Nuclear waste disposal
A safe place?
Regarding “U.S. must better manage nuclear waste” (Page A11, June 27), I wish U.S. Reps. Gene Green, D-Houston, and Bill Flores, R-Waco, good luck in trying to establish a viable nuclear waste disposal program. But they missed several key points that have proven to be intractable:
1. Siting of the waste disposal is elusive. In 1989, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission planned a fiat in which a nuclear dump site would be established in Deaf Smith County. As luck would have it, an engineer got wind of the plan and pointed out that dumping nuclear waste into the Ogallala Underground Reservoir risked poisoning the entire breadbasket of the United States. The next site chosen was Yucca Mountain. The only redeeming value for this site was that it was not as bad as Deaf Smith County. As it turns out, Yucca Mountain harbors access to one of the most prolific underground stream systems. Siting is also complicated by geology. Nuclear waste can take hundreds of thousands of years to stabilize. Major geological changes in the storage site can occur well before the waste products become nonradioactive.
2. Methodologies for storage have descended to the lowest-common denominator. The current proposals all involve long-term storage — no recycling or processing. In 1977, then President Jimmy Carter canceled the Fast Breeder Reactor program and announced the shutdown of the fuel cell recycling facility. These actions increased the volume of waste significantly. Worse, there has been no serious effort to learn from other programs.
3. In our innumerate and technically clueless body politic, everyone knows that if you are killed by nuclear waste or a nuclear incident, then you are 100 times more dead than if you are run down on the streets by a drunken driver. Not to marginalize the nuclear risk, but fear drives the system. To date, the number of persons killed by nuclear incidents is small. Nonetheless, there were about 12,000 people killed by drivers under the influence and a similar number killed by gun violence in the last year, alone. Still, fear trumps logic.
4. Virtually every government contract goes to the lowest bidder. This means government contracting is like buying oats. If you want good oats you pay a fair price. On the other hand, oats can be purchased cheaply after they have been cycled once through the horse. James A. Babb, Friendswood