July is becoming a tough month for nuclear waste. In July 2003, US District Court Judge Lynn Winmill in Idaho ruled that all of the approximately 90 million gallons of tank wastes at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are high level and must be buried in repositories. In July 2004, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that a 10 000-year radiation standard for Yucca Mountain is inadequate. Congress will no doubt have to intervene to short-circuit the latter decision, or repositories in the US will never open.
Any geologic burial site will be fractured before—and especially after—tunnel boring. The very best that can be done is to supplement the rock’s containment ability with engineered barriers such as thick-wall steel casks and titanium drip shields.
The least the tank wastes weigh is 360 000 tons, or nearly five times the weight that’s slated to go in Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy is committed to removing tank wastes from Savannah River and Hanford. In 1984, the department had potential crystalline repositories in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, and Wisconsin on its radar screen. Rocks in those states are granitic, which means each of the sites is already fractured and will be further fractured with drilling. Anyone wanting proof of that need only consult the Oskarshamn repository, a granite site about 150 miles south of Stockholm.
At some point, we’re going to have to be practical. We’ve enjoyed nuclear energy, and we’ve enjoyed our status as the world’s greatest nuclear power, but everything comes with a price. We now have 410 000 tons of spent-fuel rods and tank wastes spread all over the country, and all of us would breathe easier if they were out of sight, out of mind.
