Letter to the Editor

WHAT A WASTE

Editor,

As the time before Election Day ticks away, America is on the edge of a momentous decision that will profoundly affect its future for generations. Hint: it is not the presidential election, though that is important, too. It is the decision, now percolating quietly through Congress with little or no public debate, about whether to clean up or abandon millions of gallons of nuclear weapons wastes — some of the most dangerous materials on earth.

During the last half of the 20th century, the US produced some 100 metric tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons, leaving behind, as a byproduct, some 220,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste (HLW). This enormous radioactive brew is stored in hundreds of underground tanks at Department of Energy (DOE) sites around the country, which individually could hold an NBA basketball court. More than a third of these aging tanks have already leaked.

HLW remains dangerous for hundreds of centuries. It is potentially explosive and gives off lethal penetrating radiation, even in small amounts. Everything it touches becomes radioactive and dangerous. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) it could impact the human environment of major regions of the United States for hundreds of thousands of years.

Eager to walk away from its profoundly contaminated weapons sites, the Energy Department is now, in an Orwellian move, attempting to redefine these lethal materials by simply renaming "high-level" wastes as "incidental" wastes. This would allow DOE to abandon in tanks as much as 90% of its most dangerous nuclear wastes near major regional water supplies, including the Columbia River, the Savannah River, the Snake River Aquifer and the Tuscaloosa Aquifer, the primary fresh groundwater supply for the Southeastern United States.

In 1982, the United States Government clearly recognized HLW hazards by passing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). Signed by President Reagan, NWPA requires HLW to be removed from tanks to permanent, deep, geologically stable vaults so as to protect humans for at least 10,000 years. But now DOE wants to end-run around the law and a federal court ruling upholding it, citing excessive costs and delays if it complies.

Embedded in the U.S. Senate version of the FY2005 Defense Authorization bill is a hotly contested provision, offered by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), to allow DOE to "reclassify" its high-level wastes as "incidental" at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. So far other states with nuclear weapons sites such as Washington and Idaho remain opposed, despite DOE's repeated efforts to withhold funding unless they support DOE's reclassification scheme. "There's nothing going to be left behind ... that will not be secured to protect South Carolina," claims Senator Graham. But the National Academy of Sciences warned last year the hazards of defense high-level wastes "will persist for centuries, millennia — or essentially forever."

The wastes' fate is now in the hands of House and Senate conference members quietly working in closed session to finalize the spending bill before the election. Why would DOE, Senator Graham and Congress allow the preposterous name-change to go through?

It comes down to money. Originally DOE was supposed to remove 99 percent of the radioactivity from the high-level waste, and then mix it with molten glass in a process called vitrification. The radioactive glass logs would then be sent for geologic disposal at the proposed Yucca Mountain site. But vitrification is expensive. Since 2001, DOE's top cost-cutting objective has been to avoid vitrifying at least 75% of that waste originally scheduled for deep underground disposal. DOE's drive to make fewer high-level waste canisters means greater amounts of radioactivity will remain on site.

DOE concedes it could geologically dispose of all its projected defense HLW containers, but this will cost money that the Bush Administration would rather spend on a new generation of nuclear weapons. And so, DOE is rushing to abandon the lion's share of its most dangerous wastes — just as was done with tragic consequences in the former Soviet Union. The cost of cleaning up HLW is far less than 1% of the $4 trillion spent to amass the US nuclear arsenal. High-level wastes by any other name are still just that: the largest, most dangerous legacy of the nuclear arms race. They must be treated as such. Otherwise, the price of a name change will be incalculable.

Robert Alvarez
American Forum
Washington, DC