SEA DUMPING

As oceanographer Dr. Charles Osterberg has often pointed out [AtE Jan 82, Nov 82], it makes no sense to endanger the world's addling fresh-water resources (less than 1% of all water on the globe) to protect salt water whose deep-water marine life is starved for food and whose bottom layers are barren. As it is, the oceans contain more than 500 billion curies, and many deep-sea organisms thrive while getting doses of tens of rems/year. The sea is therefore a natural and logical place where to dispose of LLW; that the ban on such disposal is a shallow publicity stunt is easily demonstrated by noting that Britain dumps more curies into the sea via its coal ash than it ever did by its LLW before it banned sea disposal.

In their efforts to keep up the unjustifiable ban, Greenpeaceniks and other sham-environmentalists have now come up with "a sea so radioactive that it could not support algae ... which produce up to one half of the world's oxygen," as biologist Jackson Davis from the U. of Calif. at Santa Cruz claims in a remarkable concentration of baloney per word. What the Knights of Limited Resources often forget is that some resources are limited: as J. Gordon Edwards, professor of biological sciences at San Jose State U. points out, there is not enough radioactivity available in the whole world to threaten the algae. As for oxygen, there is an equilibrium of its production and consumption by organic matter everywhere, with no torrents of oxygen moving from sea to land. Moreover, since the air above a square foot contains 7,500 times as much oxygen as is produced by plants on that square foot per year, its supply is exceedingly well buffered, and if somehow all photosynthesis in the sea were to stop today, atmospheric oxygen would decrease by 10% -- over the next one million years.

[More: C.L. Osterberg, "Nuclear Power Wastes and the Ocean," in Wastes in the Ocean, vol. 4 (Wiley 1985); and "Waste disposal: land or sea?" Secretariat News, vol. 46, no. 1, U.N. Headquarters, N.Y., 1/16/86.]