America’s Inherited Nuclear Waste Problem

Breaking Bad: A Nuclear Waste Disaster By Joseph Trento, DC Bureau, June 5th, 2014 “………The original Manhattan Project, which developed our nuclear capability, paid little attention to waste. Plutonium was dumped in the ground at Hanford where the production reactors for the Manhattan project operated. The pressures of the Cold War made environmental and health concerns a low priority issue at the old and secretive Atomic Energy Commission as it vastly expanded weapons production with the creation of the Savannah River Site to produce plutonium for H-Bombs. At SRS, nuclear contamination was disposed of carelessly and is widespread over a site bigger than Washington, D.C.

Physical surveys done at Hanford and SRS revealed massive mishandling of high-level nuclear materials over decades. Over a hundred million gallons of high-level nuclear waste is stored in huge leaking and corroded tanks at Hanford and SRS. This was the volatile chemical stew that came from extracting radioactive materials to create nuclear bomb pits. The labs spent tiny amounts of their budgets trying to figure out ways to mitigate the waste – but bomb improvement and design were overwhelmingly the first order of business. Facts about high-level radiation became the enemy. Everything that radioactive materials touch also become radioactive. For example, water and chemicals used in the weapons process has to be segregated as it becomes radioactive. That is how the liquid waste vastly increased at both SRS and Hanford tank farms.

In addition to the large amounts of weapons waste, a huge civilian nuclear reactor program was building a waste stream of its own. Once fuel roads are used in a reactor, they are extremely dangerous. This spent fuel has no place to go. Decades of the rods are being stored at local power reactors adding expensive storage costs for public utilities. The government’s inability to agree on a repository for this material brought home the politics of the nuclear age. Nothing but time – often hundreds and sometimes thousands of years – will degrade the dangers. The public has little protection from what President Obama described as “our bridge to the energy future.” Science simply has not figured out a way to really mitigate nuclear waste and by the time Obama came into office, the waste had already overwhelmed DOE.

No Place To Put The Waste and No Way To Get Rid of The Radiation – ………..Presidents and Congress believed assurances from NNSA that new technologies such as suspending high-level nuclear waste in glass and using the new MOX fuel plant would point a path to the remediation of materials. Their faith was misplaced. – http://www.dcbureau.org/201406059835/natural-resources-news-service/breaking-bad-nuclear-waste-disaster.html