The Nuclear Rift at Glasgow

The Glasgow Climate Conference has exposed the rift between advocates who see nuclear power as a partial solution to climate change and those who see it as a very long term and expensive waste disposal problem. A look at how two developed countries handle radioactive wastes from nuclear operations may help answer this quandary. The USA built several nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington to produce weapons grade plutonium for use in atomic bombs. Now that the Cold War is officially over, clean up of the Hanford site is proving to be extremely expensive and time consuming. Eight reactors are now idle. Six have been cocooned in steel and concrete and two remain to be entombed. The ninth reactor was clean and converted to a historic landmark as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Ten thousand tourists visit the old B reactor every year. Plutonium from Hanford B was used in the Trinity Test of the first atomic weapon in New Mexico. Hanford plutonium was also used in the Nagasaki atomic attack.

entombed reactors DR and D

Cocooning is the same technique used by the Russians to enclose the radioactive ruins at Chernobyl, Ukraine. The shelter are intended to last about 75 years, or long enough for radioactivity to dissipate to levels low enough for the reactors to be dismantled and buried on the reservation. Compared to other radioactive clean-up costs associated with nuclear fission, the cocoons are relatively cheap: about $10 million each. So far, cleaning the Hanford site to acceptable levels of radioactivity has cost about $2.5 billion a year since it began in the late 1980s. The steel and concrete enclosures are 58 feet meters) long, 151 feet (46 meters) wide and 123 feet (37.5 meters) high. The last sarchpogus entombing Reactor K West is expected to be completed by 2026.

Disposing of the obsolete reactors is a relative bright spot in the Hanford cleaning story. The process has been plagued by technical difficulties, lack of funding, contractor turnover, and law suits over the environmental impact of the site since it sits close to the Columbia River and the town of Kirkland, Washington. Of pressing concern are the 177 buried tanks holding thousands of gallons of contaminated waste water. They are corroding, and if they begin to leak, the contamination will certainly enter the groundwater and eventually the Columbia River. It will take decades and billions of dollars to secure the tanks or remove them altogether. An estimate for the cleaning of a site the size of Rhode Island is $660 billion No one knows if future generations will be willing to foot the bill. Safe, permanent radioactive waste disposal is the unsolved problem and usually unmentioned cost of nuclear power. As one watchdog director said, “It’s rather grim. It’s multigenerational,” Cleaning Hanford, "will cost more than anyone thought possible,”

Nuclear advocates argue that nuclear power is cleaner than most other power production methods and major accidents are exceedingly rare. So nuclear power respresents the best chance of combating anthropomorphic clinate change, they argue. When accidents do occur as in the United States, Japan and Ukraine, they are catastrophic, long lasting and cost huge sums to amerliorate. France has amassed decades of nuclear power operation without a major catastrophe. The EU is debating whether to label nuclear power "green" thus making it eligible for economic subsidies. Germany has answered the question in the negative, as it dismantles its nuclear energy industry.

France is the polar opposite. No other country is depended on nuclear power as much as France. That country has adopted methods of buring or recycling radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Storage units hold about 90% of the country's low to medium radioactive waste materials. For highly radioactive wastes--mostly fuel rods--it is preparing underground storage near the village of Bure (pop.82) in northeastern France. The radioactive waste agency, Andra, has been building the facility for the past twenty years, and if approved by the government, the tunnels carved from the clay and granite 500 meters below the surface could hold 94,000 tons of the most radioactive waste since nuclear operations began in France forty years ago. Andra's geologic isolation is intended to be the permanent answer to a problem that still has not been resolved by nuclear operators, including the United States which abandoned its deep storage solution at Yucca Mountain, Utah. Geologic faults were discovered that compromised that facility's safety. France intends to spend $29 billion on its underground storage project, but that is only part of the extreme cost of safely operating nuclear power. For now, like the US, France stores its waste in pools next to operating reactors.

Environmental organizations like Greenpeace accuse the French of covering up or exporting radioactive waste disposa problems to eastern Europe. Because of the urgency of the climate change crisis, some policy makers have embraced nuclear power as a solution, or dropped their opposition to relying on nuclear reactors. The later category includes John Kerry, the US envoy for climate matters. Nuclear experts say that people are coming to the stark realization that nuclear power is less scary than climate change consequences. Anti-nuclear activist say deep geologic storage is not a leak proof solution for the thousands of years in which nuclear decay takes place. Meanwhile the waste, buried or not is not going away.