Dr. Arjun Makhijani studied engineering at the University of Bombay and Washington State University and earned his Ph.D. in engineering at the university of California-Berkeley in 1972, specializing in nuclear fusion. A recognized authority on energy issues, and nuclear issues in particular, Dr. Makhijani is the author and co-author of numerous reports and books on topics such as radioactive waste storage and disposal, nuclear testing, disposition of fissile materials, energy efficiency, and ozone depletion. He is the principal editor of Nuclear Wasteland: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects, published by MIT Press in July 1995. Dr. Makhijani has served as a consultant to numerous organizations, including the Tennessee VAlley Authority and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Good afternoon. I’m Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. Thank you, Governor Nelson, for this conference and for inviting me. I’ve never been to Nebraska before, although I have a colleague from Lincoln who works with me in my office.
I agree with Ed Helminski in part. He said that these facilities that are being sited around the country are not needed. I agree with that. I also agree that we need a national solution to this problem. We cannot just indiscriminately – and that is what is happening – increase the number of waste disposal sites. This is wrong. I also want to say that what I heard from the representative of the Nebraska Public Power District, unfortunately I don’t have that name with me right here, was marvelous, because of two things. I think one, in the economist’s black box there is a response to price increases which is that you try to economize. But it actually requires a lot of determination and innovation, and that determination and innovation has been carried out in part by utilities and in part by other industry to reduce the waste volume. It doesn’t happen by itself. I think the reduction of waste volume is a very important technical achievement of the last few years. The people who have struggle to address this waste problem, partly as a result of this legislation and partly in other waste areas, should take credit for this very important accomplishment of the last 15 years. I also think that his readiness to store waste on site is exemplary of a public power system, and private utilities should follow this example because we need a little breathing room to be able to step back and address these issues. We’ve had a lot of years of a false sense of urgency, and I’ll try to explain where that false sense of urgency comes from. We do have the room to take the time to address the nuclear waste problems properly.
I want to disagree with Ed Helminski also, because he has said essentially that either we can take it to some other site like Barnwell, or especially that we can start negotiating with the Department of Energy to open up with the military sites.
I’ve worked a lot on environmental problems related to nuclear weapons production. My institute provides technical support to a lot of communities near the nuclear weapons plants and I can tell you, quite apart from the merits of the proposal, that we are all extremely unhappy with the way the Department of Energy has managed its wastes. It has made a terrible mess of enormous areas of this country. Hanford was much talked about. Hanford is possibly the most polluted site in this country. The Columbia River, which is one of the great water resources in this country, runs right through the reservation. As an engineer and as somebody who cares about the environment, I would like to see these places cleaned up, and I cannot agree that because someplace is contaminated that this is a rationale to screw it up further. I think that technological enterprise and ingenuity, as well as a regard for the children who will come after us who will want this water and land, means that we must be determined to spend the resources and to do so wisely to clean up the areas that we have contaminated. And, you’re going to find resistance at the DOE sites because they want clean-up, they don’t want more waste. So this is going to be a very difficult thing to do.
I think the DOE has done a very bad job. They have done very poor science. Carroll Wilson, who was general manager for the Atomic Energy Commission, said, “Nobody got brownie points for dealing with waste.” I believe Ed said that utilities get paid to produce power and they don’t really care about the waste. Well, I cannot see that any institution, public or private, that is in the marketplace or providing a service, and particularly a utility, can operate with a complete absence of civic sense. I do not think that we can say, “We’re producing electricity, it’s good. You all need it for lights; therefore, we can be litterbugs.” But this is being litterbugs with radioactive waste, which lasts for hundreds of years. I think this kind of civic sense should be long past us. We are past the stage where chemical companies can create Love Canals. I think we are even past the stage where the government can say, “It’s national security; therefore, don’t look at the waste issues if we pollute your communities or create fall-out, or whatever.”
I think some kind of accountability and civic sense has to be built into every activity.
I want to finish my comments on Ed’s talk because I think it’s a very, very important talk he gave. I agree that the commercial and military sides are coming together in a lot of different ways, and we do have to take an integrated look at this problem. I’m going to try to help you do that.
The first technical note that I want to make is that you don’t solve a radioactive waste problem. You can only solve it by not creating it, and we already have an enormous amount of waste to manage. Some more is in the pipeline and you can’t switch off the nuclear power plants overnight, no matter what your view of nuclear power is. In Illinois more than 50 percent of the power, some places 75 percent of the power, comes from nuclear. Across the country we have 20 percent. Maybe we can phase them out, but we’re going to have an enormous amount of waste to manage, and we have to create some kind of view of how we are going to manage this waste. The radioactivity will not go away by moving it around or dumping it someplace and forgetting about it.
I want to point out one very crucial thing of why we are here today talking about this problem in the way that we are, it’s because what was talked about as radioactive waste management solutions in the last 50 years has become the clean-up problems of today. Because of short-term thinking, expediency, a false sense of urgency, inattention to the problem of waste, and focusing somewhere on something that you’re selling to the public, whether it be weapons or power, we have created a situation where we’re constantly creating false solutions. Now, in the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex, we face a clean-up bill, and all us taxpayers are going to pay this, of more than $200 billion. In the low-level waste area, of course, you have heard of Maxey Flats and Sheffield and so on, so I’m not going to talk about that. The false sense of urgency I think comes from a single source which we ought to dismiss. It is the question of the transfer of liability from one party to another. It doesn’t solve the problem to move this stuff. I am not against transportation of the waste. I am not against creating repositories. I do think we need to address these issues, but we need to address them with realism and with responsibility to future generations.
Now, what is my problem with the existing system? I want to show you where the waste is. How much waste do we have? The top chart over there shows you how much radioactivity we have. More than 95 percent of the radioactivity is in the spent fuel at the nuclear power plants. The low-level waste, commercial and military, is a very, very tiny proportion of the curies. The bottom part shows the volume of all of the radioactive waste. More than 95 percent of the volume of the waste is in the uranium mill tailings, which are at the processing sites where the uranium ore was processed. There is about an equal volume of mine waste which is not shown in this chart. The third bar there is the low-level waste, that’s 4.9 million cubic meters. This is the whole history of the nuclear age, 50 years. This is cumulative. It’s in egghead units. It’s in cubic meters, one cubic meter is 35 cubic feet. And there you can see the spent fuel, which is most of the curies, is 14,000 cubic meters.
We have an unscientific and irrational method of waste classification in this country. We don’t classify waste according to longevity and hazard; we classify it according to the source of the waste. So we have uranium mill tailings, we have spent fuel, we have reprocessing wastes, and depleted uranium will soon be a waste, we have transuranic waste and so on, and we’ve got a terrible hodgepodge of regulations. You can see under regulatory status -- these are all the categories of waste that we have. I won’t go through all of this. I just want to show you that there are large sections of waste for which there are no regulations. Regulations have been abandoned, partial regulations, mostly unregulated, some state regulation, NRC considering, EPA considering. This calls for a real stepping back of the whole radioactive waste problem because for 50 years we have been without civic sense and without proper sense of responsibility with respect to the longevity of this stuff. For example with uranium mill tailings, the half life of thorium 230 is 75,000 years, and it’s sitting there as sand in pits contaminating the groundwater in several states of the West.
Now, if you look at the next chart. Diane D’Arrigo made reference to this. I wanted to show you what I mean by “irrational.” That’s high level waste at Hanford from plutonium production, some of the tanks contain what’s called salt cake. This is Class B waste from a New York company, that’s more radioactive than this high level waste. This is Class C waste, 160 curies per cubic foot. It’s more than 40 times more radioactive than this. This is spent nuclear fuel, which is far more radioactive than anything else. This is greater than Class C waste. Now, greater than Class C waste is very interesting. The NRC defined A, B, C waste then they ran out of categories and they said everything – instead of inventing a Class D, which I say the “D” is for danger, so they didn’t say Class D, they said Grade greater than Class C [GTCC]. Well, GTCC is recommended to go into a repository by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These waste will arrive primarily from decommissioning of nuclear reactors. Most of the curie content of the waste, but very little of the volume of the waste, will reside in greater than Class C waste, and also in Class C waste. That’s the total radioactivity from decommissioning a boiling water reactor, and you can see that most of it is in these two categories [Class C and GTCC]. After 100 years essentially all of it is in these two categories, 80 percent.
Now, we have got a terrible problem in that if you talk privately with anybody in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and I suggest, Governor Nelson, that you send some of your technical people to go and talk privately to people in the NRC, EPA, and DOE, and see if they don’t agree that we don’t have a rational waste classification system. I was on the radiation advisory committee of the EPA for two years and I initiated this question. Everybody agreed. The EPA was going to study it, but they did not.
What is the solution? I think we have to minimize waste, there’s no question about that; and some of us think, phasing out nuclear power, with due regard to global warming concerns. I don’t think that we can phase out nuclear power regardless of other environmental concerns. There are other environmental concerns. It’s part of the solution.
Waste reduction in volume and curie is very important. But there’s one very important technical thing that arises out of reducing the volume of waste that we must understand, it goes from Class A to Class B waste to Class C waste to greater than Class C waste. What you can do, importantly, if you vitrify the waste as was mentioned this morning and reduce the volume to 100 cubic feet per year, is you can dispose of these wastes from nuclear reactors along with spent fuel in a repository. We did some calculations based on higher waste volume and concluded that the area of a repository that would be required to dispose of most of the dangerous low-level waste from nuclear reactors would only increase the size of a repository by 5 to 10 percent. So it could be accommodated in the context of deep geologic repository disposal, and not the failed shallow land burial that we would have.
A very important thing that we must do, is go back and scrap the existing politicized programs -- low-level, high-level, TRU [transuranic]. We must have a sound waste classification system and we must initiate a program of research. Nature knows how to contain radioactivity for hundreds of millions of years and we can learn to mimic those materials when we make engineered barriers, but we haven’t put the dollars into it. I think in the interim for two or three or four decades, we need some breathing room and we need on-site storage. I think the most important issues with regard to on-site storage are not technical, they’re not economic, they are institutional. They arise out of things like utilities are going to go out of the nuclear power business and the reactors are going to be shut down, so who is going to look after the waste? I think the institutional solutions can and should be addressed.
I think we ought to get the Department of Energy out of the long-term waste management business, because they are waste generators and they have a conflict of interest. They’ve done a very bad job of the site selection process and so on. We need to create an independent agency. I think the states have some genuine interest in creating a solution that will work for people, because people are very agitated about it. Today it’s in the hands of the generators, both at the state level and the federal levels. I think we need some innovative institutional answers along with the technical.