Radiological Storage of Waste
What I’m trying to say here is that the so-called “cold war” started this ecological nightmare and the so-called “do-gooders” had to find a safe use for Nuclear Energy, so the Nuclear Power Plant was born. This completed the ecological disaster we now are facing. Without a care in the world as to how to get rid of Nuclear Waste, we rushed into Nuclear this and that, spurred on by Mutual Assured Destruction strategies and so-called free energy. No more sulfur from coal or oil burning pollution for us, it was the new way of life. Then the waste started building up, power plant High Efficiency Particulate Absolute (HEPA) filters containing thousand year half lives hit us over the head by the ton. Some of the nuclear power plants began to age or fail creating more and more of this very radiologically “hot” waste. Mean while the DOE plants were putting out more and more nuclear bombs to keep up with the Russians, and first thing you know, you have a serious problem.
Every state began to come up with its own rules on how to handle, store , and transport nuclear waste. The states that didn’t have any nuclear power plants or DOE facilities just said no to storing or transporting in their states. The states that had either one were stuck with what they had, but made strict rules about not accepting or transporting any other states waste through their state. I was on an inspection team that went to Idaho Falls to view 20 year old “low level” waste that had been buried there 20 years ago in drums under a mound of dirt. What we found was just waste, no drums, no liners, just waste. Doe Facilities had been burying low level waste in Idaho for years as a temporary fix. When the governor of Idaho found out about the just waste issue, he cancelled all those long agreements and shut off Idaho to any more low level waste. Now, each DOE facility stores these same steel drums of waste, with plastic liners above ground at their own facility, waiting for a solution. Several solutions have been proposed, but, to date, none acceptable or accepted. Doe is the arm of the government which has the “problem” . It came up with 2 solutions to the high level radiological waste. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was built under New Mexico in impermeable salt beds, 1200 feet down. They built the facility to collapse on itself from the shear pressure of the earth. They built $200,000 containers to ship the waste in and tested them by bouncing railroad diesel engines off of them. I was part of the Waste Inspection team. We viewed the waste for liquids and sharp objects that were not supposed to be in the containers. It was a plan, until the governor of New Mexico threw a curve ball at DOE. He demanded a brand new 4 lane highway of concrete from the edge of his state to WIPP. This slowed things down enough to effectively stop the project. 10 years after it was supposed to accepting waste, it accepted its first waste. By this time the salt beds were crumbling under the earth’s pressure, so this raised more safety concerns. The project was completely stalled.
Meanwhile, DOE came up with another plan to store low level waste in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. They again tunneled into the mountain, started building the facility, only to be stopped by the threat of terrorists acting on the shipments. The governor is up at arms and so is everyone else. Nevada, it seems had its fill of testing nuclear bombs awhile back and is not about to declare itself open season to terrorists.
The big picture is that radiological waste eats plastic liners over time and water can then rust the steel and get to the waste. When water gets to the waste, the water table is at risk, and it flows anywhere it wants to, in underground streams. This takes a lot of time to happen, but tell that to a frightened public and you get over my dead body back . So, here we are, a problem created by war without a solution that is acceptable to everyone.
The low level waste is really the problem as there is a lot more of it around, and any contamination has to be cleaned up when and where it spills. People have tried to burn it and were shut down, which is by far the best method of waste reduction, but the public won’t buy it. Which would you rather have, an Arc Melt Furnace, a few HEPA filters and some “hot glass” buried deep in the earth, or a lot of 55 gallon drums of waste rusting away above ground right near your home. I vote for the HEPA, but no one is listening, including the waste gurus at the DOE Facility where I used to work.
As a Hazardous Materials Technician, I am always amazed at the size of the dollars it takes to clean up a spill of any type. Generating the waste is easy, cleaning it up, transporting it, and storing it is another matter entirely. This is one of the reasons why a lot of Nuclear Power Plants were stopped in the 1980’s. The public was scared of the whole thing and so Environmental Assessments were done to prove feasibility before a project was started. The concept of cradle to grave with hazardous waste scares a lot of companies also. Then , you get the companies who are run by unscrupulous managers who don’t care if they don’t have an idea of how to clean it up. These are the companies who take on the job and file Chapter11 bankruptcy along the line as a solution to the problem that they created.
True enough, a terrorist could probably destroy a truck carrying a low-level radiological shipment and spill the waste all over creation, but a high level container would just laugh off almost any bomb they threw at it. This brings up the difference between low level waste and high level. The high level is definitely HOT and you do not want to mess with it. 90% of the low level waste is almost harmless when you consider the average background radiation for the earth’s uranium. Then there’s that 10% that’s left which is not harmless by any means and someone probably looked the other way to get it in the low level category.
As bad as the radiological waste from the DOE facilities is, the Chemical wastes are much worse, due to amounts of hazardous chemicals used in the manufacture of the nuclear bombs. The public , however, is not as scared of these so-called “normal” mixed wastes, only because they are not publicized at all. The mixed wastes are part chemical, part radiological. Some of these are really hard to deal with.
I am not talking about Biological Warfare yet. I believe the US Postal Service found out about the public and how scared it was of anthrax, let alone smallpox, aids, ebola, or mad cow disease.

