Radioactive Waste Conundrum
A strong objection to nuclear power is that nuclear waste disposal techniques are inadequate. The fact that waste created by reactors is toxic for centuries is certainly a persuasive argument against a fission-powered electrical grid. What exactly to do with the radioactive waste seems to be an insoluble conundrum. However, when other power sources are held to the same standard, it becomes a shared problem.
Current disposal methods for spent fossil fuels are non-existent. The world does not trap the exhaust from fossil fuel combustion and put it into barrels. Instead, the global population spews the poisonous byproducts into the atmosphere. The waste products of fission are put into barrels and its whereabouts cataloged. Admittedly, those barrels will be hazardous for many thousands of years. In contrast, the waste products of fossil fuels hang around to affect the environment and weather detrimentally for an unknown period.
The analogy of an urban sewer system is useful when considering the nuclear power situation. The lack of adequate fossil fuel waste disposal condemns the world to breathe its own excrement. With nuclear fission, humanity can at least put its waste into a septic tank. A comparison of waste disposal techniques would seem to indicate that fossil fuels are far more toxic due to the difficulty in containing the waste. What is the half-life of fossil fuel waste asks the libertarian-socialist?
Finding a place to store those barrels of radioactive waste has been a great problem. However, given that there are large expanses of desert in the American West contaminated by years of nuclear testing, why not use these areas for storing barrels of nuclear waste. The American government set off hundreds of nuclear bombs a mere sixty-five miles from Las Vegas in the fifties and sixties. Over one hundred of these atomic bomb tests were above ground. The blasts were visible for miles around. Stacking some barrels of spent nuclear fuel there seems trivial in comparison.
The NIMBY effect has dogged America’s quest for energy independence. Americans need to consider heavy subsidies to any state storing radioactive waste. There are some clear candidates for being the store house states, though. Libertarian-Socialists would encourage Americans to compensate those candidates and for those candidates to be patriotic. The generation of energy is a national security issue, and if ever the need for eminent domain had a justification this could be it.
Libertarian-Socialists know the American public has an overwhelming fear of nuclear reactors. Three Mile Island scared many people. The amount of radiation released at Three Mile Island should be put into perspective, though. A declassified document from the nineties revealed details of a nuclear experiment that went awry, code named Green Run. In the late fifties, near Spokane, Washington, nearly eight thousand curies of radiation were released. By contrast, the Three Mile Island incident released barely forty curies. Forty curies are not good, but in comparison to what occurred over fifty years ago, it is minor.
The Green Run experimental failure could no longer even occur nowadays, because the world has too many Geiger counters. Back then nobody had a Geiger counter so the secret could be kept. Clearly, radioactivity was still treated too cavalierly. The government was actually doing open air burst bomb tests for decades after WWII. There is one powerful lesson from this careless radioactive pollution that occurred, however. The fallout from this carelessness seems to have been dissipated by natural processes.
The Green Run experiment and the legacy of air burst atomic bomb testing in the Nevada desert are illustrative of the fact that radiation is a natural aspect of the environment. It is just as subject to natural processes as the waste of fossil fuels and perhaps more so. Thousands, perhaps millions, of curies of radiation were released into the air during the Green Run fiasco and other secret tests. However, the government was able to conceal its errors ONLY due to the widespread lack of Geiger counters at the time. This is terrible, of course, but imagine trying to cover up a similar fossil fuel error.
Obviously, the environment has some capacity to dissipate radiation. Uranium is a natural ore, and many areas on Earth are naturally radioactive to some extent. An oil slick, thousands of square miles wide, could never be swept under the rug by the government. If no clean up action is taken such an oil slick could destroy an environment for decades, perhaps centuries. The environment does not seem to dissipate fossil fuel pollution all that easily. Before the days of cheap Geiger counters, hiding radiation leaks was not that hard, but the damage from huge oil spills has always been clear for all to see.
The environment does not effectively assimilate oil. Even though the Gulf of Mexico now appears relatively clean, the millions of barrels of oil spilled there still lurk about in the water damaging the health of its inhabitants. In Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez accident was far worse than Three Mile Island. It was painful to watch the footage coming from Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The animal suffering was so great, even more so than appeared to be the case in the Gulf of Mexico. News footage of workers wiping off Alaska’s rocky beaches with towels would have been laughable, had it not been so tragic.
The world runs on oil. War after war in the Middle East has horribly fouled the Persian Gulf. Arabian marine life will never be the same. Chernobyl, arguably the worst nuclear reactor accident, has left a legacy of nature reserves. Truly, the lack of humanity in the Chernobyl “dead zone” has produced a wealth of wildlife and regeneration of the ecology none would have predicted. One has to doubt that a similar nature reserve is being created in the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of Deep Water Horizon’s oil spill.
These petroleum disasters will only recur. Tankers and pipelines crisscross the globe. Thousands of potential disasters are waiting to happen every day. In fact, these accidents are happening, but Geiger counters do not pick up oil spills. Major spills are hard to cover up, but continuous minor spillage here and there takes its toll silently with no Geiger counter to sniff it out. The risks of petroleum actually seem greater when compared to the risks of fission, since radioactive waste cannot be hidden.
For some reason there is little discussion of how radioactive waste can be further reduced by a simple action. The government currently allows civilian reactors to use only low-grade nuclear fuel. This is due to national security concerns. Low-grade fuel creates far more waste than necessary. Nationalization of fission should ease national security concerns, so that these reactors can be run on purer fuel. Such spent nuclear fuel can be used in breeder reactors further to reduce waste, not something that can be done in the case of fossil fuels.
Nationalization would allow the reactors to burn high grade, ninety-nine percent pure fuel, as the military does. This would decrease the amount of waste created significantly. Breeder reactors can use this spent fuel more efficiently as well to reduce the waste produced even further. There is no question that radioactive waste produced by fission is a difficult problem, but it is not insoluble. In addition, when radioactive waste handling is compared to the handling of fossil fuel waste, the latter process seems almost criminal in its inadequacy.
Ironically, it might also ease some concern to know that radioactive waste is being produced in a whole host of different arenas. There is quite a bit of radioactive waste produced in the medical arena and no one thinks that nuclear medicine should be banned. Would people believe that fracking to extract natural gas or other fossil fuels produces an enormous amount of radioactive waste? If they knew, would I even need to write this?
Its fission or frickin’ fracking people!
