it was produced. For determining a “hazardous lifetime,” a half-life is multiplied by 20. Thus, iodine-129 remains radioactive for 314 million years.

“The design of the storage facility” for nuclear waste in Finland “has taken into account the potential impact of earthquakes and even future ice ages,” related CNBC. But not for anything close to millions of years.

So, what should be done about nuclear waste?

First, says Kamps, “we should stop making it.” He calls for the closure of every one of the 92 nuclear power plants now in the United States, the building of no more, and a push for safe, clean, green energy sources led by solar and wind energy. Nuclear power plants in the United States have, since 1957, generated nearly 100,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste, he says.

Second, the “best option is hardened onsite storage.” Currently, most nuclear waste, he says, is at reactor sites in pools of water, which must be kept circulating. If there is a “loss of water” accident, the nuclear waste in the pools can go “up in flames.”

Kamps and Beyond Nuclear, with other environmental and safe-energy groups, is now challenging — along with the state governments of Texas and New Mexico — the present U.S. government plan involving “so-called interim” nuclear waste sites in Texas and New Mexico. They’d be amid largely Latino communities, and on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the United States. It extends north to South Dakota, encompassing eight states, and is a main source of water for drinking and irrigation.

Also, the U.S. Department of Energy has, he says, “restarted its federal consolidated interim storage facility scheme, last attempted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A whole new crop of nuclear waste dump fights can be expected, especially ones targeting Native American reservations to agree to host the most deadly poison our society has ever generated.”

Meanwhile, over in New Jersey, Oyster Creek, which was the oldest nuclear power plant in the United States and a twin of Shoreham, both General Electric Mark I plants, is in the midst of being demolished after its closure in 2018.

There’s been “a series of worrisome accidents” in the tearing-down process, The Washington Post reported last month. And then there is the decommissioned plant’s nuclear waste.