Introduction
Radioactive waste is a waste product containing radioactive material, usually the product of a nuclear process such as nuclear fission. Radioactive waste can also be produced by industries that are not directly connected to the nuclear industry. Radioactive waste is classified as
- low-level, from hospitals, industry and used protective clothing.
- medium-level, found in chemical sludge and metal reactor fuel.
- high-level waste from nuclear reactors.
- transauranic waste, which is radioactive waste emitting alpha-particles with a half-life greater than 20 years).
Radioactive contamination can occur through ingestion, inhalation, absorption or injection of radioactive waste.
In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states that there are “millions of gallons of radioactive waste, thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material and huge quantities of contaminated soil and water.” For example the Fernald Ohio site had 31 million pounds of uranium product, 2.5 billion pounds of waste, 2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris and a 223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards.
Defenders claim that the problems of nuclear waste do not come close to approaching the problems of fossil fuel waste. In fact, emissions from fossil fuels kill far more people than nuclear waste does and a coal power plant releases 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant of the same wattage. The World Nuclear Association provides a comparison of deaths due to accidents among the different kinds of energy production. The deaths per TW-year of electricity produced from 1970 to 1992 are quoted as 885 for hydropower, 342 for coal, 85 for natural gas and 8 for nuclear.
Nuclear Disasters in Chelyabinsk
However, while the statistics seems to indicate that nuclear waste is, on average, the safest fuel, the history of nuclear power and nuclear waste paints a far darker picture. The most tragic example of nuclear contamination in history is that of Chelyabinsk, which has been declared by western scientists to be the most polluted spot on Earth. The region endured around forty years of nuclear contamination and has suffered three major nuclear disasters.
Chelyabinsk was one of the former Soviet Union’s main military production centers, including nuclear weapons. Accidents, nuclear waste disposal and day-to-day operation of the Mayak reactor and radiochemical plant contaminated a vast area of the province. Much nuclear waste was dumped in the Techa River and the contaminated water killed so many people in the 1950s that 22 villages along the river banks were evacuated.
In 1957, a nuclear waste storage tank accident released radiation that was double the amount released by the Chernobyl accident. The accident was kept secret but almost 11,000 people had to be evacuated. The severe environmental contamination has caused many health issues to increase dramatically over the past 33 years. In fact, 21% increase in the incidents of cancer, a 25% increase in birth defects and 50% of the population of child-bearing age are sterile.
Disaster would strike yet again in 1967 at Lake Karachay. Nuclear waste was being dumped into two self-contained natural lakes near the Mayek reactor; Lake Karachay for high-level waste and Lake Staroe Boloto for medium level waste. During a long drought that summer, Lake Karachay dried up and the radioactive waste from the exposed lake blew over an area of 2,200 square kilometers.
Proper Waste Management
The story of Chelyabinsk may have been avoided if the high-level radioactive waste being carelessly disposed of was properly handled. The proper handling of these wastes is a daunting task, since radioactive wastes remain deadly to living organisms for many years. The two primary radioactive waste products, Technetium-99 and Iodine-129 have a half-life of 220,000 and 15.7 million years respectively. There are also transuranic radioactive elements in spent nuclear fuel, including Neptunium-237 and Plutonium-239, both of which remain radioactive for thousands, if not millions of years. High-level radioactive waste requires sophisticated treatment and proper management to isolate it from the biosphere.
The main problem with nuclear waste management is how to keep the waste in storage until it decays after thousands, or millions of years. Hannes Alfven, a Nobel laureate in physics, identified two prerequisites for the effective management of radioactive waste,
- Stable geological formations
- Stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years
As far as we know, no human civilization has lasted over hundreds of thousands of years and there are no known geological formations of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository that would remain stable over the required timescale. However, avoiding confrontation with the risks involved with managing radioactive wastes can lead to even greater consequences in the distant future. Radioactive waste management is a kind of policy analysis that requires special attention, not only on ethical grounds, but also because of the high degree of uncertainty and futurity involved.
I think this topic is excellent for applying some systems thinking. There are some variables that we might track over time if you were to model the decision making process that goes into nuclear waste recycling and storage. First, the recycling loop might contain variables related to cost of recycling, risk of accidents during recycling and transportation, risk of proliferation, and amount of material recycled. For the storage loop, you might consider the cost of storage, risk of transport, risk of proliferation, and people's reactions to having nuclear material moved through or stored in their communities. Of course, the two loops would be related, as the more material recycled would decrease the amount of storage needed, unless of course this prompts a desire to build more nuclear plants and thus creating more waste...
ReplyDeleteThese are all very good points you made Curt. I tried to show the different variables involved by going through the tragedy of Chelyabinsk, which highlights the Soviet's Unions political will to produce military weapons, even at the cost of massive human and environmental casualties.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I find interesting about this topic from a systems thinking perspective are the 'soft' variables. The two I've highlighted in the blog itself are the stable geological formations and stable human institutions.
Other variables that are hard to monitor are political will, the interests of different countries, transboundary contamination and accidents.