- It must be tough to be a geologist.
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- You basically study the behavior of rocks, which usually
don't move around fast enough to provide many clues about their personality.
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- It must doubly frustrating to be a geologist working
on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. The
technical work on that facility is being done "on a time scale of
centuries," one expert said.
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- "We continue to have extensive supporting research
to provide as good as possible a technical basis for the societal decisions
that need to be made to manage our legacy of high-level waste," said
D. Warner North, who is a geologist himself, with the rather cumbersome
title of chairman of the Committee on the Disposition of High Level Radioactive
Waste Through Geologic Isolation.
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- Since Congress decided earlier this year to override
Nevada's veto of the Yucca Mountain site, North and his colleagues have
optimistically concluded that the waste disposal process has moved from
the political arena to the technical one.
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- "Who are you going to trust?" he asks. "People
or rocks?"
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- Who, indeed?
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- All around the country, nuclear power plants are running
out of storage space for the spent fuel. In California, according to Department
of Energy data, pool storage for the Humboldt Bay and Rancho Seco nuclear
plants is full. Pool storage for the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre plants
will be full in about 2005. California gets about 17 percent of all of
its energy from nuclear power. Both Diablo Canyon and San Onofre are expected
to continue operating for 18 years after they run out of waste storage
space.
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- In New York, pool storage at Indian Point 1 is full.
Indian Point 2 and 3 will be full by 2005, Fitzpatrick by 2004, Nine Mile
Point and Ginna by 2009. Nuclear power provides 23 percent of New York
state's power and three of its plants are expected to operate 10 or more
years after their waste storage capacity is maxed out.
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- This scenario is repeated with greater and lesser degrees
of urgency in the remainder of the 39 states that have operating nuclear
power plants.
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- "We are not confronting a hypothetical problem,"
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham wrote President Bush last February. "We
have a staggering amount of radioactive waste in this country -- nearly
100,000,000 gallons of high-level nuclear waste and more than 40,000 metric
tons of spent nuclear fuel with more created every day."
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- In his transmittal letter accompanying DOE's recommendation
to use the Yucca Mountain site, Abraham said, "America's choice is
not between, on the one hand, a disposal site with costs and risks held
to a minimum, and, on the other, a magic disposal system with no costs
or risks at all. Instead, the real choice is between a single secure site,
deep under the ground at Yucca Mountain, or making do with what we have
now or some variant of it -- 131 aging surface sites, scattered across
39 states."
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- Every one of those sites was built on the assumption
it would be temporary, the secretary's letter noted. "As time goes
by, every one is closer to the limit of its safe life span. And every one
is at least a potential security risk -- safe for today, but a question
mark in decades to come."
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- As Stan said to Ollie, "This is fine mess you've
gotten us into." What to do? What to do?
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- As North's title confirms, what the nation has decided
to do is bury it. This in itself represents a significant technical decision.
High-level waste is dangerous for a very long time. The government has
set a 10,000-year safety standard the Yucca Mountain facility. That's longer
than the entire history of human civilization or, if you prefer, twice
as old as the Great Pyramid at Giza.
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- Even this generous timetable is arbitrary. Many radioactive
waste products remain dangerous for longer than that -- some for millions
of years.
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- Any burial of nuclear waste contains the flavor of arbitrariness.
How do you guarantee our descendants 10 millennia from now won't have a
gargantuan mess on their hands?
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- A rejected alternative involved disposing of the stuff
in the deep ocean, even though water shields this kind of radioactivity
pretty well and some deep ocean basins have been geologically stable for
many times the expected lifespan of the nuclear waste. Also, fewer people
live nearby. The problem is, once you dump the stuff there, it by and large
becomes impossible to retrieve.
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- Likewise rejected were launching it into space toward
the sun and transmutating it into less dangerous material -- both technologically
and/or economically remote ideas.
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- So, we're left with Nevada's rocks, and with rocks come
geologists, geologists who are trying to predict how Yucca Mountain is
going to behave over those aforementioned next 10,000 years. The waste
will be buried 1,000 feet below the surface, in an area above the water
table, but below the area where most of the surface water penetrates.
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- DOE has calculated 95 percent of the 12.5 inches of rainfall
the area receives annually either runs off, evaporates or is picked up
by plant root systems.
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- In addition, the waste will be protected by a titanium
shield, the world's most expensive umbrella, to reduce water penetration
even further.
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- Water is the biggest and most obvious problem. It can
corrode the containers, exposing the waste. It can carry radioactive particles
to the surface as it migrates through the water table.
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- DOE plans to deal with this prospect by operating a "hot"
repository. When the waste containers are stored close together, they will
spontaneously generate a lot of heat -- not enough to cause a meltdown,
but when the repository is sealed, temperatures will rise beyond the boiling
point of water. This should, in turn, evaporate any water that enters,
sending it back up into the overhead rock as steam. Minerals in the steam
should precipitate out, forming another impermeable layer above the waste
facility. That's the hypothesis, at least.
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- The possibility of earthquakes or volcanoes at the site
is considered too remote to worry about -- although the local geologic
record contains both occurrences.
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- All of these technical considerations rely heavily on
understanding rocks and predicting the forces that Earth can unleash upon
them. But geologists are being asked to do things they are ill equipped
to do. Their science is a historical science, not a predictive one.
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- One of geology's charms is a lot of it is useless for
most practical purposes -- the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. No
matter what your scientific background, predicting the future is hazardous.
Over 10,000 years, even rocks can be treacherously unreliable.
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- Who are you going to trust? Rocks or people?
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- Something even more basic somehow was not addressed in
this debate: Why have we continued to produce this stuff when we've had
no good place to put it? DOE has generated reams of fancy material on the
theme, "Why Yucca Mountain?" One searches in vain for a single
sentence containing the corollary: Why Diablo Canyon? Why Indian Point?
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- Isn't it simply bad manners to continue producing poisons
in our neighborhood, only to leave them lying out there on the curb for
the neighborhood children to wade in?
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- Copyright © 2002 United Press International
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