First, a correction: If you bought The Non-Problem of Nuclear Wastes ("Different Drummer" Booklet #7) before mid-October, please correct the statements about whiskey on p. 11: Whiskey consumption in the US is close to 200 million gallons/year; whiskey is radioactive with 1.2 nanocuries/litre, so that the annual contribution to the radioactivity of the oceans by America's whiskey drinkers alone is of the same order as 1 ton of low level nuclear wastes. Although whiskey is not what nuclear waste disposal is about, the entire remaining edition of the booklet was destroyed as soon as the error was pointed out, and a new printing with the correct whiskey values is now available.(*)
Next, low level waste disposal sites: Closed in Kentucky, Washington, Nevada, severely restricted in the last remaining site in S. Carolina, dangerous radioactivity, scandalous, poisonous, lethal, blah, blah, blah... Sometimes stated, more often implied, was the allegation that these wastes come from nuclear power generation. In fact only around 25% of these wastes are traceable to nuclear power generation as workers' gloves, tools, clothing, etc. What was rarely mentioned is that the biggest share (about 50%, according to NECo, operators of the Washington and Nevada sites) comes from hospitals, universities and medical research, for the newstwisters are in the business of fanning hysteria against nuclear power, not (yet) against cancer therapy.
If these disposal sites are not opened soon, it will not be the utilities that will be immediately affected (the Carter administration, after all, forces them to keep even high level spent fuel rods on their sites indefinitely); it will be hospitals that will be thrown into a crisis. Will they let cancer patients die because there is no legal way to dispose of the radioactive isotopes used in their treatment? Obviously not; medical personnel will be forced to flush the iodine and cobalt and the other radioactive goodies down the drain into the municipal sewers, whence some of them will inevitably find their way past water treatment plants (which have no effect on radioactive isotopes) into your drinking water. This may indeed result in a few more cancers, courtesy of the media as they build the panic about the dangers of cancer from nuclear power.
This is not to say that everything is fine with low level waste disposal. Although low level waste (with less than 1 curie per kilogram, or at least 1,000 times less than the radioactive level of radium) is neither as lethal, nor as abundant, nor as difficult to dispose of as highly toxic chemical waste, there is no reason to tolerate sloppily packaged shipments or irregular disposal. On the other hand, the various agencies of the federal government have now passed from merely dragging their feet (on setting and enforcing standards) to active promotion of outright chaos, and under these circumstances it is surprising that irregularities are comparatively rare (about 1 in 400 shipments).
The whole low-level waste situation is not without irony, and a brief shutdown of low-level waste dumps might even be beneficial if it succeeded in giving publicity to some facts that the media have been eagerly censoring, such as
1) that it is hospitals and other medical facilities, not the power industry, that are far and away the biggest source of man-made radioactivity in the environment;
2) that ionizing radiation, of the same type as emitted by nuclear power plants, only incomparably stronger, is used to treat, and often cure, cancer;
3) that the crisis artificially forced on disposal sites both by politically motivated panic mongering and by the ineptness of the government bureaucracies will force medical personnel to dispose of radioactive wastes in unnecessarily dangerous ways
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Vol. 7, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1979 02:56 PM Title: The scribblers
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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