Inherit the waste: The nuclear-disposal dilemma

By Reese Palley

The showstopper in many discussions about the good and bad of nuclear power is the figure 10,000. The antinuclear community often maintains that radioactive fuel remains dangerous for that scary number of years.

The entire written history of the human race spans barely 8,000 years, and a message from that distant past wouldn't be in any language we can understand today. So what is the likelihood that, 9,000 years from now, some distant descendant could understand instructions to the effect that the stuff tucked away under Yucca Mountain must not be tampered with for another thousand years? And who would read the message, let alone enforce the embargo? And what sort of containers would last 10 millennia, when the best we can do with stainless steel is some number of centuries?

But the truth is that all this talk of 10,000 years ignores the way the world works. A Roman engineer in A.D. 100 did not plan for eventualities in the year 2000; more likely, he had A.D. 120 in mind. Nor did the industrialists of the 19th century, as they converted fossil fuels to globe-warming greenhouse gases, consider the carbon dioxide surpluses of the 21st century and beyond.

Throughout human history, each generation has inherited the good stuff and the bad stuff from the generation precedent, and somehow made adjustments for survival and growth. No one really looks thousands of years ahead.

In the case of nuclear waste, it's not the 200th future generation that we need to be concerned about, but the second generation hence, in which our grandchildren will inherit the Earth. Certainly we can arrange to protect a stash of radioactive material for a mere hundred years and leave the problem of the next hundred years to our grandchildren's grandchildren. And so on.

Anyway, the "problem" of dealing with nuclear waste has been long since solved. To begin with, we have not generated much nuclear waste. In fact, nuclear waste represents less than 1 percent of all industrial toxic waste.

Since the beginning of the nuclear era, 70 years ago, only 56,000 tons of radioactive waste has been generated worldwide by the nuclear industry. That's substantially less than the amount of waste generated by New York City every week.

Furthermore, modern reprocessing technology can recapture usable fuel and leave behind only manageable, low-radioactivity residue. Dangerously radioactive material represents only a tiny fraction of radioactive waste. In fact, if we reprocessed all the nuclear waste that has been produced since the inception of the nuclear era, we would end up with less than 500 metric tons of dangerous stuff. Certainly we can figure out how to sequester that amount of anything.

And, going forward, we need not create any more extremely long-lived nuclear waste. There are proven, 50-year-old technologies that would produce a quarter of the waste we now turn out, and it would have to be sequestered for only 300 years. The use of thorium, an element you could probably find traces of in your backyard - instead of much more scarce uranium - could lead to a world of abundant nuclear power with minimal amounts of dangerous waste.

We have real problems to solve in connection with nuclear energy, but most of them are financial, not technological. Terrifying the public over a problem that has been essentially solved only keeps us from addressing our pressing energy needs.