March 28, 2006

A new report from Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) finds that all of the stated U.S. radioactive waste policies have failed, and/or hold no potential for success. The group recommended—as it did 12 years ago—that an independent Blue-Ribbon Commission be established to start from ground zero and establish new, workable, scientifically-defensible radioactive waste policies. Had the U.S. done this 12 years ago, about seven billion dollars would have been saved that have been spent on a pyrrhic effort to open the proposed and unsuitable Yucca Mountain, Nevada nuclear waste dump.

The report also dismisses reprocessing—currently a cause celebre among the Bush administration and a few of its Congressional backers—as a radioactive waste management approach. Reprocessing would not only not solve the radioactive waste problem, it would lead to new dangers to the environment and public health and to increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

 

Said lead author Kevin Kamps of NIRS, “The U.S. has no better idea of what to do with high-level atomic waste than it did 20 years ago; given current circumstances, it will have no better idea 20 years from now. Shipping wastes through 45 states and the District of Columbia to bury it in a leaky volcanic earthquake zone doesn’t make sense, neither does setting up a parking lot for defective radioactive waste casks. What is needed is a complete re-evaluation of our radioactive waste programs, and that needs to be done before construction of any more nuclear reactors is even considered.”

 

The new report, titled “Radioactive Wreck: The Unfolding Disasters of U.S. Irradiated Nuclear Fuel Policies,” also argues that the proposed Private Fuel Storage waste dump on the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah is both unworkable and environmentally racist, that no full-scale, physical testing of radioactive waste transport canisters is planned, that radioactive waste fuel pools at existing reactors pose numerous safety and security problems, while dry cask storage at nuclear reactor sites does not work as well as it is supposed to and is vulnerable to terrorist attacks as well as accidents.

 

The Bush administration is expected to propose legislation in the near future to attempt to salvage its failed radioactive waste policies by expanding the legal limit on the amount of waste Yucca Mountain could accept, seeking a new “interim” storage program to alleviate the stress on nuclear utilities holding their own waste causes them, taking the Yucca Mountain program off-budget in order to get around the Congressional appropriations process and oversight of the bungled program, and likely other provisions. Many of these measures have been attempted before, and rejected by Congress and/or former President Clinton’s veto pen.

 

The expected introduction of the bill, and the Bush administration’s recent GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) program only reinforce the report’s conclusions that U.S. radioactive waste policy is in complete disarray, with no workable or scientifically-sound options being presented to the public.

 

The NIRS report, published in NIRS’ publication The Nuclear Monitor, is available at: http://www.nirs.org/mononline/nm643.pdf .