nuclear-news

Is nuclear waste safely managed and disposed of so that it no longer poses any danger?

Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Nearly ‘Ended The Japanese State’, Radioactive Waste Specialist Explains, Sputnik News,   by Mohamed Elmaazi  12 Mar 21,……….How is it that nuclear waste safely managed and disposed of so that it no longer poses any danger?

Kevin Kamps: Well, it’s not. We don’t know what to do with it. High-level radioactive waste is stored in indoor wet storage pools. That’s where the majority of American high-level radioactive waste is stored. What almost happened at Fukushima Daiichi, another lucky break, was that the wet indoor storage pool at unit four nearly caught fire, and it was sheer luck that it did not. And just to give you an idea of what that could have meant for Japan, there have been 160,000 nuclear evacuees due to the meltdowns, the failures of the containments.

If that pool had caught fire, and pools are not even inside containment, the Japanese prime minister serving at the time, Naoto Kan, a year after the disaster began, admitted that he had a secret contingency plan, if that pool had caught fire, to evacuate 35 million to 50 million people from North-eastern Japan and metro Tokyo. He said it would have been the end of the Japanese state.

Here in the United States where the majority of our high-level radioactive waste is still in this vulnerable indoor wet pool storage, our pools are much more densely packed than Fukushima Daiichi Unit four was on March 11th, 2011. So, we don’t have an answer. We do not have deep geologic disposal repositories. Yucca mountain, Nevada, has proven to be a failure. Besides the Western Shoshone Indians [Native Americans] did not consent, it violated their treaty rights to that site, but it’s also scientifically unsuitable. So, we’re right where we began in 1942, when Enrico Fermi first split the atom, created the first high-level radioactive waste during the Manhattan Project race for the atomic bomb. We don’t know what to do with the first cup full of high-level radioactive waste in this country.  https://sputniknews.com/interviews/202103111082310108-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-nearly-ended-the-japanese-state-radioactive-waste-specialist-explains/

March 13, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, wastes