The world’s blind eye to the nightmare problem of nuclear waste disposal

Now if you were to ask an old-fashioned housewife, to prepare a complicated dinner with strong-smelling crayfish, seafoods and vegetables, she would probably first make sure that there was a suitable garbage bin at hand.

But that’s not the way that the magnificent men in their nuclear machines thought about the garbage from their concoctions. The American (pro-nuclear) historian Spencer Weart explains how, in the 1950s:

“… the press and the public gave the matter only passing attention, preferring to leave nuclear sanitary engineering to officials. Officials left it to nuclear experts, and most nuclear experts left it alone.” 

So, they left it alone – for a long time.

The authority on matters nuclear – the Atomic Energy Commission – mentioned atomic wastes as a “cumbersome” problem – going along with the view that it was not a major issue, and technological development would solve it in the future. The British Ministry of Supply, in 1949, concluded that  nuclear waste dumped into sea was “only slightly radioactive and the amount too small ‘to have any harmful effect on fish or on human life.’

Still, even in 1950, one report in the New York Times; “Atomic ‘Cemetery’ Needed for Waste,” argued that “some kind of national burying place will be needed for the lethal substances” and warned of the dangers of dumping atomic wastes into the oceans; “[i]f fish ate the material, scientists fear it might find its way into food used by humans.”

“Expert” thinking about nuclear waste moved on, in the 1950s, to the idea that it could be beneficial. It could be used to generate electricity. It could have a military use -it could be used to create “a lethal radioactive ‘line’ along a frontier. behind a river, across a peninsula, that would deny an area to the enemy.” In 1956, Lewis L. Strauss, the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission said “the term ‘atomic waste’ is a misnomer”.

So developed one of the nuclear lobby’s favourite themes over the decades – “Not a Waste, but a Resource”.

However, from 1957 onwards, there was a growing public realisation especially in Europe, that nuclear wastes are dangerous, especially to health, and opposition increased to the dumping of wastes at sea.

It was not until 1993 that nuclear waste dumping at sea was banned, by international treaties – and it’s still not enforced everywhere. So, it has taken the nuclear experts and the various authorities, world-wide, a very long time to take action against the nuclear industry’s most egregious crime against nature.

So, where are we today?

Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Becoming a responsible ancestor”– Daniel Metlay gives the most comprehensive account of the USA’s policies, and of the authorities’ continuing struggles to tackle the Gordian knot of nuclear wastes. And that’s just from the peaceful nuclear power industry.   

On the nuclear weapons industry, also in the Bulletin, Cameron Tracy writes on the Risks of geologic disposal of weapons plutonium.

Apart from the American experience, the media tells us, generally in glowing, optimistic terms, of the progress of super-costly deep underground facilities in Finland, and soon to come, in Sweden and France.

As if the American or “Western” history of nuclear waste were the whole story, we learn little or nothing about nuclear waste management in Russia, China, India, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (except for Fukushima).

However, the US National Academy of Science and its Russian counterpart met in 1992, leading to a U.S-Russia pledge in 2000 to reciprocally dispose of 34 metric tons of excess weapons plutonium. It was a complicated co-operative effort which fell apart completely by 2016.

On the rare occasions when the Western media has mentioned Russia’s nuclear waste history, it is to gloat over what a mess Russia has made of it.

The nuclear waste industry bumbles on, with prospects of profits for waste management companies like Holtec, and of “jobs, jobs’, jobs”. Is the nuclear behometh just too big to be stopped?

There are two questions about nuclear wastes that are never asked by the “experts”, let alone answered by them:

1. Why not stop making more nuclear trash?
2. Why do the nuclear-power countries not work together, co-operate, in getting rid of the existing global problem of nuclear trash?

Also by Noel Wauchope: 2025 – Australia’s dangerous nuclear dance with Dutton?