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Facing up to the reality of nuclear wastes: it requires longterm continuing stewardship

Gordon Edwards: Nuclear Waste Mismanagement

A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/ Montreal, August 25, 2018,   Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 2018 “…….. Proliferation of thousands of non-naturally occurring radioactive isotopes

Our organization has come to the conclusion that these wastes did not exist seventy-five years ago. It’s only in the last 70 some years that these wastes have been produced, and there are thousands of human-made radioactive materials, in addition to the couple of dozen radioactive materials that exist in nature. There are naturally occurring radioactive materials, but the difference is most of the existing radioactive materials are different chemical species from the non-radioactive materials. You can separate them chemically. Uranium, thorium, radium and so on are different chemical species than normal non-radioactive atoms.

In a nuclear power plant what you’re-creating is hundreds and hundreds of radioactive varieties of otherwise non-radioactive materials. Non-radioactive iodine is now contaminated with radioactive iodine. Non-radioactive cesium is contaminated with radioactive cesium—non-radioactive strontium and so on. And the result is that once these things are blended together, the radioactive and the non-radioactive, you can’t separate them anymore. It is an impossible task to separate out the radioactive from the non-radioactive once you have created duplicates of virtually every element in the periodic table of a radioactive variety.

15. Rolling stewardship

So we feel that for the foreseeable future, and that means for however long it takes, 100 years 200 years or more, we should not fool ourselves into thinking we have a solution. We should adopt a policy of rolling stewardship which means that we have to keep these things under constant surveillance, constant monitoring and they must be retrievable, and they must be guarded, and they must also have a built-in mechanism, a social mechanism, for ensuring that there is funding and knowledge and resources and tools available to future generations so that they can, in fact, know what these wastes are, that they can monitor them, and that they can take corrective measures when things start going wrong, and that they can improve the containment so that this is not just a status quo.

This is not an idea of just leaving it where it is and ignoring it. On the contrary, it’s an active involvement, an active engagement to continually improve the storage of these materials because we know how to do this. We know how to store the materials in such a way that they do not get out into the environment, and we can do this for periods of decades or even centuries, depending on the circumstances.

We feel that this is the policy that we should be following, not that this is an acceptable long-term solution, either, but it is something that can be managed over an intergenerational period of time indefinitely. The point here is that rather than abandoning the waste, which is what the industry now wants to do…

And by the way, it’s not only industry that wants to abandon the waste. It’s also the regulatory agency because the regulatory agency wants to also cut its liability. They don’t want to have to look after or be responsible for these wastes beyond a certain point in time. So they have a conflict of interest. Institutionally, they have an interest in abandoning the waste and saying it’s not our problem anymore. Any problems that are caused are your problem, not ours. Unfortunately, the people who are more likely to suffer the consequences of major leakage or major failure of containment will not have the resources or the knowledge. So abandonment actually presupposes amnesia. It means that you’re saying that we’re just going to forget it, and that means that when these things do come back to the surface, if they do, and do contaminate surface waters and food paths and so on, nobody knows anymore. It’s a question of rediscovering what these materials are, how we contain them, and so on.

So we feel that rolling stewardship is a more responsible approach and that entails really admitting that we don’t have a solution, and admitting that we should stop producing the waste. One of the reasons why we continue to produce this waste is because we are continually being presented with a dangled carrot, with the idea that the solution is just around the corner, and that we’re working on the solution. As long as we’re working on the solution, how can you possibly object to us just continuing?

So we feel that that’s the fundamental track of the nuclear power dilemma and that somehow we have to wake people up to this and make them realize that this is not leading us to a sustainable future. It’s leading us quite in the opposite direction……..https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-back-at-the-achievements-of-the-canadian-coalition-for-nuclear-responsibility-ccnr-http-ww/

September 26, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, Reference, wastes