NUCLEAR WASTES AGAIN

If, for example, some cities are running out of space for their municipal waste land fills, where are they going to put the ash, produced by a 1,000 MW plant at the rate of 30 lbs a seconds And where is the country going to put the lime sludge forced on it by, believe it or not, the crusaders against pollution? Over the next 20 years, there will be between 1 and 2 million acre feet of the icky slime to commemorate Sen. Muskie and other architects of the Clean Air Act.

Among coal wastes, and industrial wastes in general, there are some nasty poisons, including carcinogens and mutagens (causing cancer and genetic mutations, respectively). If there is a way to have an advanced industrial society, including its superior public health record, without health hazards from its wastes, it has not yet been discovered.

But there is one and only one type of wastes that can be completely removed from the biosphere: nuclear. Their volume is more than one million times smaller than that of coal wastes from a power plant of equal capacity (a mere 2 m3/year from a 1,000 MW plant); they can be solidified, sealed into glass and put in earthquakeproof, fireproof, waterproof steel drums for burial 1800 feet deep in salt formations where there has been no water for the last 100 million years, and if water does threaten to get in next week, the salt will seal up and keep it out. The wastes are easy to monitor because, thank God, they are radioactive; and within 600 years, their radioactivity will have decayed below the level of the uranium ore that they originally came from.

The charge that no way of disposing of nuclear wastes is known is a deliberate falsehood, propagated by those who have seen to it that no way has so far been approved by the bureaucrats in Washington. But all phases of the nuclear waste disposal cycle have, in fact, been tried out on both sides of the Atlantic.

What about the leaks in Hanford? Hanford is a weapons plant, established under wartime pressures (the tanks are an early postwar design); even so, no wastes have ever leaked into the water table, and the threat could be averted if it existed.

What about West Valley? The reprocessing plant there ran into jurisdictional trouble between various bureaucrats (mainly federal and Nelson Rockefeller's), until the project was abandoned and the wastes were left there with nobody wanting any responsibility. So what does that prove? Should no more novels be written because Norman Mailer beat up Gore Vidal?

Are power plants running out of space in which to store spent fuel rods? Not yet, but they will soon. Which has nothing to do with waste disposal technology, but is a result of " nuclear engineer" Carter's decision to outlaw reprocessing. Good job he didn't have a two semester course in medicine as well; he might outlaw toilets and complain that food consumption causes environmental problems.

Do nuclear wastes need to be guarded for 250,000 years? Of course not. The number is close to 10 half-lives of plutonium; the astrologers of the anti nuclear movement found this number preferable to squaring the combined ages of their grandmothers, which would have been equally relevant. Monitoring the wastes until they have decayed below the level of uranium ore (600 years) might be reasonable if a society that does not monitor toxins with infinite duration can be moved to worry about them at all. In any case, in 250,000 years of nuclear power there will be less radioactivity on this earth than if the superstition mongers had their way for nuclear power does not add to the earth's radioactivity, it cleanses the earth of it.

Once again, on all of these questions, we recommend Prof. B.L. Cohen's article on nuclear waste disposal in the June 1977 Scientific American.

[With last month's comments on decommissioning nuclear plants, this should answer readers who sent in an investment letter by one C.V. Myers, claiming that "nuclear power spells death for humanity." We cannot say what investment letters are better, but on nuclear matters, some periodicals are equally good: Critical Mass, True Confessions, and Little Orphan Annie.]