Nuclear wastes: law and reality

The nuclear waste law passed in December is better than no law, in places significantly so; it shows that the "problem" of waste disposal is political, not scientific.

But the exultation with which the leadership of the nuclear industry has greeted the bill seems misplaced; it reflects the naive belief that an entire class of powerful hysteria fanners, together with the millions they have scared, can be legislated away through a side door.

Even on the most superficial level, the new law bristles with invitations to the NRDC(1) to obstruct it; as in the past, they will probably succeed because, to use one of their movement's phrases, "judges do not live in a vacuum." Judges, they mean, will find a way to interpret the law in harmony with the atmosphere created by the obstructionist atmosphere creators, not in harmony with abstract justice.

Typically, a recent paper in Science says "Simply stated, large quantities of highly toxic liquid and solid waste must be isolated from the environment for tens or hundreds of thousands of years." Typically, the article is written by members of the professoriat and the consultantry, "experts" in non-subjects like "policy analysis." And typically, official spokesmen for the nuclear industry will only say that this is "inaccurate" (they never say "false"), and they will dispute the statement on the ground the policy analysts and prattle snakes have chosen for them.

If, like their adversaries, the industry spokesmen were atmosphere creators, they might present the issue like this:

"If nuclear power had no other advantage over fossil fuels, its waste disposal alone would make it vastly superior. In the US, coal-fired power now produces more than one billion tons of wastes a year, and some of that is disposed of in people's lungs. Nuclear wastes are the first wastes in man's history that can be completely removed from the biosphere: For the same power produced, they are three million times smaller in volume, and after 500 years their toxicity(2) decays below the permanently toxic level of coal ash. Demanding the perfect instead of the overwhelmingly preferable means damage to public health."

The reason why official industry spokesmen never present the issue in this light is that they are afraid of "knocking coal" and offending the coal companies.

That is doubly fallacious reasoning. First, nobody is knocking coal. Anybody who knows that nuclear power is much healthier than coal also knows that coal is much healthier than lack of energy; and he also knows that "no nukes" is the deceptive slogan of the "no energy" crowd.

Second, the fear reveals ignorance of the mining industry, which is being confused with a passel of Washington lobbyists, including the UMW union bosses. The real mining industry, the one that gets the fuels out of the ground, not the votes out of the politicians, has no such problems with PR niceties. That mining industry understands that coal and uranium stand and fall together in fighting off the no-nuke/ no-energy crowd; and they also know that they have no better weapon than the truth.

And the law, as always, will limp in after the reality.

1 An obstructionist Washington lobby of lawyers feigning environmental concern.

2 Measured by the quantity of water needed to dilute a toxin to international drinking water standards.