Nuclear Waste: The Problem That Won't Go Away [antikvár]

In December 1942, humanity's relationship with nature changed for all time. Working in a secret underground military laboratory in Chicago, the emigré Italian physicist Enrico Fermi assembled enough uranium to cause a nuclear fission reaction. He split the atom, releasing the inherent energy that binds all matter together. Fermi's discovery almost immediately transformed warfare, eventually revolutionized medicine, and created hopes of electricity "too cheap to meter." But his experiment also produced something that will persist in an extremely hazardous form for hundreds of thousands of years—a small packet of radioactive waste materials.1 A half century later, scientists have yet to find a permanent and safe way to dispose of Fermi's radioactive waste, which Hes buried under a foot of concrete and two feet of dirt on a hillside in Illinois. Nor have they found how to safely dispose of the 80,000-odd tons of irradiated fuel and hun-dreds of thousands of tons of other radioactive waste—contaminated hardware, filter sludges, and other dangerous detritus—accumulated since then by the commercial generation of electricity from nuclear power. Governments continue to promote the use of nuclear power without ha ving any sure knowledge that a solution to this haunting problem is near, or indeed that the problem can be solved at all. The deadly residue of the nuclear age that Fermi inaugurated may be our civilization's longest-lasting legacy.2 Only the natural decay process, which takes hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, diminishes the radioactivity of nuclear waste. The significance of this crucial fact—that the health consequences, also, would last for millennia—was overlooked for decades after the discov- I am grateful to Diane D'Arrigo, Helmut Hirsch, David Lowry, Lydia Popova, Scott Saleska, Mycle Schneider, and Barry D. Solomon, as well as to my colleagues at Worldwatch Institute, for reviewing drafts of this paper. Special thanks to Maureen and Nathan Lenssen for their invaluable support.