Fiddling while the drums burn Okay, let’s put aside the question of whether nuclear power is Good or Bad. We have it. We’ve had it. And as a result, we…
Fiddling while the drums burn
Okay, let’s put aside the question of whether nuclear power is Good or Bad. We have it. We’ve had it. And as a result, we do have nuclear waste. And we need to do something about it.
Right now, it’s all sitting in retaining ponds (to diffuse the heat) in steel and/or concrete drums, slowly eating away at them — and, not coincidentally, providing a swell, diffuse target for terrrorists to hit. Since this stuff is deadly for hundreds of thousands of years (a good argument against nuclear power, but, again, neither here nor there, since it already exists), obviously this is not a long-term solution. It’s not even a good short-term solution.
Long-term solutions have been finding a geologically stable place to bury the stuff. Sure, there are no guarantees, no matter how long and how hard it’s studied, that the site(s) selected will be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. But again, almost any place chosen is going to be better than where the stuff is now.
Humans are dunderheads when it comes to risk. If we can’t see it, right here in front of us, it’s not a risk. If we do see it, it becomes a risk perceived as much greater than it actually is. That’s why media reports on violent crime tend to make people think that violent crime is rampant and increasing, even though the opposite is true.
Thus, as long as the waste is sitting out of sight behind barbed wire fences, as long as people are used to it there — very little brouhaha ensues. Maybe the folks living nearby aren’t terribly happy — but they go on with their lives.
But try to decide on a new, much safer place to put this stuff — and every state, county, city and village en route — let alone at the proposed destination — treats it like Armageddon on the Hoof. That’s not to say that there aren’t risks, but those risks aren’t compared to the risks involved in doing nothing for another month, year, decade, century.
The story cited in the title for this post discusses the debate over siting of nuclear waste, and how power politics (particuarly in the Senate) has basically excluded every single location in the US — regardless of the fact that the waste currently resides all over the US anyway, and, again, in a much riskier setting than any permanent site would provide.
I hope it doesn’t take a disaster to finally push this thing to resolution, because, if it does, it’s going to be ugly. Really ugly.
(Obligatory conflict-of-interest note here: I not only live in the same greater metropolitan area as the Rocky Flats plant, which built plutonium triggers for H-bombs, but my employer has been and remains involved in various ways both with the clean-up of that plant and with the construction of WIPP waste storage facilities in New Mexico.)
The FBI — yes, the FBI — hasn’t caught the Anthrax mailers yet. But they have managed come up with a new watchword (and logo!) for the whole situation.