Commentary on Obama's Yucca Mountain Abandonment
By Dr. Gordon Edwards
For decades, nuclear proponents have been saying that the solution to
the problem of safely storing the highly toxic radioactive wastes created by
nuclear reactors – for millions of years – is to dig a hole and bury it.
This simplistic idea has problems associated with it:
- No long-lived toxic materials have ever been disposed of by
the human race in a permanently satisfactory way, so we
have no success stories to model our efforts on
- It is impossible to get radioactive wastes into an "undisturbed"
geologic formation without disturbing it, thereby creating fractures
and/or passages which cannot be restored to the same integrity as
the original undisturbed formation;
- Safely emplacing wastes in a geologic formation does not guarantee
that those wastes will remain where they are put, over geologic time
periods, and there are no principles of science which allow us to predict
reliably so far into the future -- especially since geology itself is not a
predictive science;
- Moving highly radioactive wastes over thousands of miles raises
serious concerns about air/water/road accidents and radioactive
exposures along the way;
- As long as new waste continue to be produced at the plants,
moving the older wastes underground does not eliminate or even
significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic dispersal events at the surface;
- There is no perfect site it seems -- earthquake fault lines, brittle rocks that
display extensive fracture zones, salt formations that contain pockets of
brine, many unanticipated geologic factors have come into play.
After decades of research, and billions of dollars in expenditures,
the Yucca Mountain site in the USA (not far from the old nuclear
weapons testing grounds) has shown many serious defects that
call into question its suitability as a permanent waste repository.
Now the Obama administration is cutting further funding on this project.
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