A Review of Too Hot to Touch, The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste by William M. Alley and Rosemarie Alley, Cambridge University Press , 2013
During a Labor Day 1954 video broadcast, President Eisenhower flicked his “magic wand” in Denver, Colorado and switched on the nation’s first nuclear power plant 1,200 miles away in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. At the time, researchers expected nuclear power would minimize energy costs and curb air pollution. But the nuclear industry has done more than generate clean energy; it has also generated enough high-level radioactive waste to fill over 150 football fields stacked at 20 feet high.
During the 1950’s, well-informed proponent of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss predicted that “electricity will be too cheap to meter” and Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chair, Robert Oppenheimer claimed the issue of nuclear waste was “unimportant.” Impressed and hopeful, politicians and engineers were led to believe nuclear was a sensational innovation that would solve our energy deficit. Nuclear waste disposal was an afterthought to visions of a technological future.
Today, the 121 communities across 35 states with high-level nuclear waste storage facilities would disagree. In their book Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste authors William M. and Rosemarie Alley clearly present the historical, scientific, political, and social issues regarding nuclear waste in means accessible to a broad audience.
Dr. Alley is an award-winning hydrogeologist with twenty years of management experience for the US Geological Survey. Most notably, Dr. Alley oversaw the proposed permanent waste facility project at Yucca Mountain from 2000 to 2010. Rosemarie Alley, an education and literacy specialist, helps translate Dr. Alley’s research and experience into easy to read terms. Their complementing expertise provide for a holistic analysis of the issue of nuclear waste disposal.
High-level nuclear waste releases high amounts of heat and radioactivity for up to 10,000 years or more, posing a significant risk to the surrounding environment and residents. As explained by the Alleys, the problem is actually much more complex than just mitigating environmental degradation; regulatory implications and economic ramification must also be addressed. For instance, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) currently rules that waste engineers must provide “reasonable assurance” that the radioactivity will be permanently contained before moving forward with a waste disposal project. Though this regulation seems sensible, waste engineers are forced to continuously modify their designs in order to comply with the NRC’s most recent interpretation of “reasonable assurance”.
The Alleys’ analysis begins when nuclear energy was a scientific revelation that promised to eliminate smog from coal-fired power plants, but little attention was given to waste storage. Much of the waste generated by the Manhattan Project, for example, was buried in haphazard steel tanks, cardboard boxes, or, in some cases, nothing, just covered up with 10 feet of loose dirt. Whether or not you have a background in nuclear energy, these retellings of how politicians and engineers addressed the short-term issue of nuclear waste are unfathomable.
The proposed permanent solutions for nuclear waste during the 1940’s and 50’s all seemed like logical, promising solutions, but the flaws in each would quickly become apparent. Regulators considered recycling spent fuel into atomic weapons, disposing it under remote islands, or even shooting it into space. A proposal to allow radioactive hot material sink into polar ice caps was even introduced and debunked before the rise of the global climate change debate. As each option was taken off the table, it seemed a more outlandish solution was proposed.
The AEC ended up approving a solution allowing companies to dump it into the ocean starting as early as 1946. Though the Alleys point out the dangers of this practice, they explained the historical context that made which ocean dumping seemingly reasonable. Scientific and economic evidence at the time suggested it was a cheap and presumably low risk option. Historical estimates for the time required for safe storage was only 600 years, though now, experts agree the actual lifespan of high-level waste is tens of thousands to millions of years. The Alleys analyze each possibility from first proposal to abandonment and place them in a modern context, adding a bit of Dr. Alley’s own risk assessment analysis.
The rest of the book thoroughly and thoughtfully draws out the future prospects of nuclear waste storage. The possibility of long-term, geological repositories deep underground in stable bedrock is still being considered. Based on his work on Yucca Mountain, Dr. Alley provides both sides of the debate on the site’s relative safety.
Dr. Alley’s understanding of geological repositories also informs his analysis of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s (WIPP) handling of low-level radioactive waste (as opposed to the more dangerous high-level waste). He explains how WIPP was proposed after Governor Bruce King officially invited the AEC to assess ex-salt mines near Carlsbad, NM as a possible repository, which eventually began construction in 1983. Salt beds make effective and reliable natural disposal sites because the salt has the ability to self-seal the spaces around waste materials at a rate of 6 inches per year.
As recently demonstrated this February, however, WIPP is not failsafe. Trace amounts of radioactivity leaked from the underground waste disposal areas, posing a risk to facility operators. Before these recent incidents, WIPP has experienced a nearly perfect safety record since the facility’s opening in 1999. However, these recent setbacks confirm the Alley’s key point that nuclear waste disposal is an ongoing issue, with no easy solutions, that we must be determined to solve.