WASTES: A SOLVED PROBLEM

Untrue. Nuclear waste disposal has not yet been legalized in NRC standards and regulations; but the technology is available and ready for full-scale application. Each step from discharge of spent reactor fuel to terminal storage has been demonstrated on at least a pilot scale in this country, and some or all of them have been demonstrated in actual operation in France, Germany and Britain.

There is not one, but several practicable solutions; the most attractive is conversion of high-level liquid waste into a solid, which is immobilized by being sealed into glass. The glass blocks are inserted into earthquake proof steel drums and stored, permanently or retrievably, in stable geological structures some 3,000 ft below the surface (salt formations are one of several options). The volume of the ultimate waste is minute: 5,000,000 times smaller than the waste produced by a coalfired plant of equal power one canister 10 ft long and 1 ft in diameter holds the waste remaining after extracting the energy from more than three tons of uranium ore.

The probability that these wastes could somehow get into the water supply (the only danger) lies on the borders of absurdity, but even then the process would take decades, and to facilitate countermeasures, this miraculous migration could be easily monitored, for the wastes do have one redeeming quality - they are radioactive.

The scaremongering about several multiples of 25,000 years (the halflife of plutonium) is so much melodramatic hogwash. It ignores the fact that plutonium is not a waste, but a fuel, far higher priced per ounce than gold, and there will probably be less plutonium in the terminal storage than there is gold in a city's garbage dump. It ignores the fact that after 450 years the waste will have decayed to a level of toxicity below the level of the natural uranium ore from which it was made. It ignores the comparison with chemical toxins (such as those contained in coal ash) which will not be around for 25,000 years, but forever. But above alls and this is the crucial point, it ignores the comparison with the waste disposal we are now using when electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels (see next item).

A most enlightening state-of-the-art report (EPRI SR-44), The Status of Commercial Nuclear High-Level Waste Disposal has recently been published by the Electric Power Research Institute, and a very readable article summarizing it, Secure Storage of Radioactive Waste by G. Dau and R. Williams, appeared in the July-August l976 issue of the EPRI Journal. It is to be hoped that the article will be given the publicity it deserves.