NOT IN MY BACKYARD

...Now why did they come over here and pick that little bitty spot...

...A thirty-foot drop is equivalent to a thirty-mile-per-hour crash...

...Geologists can study fractures and gradients and determine the likelihood of earthquakes or movement of water...

...On a map, they showed me the 17,000 acres they farm between them...

...Yet the industry keeps hoping...

...In their own county, they've held the DOE to three exploratory wells by explaining to neighbors that the drilling leases being offered them were not for oil...

...Is the industry sufficiently insured...

...How rapidly could people be evacuated...

...Of course, nonnu-clear nations may object to ocean burial and attendant ocean transport of radioactive waste...

...I think the dangers of leaving it in the corners we've kicked it into are greater...

...Across the country, reactor pools are filling up...

...Downgradient wells would have to be drilled within the canyon of the Colorado River, source of water for much of the Southwest—and within the bounds of Can-yonlands National Park, only a mile from the site under study...

...Drilling wells there would meet stiff political opposition...

...Monroe, who has been monitoring a military transuranic waste project in New Mexico, argues that the haste is unnecessary if our concern is for safety and not just for the well-being of the nuclear industry...

...It is not like ordinary waste but falls instead1 into the category of things that are danger^' ous and beyond our control, like nucleaif weapons...

...Hampshire, who specializes in issues whosej \ perceived significance is greater than the|t|j real significance...

...Yet somehow it's been turned into one of those issues on which a lot of other baggage is hung...

...This could escape to the surface through fractures or as a massive steam explosion...

...The casks are designed to withstand certain performance tests conceived in 1961, when highway conditions differed considerably from today's...

...But I noticed our conversation kept wandering off to other nuclear subjects of concern to the Yakima—existing radioactive pollution at Hanford, proposed nuclear power plants...

...may not be adequate...

...Department of Transportation has moved to preempt such local ordinances, New York City has successfully challenged DOT in court...

...One repository would be operating by the mid-1990s...

...No permanent repository is in operation, nor is any large-scale temporary storage site available...

...a half-hour fire at 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit, and submersion under water...

...Some utilities face the possibility of having to suspend nuclear operations ahead of time...

...Not to do so would be "negligent" and "scientifically irresponsible," Dingman reported...

...But the Reagan Administration, intent on reviving the faltering nuclear industry, must press on...

...Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to require high-level nuclear waste packages that will contain the waste for a thousand years—the time it takes for all but a tiny percentage of the destabilized elements to return to stable and innocuous forms...

...Appropriately, Sandia National Laboratories, a DOE contractor in the sub-seabed^ program, has granted a subcontract to Joh$ Kelly, a professor at the University of Nelw...

...A few, among them the British political system, have almost reached their thousandth birthday...

...K "The stated requirement of being able to retrieve the waste within five years by simple reentry through shafts and tunnels originally used for waste emplacement appears to be an impossibility...

...In either event, the repository site and a large area surrounding it would be uninhabitable for thousands of years...

...There is, in fact, cause for concern that either the Hanford Reservation in Washington or the Nevada Test Site could get the first repository by default-—not because either site is geologically suitable, but because opposition is so high,everywhere else...

...importance because it is inscrutable, difficult to understand...

...The packet contained a set of notes dated October 23,1981, that amounted to a guide for political action—an alternative to pragmatism, a rejection of technology as a substitute for wisdom...

...testing is by computer simulation and hand calculation, and the mathematical modeling formulas have been criticized by independent researchers...

...Under the gun, the Department of Energy has set up a schedule for close study of three potential sites: a basalt site at the Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, a volcanic tuff site at the Nevada nuclear proving ground, and one domed or bedded salt site, to be chosen from several under consideration in Utah, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana...

...The Mississippi legislature, with only a couple of dissenting votes, laid down a law requiring state oversight of any nuclear waste activity...

...Columbus was half a millennium away...

...They brought the NRC to the river, showed them the eagles and tribal fishing, testified in Congress, and learned the personalities of their opponents____They remembered that the Indian's expertise—our sacred and unique relationships with nature—is a wisdom that the mainstream society desperately needs to hear and does not share in...

...At Hanford, leaking tanks are described as having 'questionable integrity9 One of the corners into which radioactive waste has been kicked is the Hanford Reservation in Washington...

...Electric Power Research Institute Journal, May 1982 Under heavy pressure from the nuclear industry, the Federal Government is determined to carve out a high-level nuclear waste repository deep underground by the mid-1990s...

...After cooling down for six months, each assembly contains ten times as much cesium (one of the fission products) as was released by the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima...

...The rings of difficulty keep spreading, as far out as we can see...

...The new governor of Texas, no doubt sensing the public drift, campaigned for office on a commitment to prevent Texas "from becoming the nuclear dumping ground for the nation...

...The Caldecott Tunnel fire in Oakland, California, burned for one and three-quarter hours...

...Twenty-five additional Vermont communities are to consider ordinances at town meetings in March...

...Would money be immediately available to pay for the cleanup...

...And many organizations— the U.S...

...A utility official told me the same thing: DOE is being put in a time squeeze...

...The guideline that a repository should not be established in an area having abundant rock fractures seems to have been ignored...

...If Congress ends up authorizing an away-from-reactor facility, utilities will be able to relieve the pressure on their crowded pools by shipping waste off to another state, probably South Carolina, Resnikoff says...

...And, he added, some DOE officials would not know the difference between one and the other...

...With each state looking out for itself, the loser is likely to be the state with the least political clout...

...Another report solicited by Governor Matheson casts further doubts...

...How did the Federal Government ever come to consider nestling a repository next to a national park...

...Already they're moving in that direction—deciding maybe they don't need to go down so deep, maybe they don't need so many engineered barriers for spent fuel...

...The DOE's use of an elementary geological textbook to document its stand that the area is not on a plate boundary and is, therefore, free of earthquake hazard is not what one should expect to find in a legal document dealing with a project of this magnitude...

...That schedule, made possible in part by shortcutting environmental review, may push DOE too fast, said NRC's Michael Bell...

...Good science is being done, a scientist told me—but so, he said, is bad science...

...At the end of last year, Congress voted to require the Department of Energy to recommend three potential waste disposal sites to the President by January 1, 1985...

...By 1980, when the Government got around to issuing an environmental impact statement on the management of commercial nuclear waste, 10,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods (96 per cent uranium, 1 per cent plutonium, 3 per cent fission products) had piled up...

...By the end of last year, work at the Utah and Mississippi salt sites had ground to a halt...

...But New Yorker writer Fred Shapiro, author of Radwaste, has suggested that too much delay of the Government program could prove hazardous...

...A truck accident occurs, on the average, once every 400,000 miles traveled...

...The Council's 300-page study of nuclear waste transport and storage, "The Nuclear Gamble," will be released in mid-March...

...Nuclear shipments will move in shipping casks that are called virtually indestructible...

...Meanwhile, the unresolved waste issue has become another obstacle to licensing new reactors—several states have laws banning new plants until the waste problem is solved...

...In fact, no shipping casks are subjected to real tests...

...Much can be learned about the interaction of radioactive waste with a variety of geologic mediums, and about the interaction of radioactive waste with a particular horizon of rock deep in the earth...

...If existing reactors—with no new ones added—were to remain in operation, they would produce 48,000 metric tons of high-level waste by the time they shut down...

...Far away, across continent and sea, the cathedrals of France, the castles of Wales, had not yet been built...

...Though the U.S...

...The question, rather, is how quickly a secure repository site can be found—and at what cost...

...How, short of testing for thousands of years, can we really feel sure we have found a safe place for high-level wastes...

...Mattox's criticisms (and there are others) cast heavy doubt on the* Federal Government's repeated assurances to states that it is seeking a technically sound solution to the waste problem...

...1:1 You can't smell it, feel it, or taste it...

...In 1967, Barry Commoner warned in Science and Survival, "The capability of science to guide us in our interventions into nature has been seriously eroded...

...Since then, the fast track—if that is what it is—has been laid down in law...

...But so far, problems of safety, cost, and security have kept us from reprocessing commercial reactor wastes...

...Marvin Resnikoff (Marvin Resnikoff is a physicist and project director at the Council on Economic Priorities, an independent research organization based in New York City...

...If a major release of radioactivity were to occur, would local personnel be adequately trained and equipped to handle the emergency...

...1,000 years, even 10,000 years, are, after all, only an instant in geologic time...

...All I have to do is outrun you...

...Again, the solution would be provisional...

...At Hanford, a military outpost born secret, he found a fragmented culture in which each person fingers only his or her small piece of the puzzle...

...The pressure to move quickly is political and stems from the fact that, with the nuclear enterprise now in its fourth decade, it is an acute embarrassment that the waste problem has not been solved...

...In Utah, Governor Scott Matheson ordered state agencies not to issue any permits DOE might need, and a coalition of environmental groups stopped DOE cold by filing an administrative appeal...

...across the Panhandle land and causing extensive and expensive damage, say the farmers, DOE doesn't know a thing about Panhandle winds...

...a forty-inch drop onto a six-inch-diameter metal plug...

...How can we be sure a disposal site will be safe for 1,000 years...

...And still we can be told by former Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards, in a speech to the Atomic Industrial Forum, that "nuclear waste isn't one of our big problems...

...After they've exposed approximately 2,000 acres of the underground formation, we're going to know a lot more about that site than we did when the shaft was sunk...

...The President would choose one site, which could be used for military as well as commercial wastes, by March 31, 1987, and a second site by March 31, 1991...

...Delay only gives the bureaucrats time to get costs down to a politically acceptable level, he said...

...I want a program that moves...

...It will also be a critical factor in determining public acceptance of nuclear power for the nation's still-growing energy needs...

...Few commercial shipments of nuclear waste have traveled the highways or rails in recent years because there has been no place to take it...

...Speaking to activists last December, he noted the high cost of radwaste disposal: If the Government had started disposing of all radwaste—not just high-level radwaste—last year, he said, it would cost $100 billion to get rid of it all...

...Commercial shipments are likely to begin moving soon to Savannah River, South Carolina, and Idaho Falls, Idaho...

...Mississippi even resorted to filing Freedom of Information Act requests...

...Beyond that, let the future beware...

...I don't think we can afford to let the Government dither around," he said...

...they were only beginning to tuck their houses into the crevices of cliffs...

...he asked...

...I knew that the Yakima had an interest in current repository exploration at Hanford, and I was curious about what they were doing...

...The nuclear waste problem throws into sharp relief the limits.xtf pragmatism...

...When Utah Governor Matheson solicited independent evaluations of Federal work at the proposed salt site in the Paradox Basin, the results were startling—so startling that Richard B. Mattox, a geology professor at Texas Tech University who has spent years, studying that basin, felt the need to preface his report with a disclaimer: "I hope that no one assumes I am an extreme environmentalist who is opposed to all aspects of the nation's nuclear programs...

...Of all the provisions in the law, this was the one industry most wanted, according to Marvin Resnikoff of the Council on Economic Priorities, which will soon publish a major study of the waste issue...

...Speaking last December to a group of activists from potential repository states, he said: "Until a shaft is sunk and measurements are made at the repository horizon, there's still going to be a great deal of uncertainty about the geologic properties of any of the sites being considered...

...The question among scientists concerned with waste management—even some scientists linked to the antinuclear movement—is not so much whether a reasonably secure repository site can be found...

...The Department of Energy is considering an ocean burial site in the Atlantic as a potential second repository for high-level wastes...

...States under consideration as repository sites could appreciate a joke someone told at a meeting last year: Two backpackers were trudging into deep wilderness where grizzlies were known to hang out, when one backpacker Stopped to put on his running shoes...

...The potential for irresponsibility in the international arena is unfathomable...

...Tests can be run to see how radioactive waste reacts with certain kinds of rocks and what effect radioactive heat has on those rocks...

...This is nowhere so clearly demonstrated as in the nuclear waste management program, awash in political science...

...Are you going to go to the people of the United States at a time when they're cutting Social Security and say, 'By the way, we'd like $100 billion...

...Shipping cask construction and design criteria have also been faulted...

...Congress enacted legislation in December that gives a state the right to veto a repository within its borders, and both the House of Representatives and the Senate would have to agree to override the state's veto...

...Europe was still in its Dark Ages...

...It's not like ordinary waste Ihad a talk not long ago with Russell Jim, who sits on the council of the Yakima Indian Reservation, which is thirteen miles as the crow flies west of the Hanford Reservation...

...But we can turn geologists' attention from the past, the history of rock behavior, to the future, the prediction of rock behavior...

...You can't smell it, feeli it, or taste it...

...At a Las Vegas conference in December, when 800 scientists and bureaucrats and a handful of ordinary citizens gathered to hear reports on the program, officials spoke of "deployment" and "pro-jectization," of "proceeding swiftly" (although, said one official, "to proceed swiftly is not the same as to accelerate...

...You can't outrun a grizzly bear...

...Byrd asked me, sweeping his hand over all the other blank spaces on the map...

...So far, however, we have not really learned much about the sites under consideration, according to Michael Bell, NRC branch chief of high-level waste licensing...

...Because the tuff and basalt exploration is going on at sites already dedicated to nuclear purposes, those studies have hit few political snags...

...At the same time, the Department is screening granite sites elsewhere for a second repository to be developed later on...

...It evades familiar categories...

...Government for instance—had survived a century or more...

...His indictment of Federal science is serious enough to be quoted in some detail: f "The DOE's statement that the Paradox Salt has been stable for millions of years has no basis in fact...

...In his 1965 analysis of modern society, The Secular City, theologian Harvey Cox praised the ability of secular man to solve problems in such a pragmatic way...

...Drawn by the hot waste, brine would seep into the repository and turn it into a pressure cooker: The brine would become steam...

...Such surrender of responsibility characterizes what Paul Loeb called the "nuclear culture" in his recent book of that name...

...We will have to do our best to see that the wastes stay where they are put and are not carried elsewhere by groundwater or steam...

...Ten thousand years: Cultural memory all but fails...

...The sacred books of major religions and the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt had lasted thousands of years, they said...

...Indeed, it could well apply to our entire technocracy, which continues to function— in a manner of speaking—because we are able to focus our attention on small areas of a big picture...

...And it has been stored sloppily...

...Athousand years ago, in that same southeast corner of Utah, a people whom Navajos later called "ancient ones" dwelled in multi-chambered houses, later called pueblos...

...When DOE says the problems of waste disposal are institutional, it is not just whistling Dixie—though one DOE official pointed out to me that most of the trouble is coming from states' rights states...

...A staff scientist with the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, Alison Monroe, says scientists are giving only two or three years to matters that need decades of research...

...As members of Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping (STAND), Byrd and Devin are doing what they can to keep the repository out of Texas...

...The other said, "Are you crazy...

...But they want to be sure the location chosen is geologically safe, and they want the assurance to consist of more than DOE's word, They have not been made happy by DOE delays in sharing data, sometimes until it's too late for states to have any impact on decisions...

...The term could apply to the entire nuclear culture...

...replied his companion...

...In Bi-loxi, Mississippi, 5,000 citizens turned out for a forum on nuclear waste, and the Department of Energy, which had refused to send a representative (not a suitable forum, the Department sniffed, and, besides, no one was free at the time), was left with egg on its face...

...Even if high-level commercial wastes could be reprocessed, we would be left with large volumes of low- and intermediate-level waste as well as some high-level waste...

...We have solved the problem for the moment...

...Finally, after the waste has been em-placed and we've had the opportunity to make measurements, observe what's happening, when it comes time to decide whether it's really safe to seal up the repository and make a commitment that's getting to be fairly hard to reverse, we'll have a great deal more information, not only on the geology, but how the engineering system has performed over a period of decades...

...Or, eventually, the states' not-in-my-backyard stance may push the waste out to sea...

...Exactly...

...If we cannot manage to hold our own government accountable for our safety, as thus far we have not managed to do, how are we going to make other governments toe the line...

...Then South Carolina's problems will become Vermont's, and Idaho's will become New York's...

...Officially, the states usually deny that they are totally opposed to the very idea of accepting a repository...

...Robert J. Dingman, a consultant to the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey, found that to discover the direction and rate at which waste from the repository would move if it escaped, the contractor would have to drill "downgradient" from the site...

...Studies were continuing in Louisiana—also in salt—but state officials banked on a promise that because Louisiana houses the strategic petroleum reserve, it will be exempt from accepting high-level waste, too...

...Later, Jim sent me a hefty packet of Yakima testimony, resolutions, and speeches, along with newspaper clippings and magazine articles on a range of environmental hazards threatening the Yakima: radioactivity, PCBs, nuclear war...

...They sat at the councils of decision with dignity, knowing they did not have to feel shame that they did not know the expertise of their opponents, because the modern world is a world of many expertises and the power of the Indian's expertise applies to all mankind even though they don't see the vision...

...Outlining the technical problems of the proposed sites, Carter concluded, "Unless the technical realities of geologic disposal are respected for what they are, with National Waste Terminal Storage schedules adjusted to fitthose realities, further political embarrassments could well lie ahead...

...More than 200 local and state jurisdictions have answered such questions by banning or restricting nuclear transport...

...To get down to the salt formations where the waste packages would be buried, DOE contractors would have to drill through the Ogallala aquifer, source of virtually all Panhandle water...

...In the January 7 issue of Science, Luther Carter argued that "public health and safety does not require early disposal...

...In this view, we are all nervous nellies who just ^ don't know the facts...

...The average highway fire temperature is 1,850 degrees, not 1,475, and some burn considerably hotter for longer than a half hour, particularly if a tank truck is involved...

...A grocery store tomato could withstand a forty-inch drop, which may say more about agribusiness than about shipping casks...

...With the nuclear waste issue, the Federal Government has grabbed a tiger by the tail...

...He saw these as a single problem...

...Leaking tanks were euphemistically said to have "questionable integrity...

...This waste fuel is accumulating in water pools at each of seventy-five reactor sites around the country...

...In fact, no accidents involving a major radioactive release have yet occurred, though this may be more a matter of luck than of careful planning...

...As if that scenario were not dramatic enough, Mattox picked large holes in DOE's analysis of the Paradox site...

...Ever since we began producing nuclear waste, we have, like Scarlett O'Hara, set it aside to think about tomorrow...

...Technopolitan man," he said, "approaches problems by isolating them from irrelevant considerations, by bringing to bear the knowledge of different specialties, and by getting ready to grapple with a new series of problems when these have been provisionally solved...

...Radiation, like whales, i Kelly told me, has achieved such symbolic...

...A 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant, providing electricity for about 750,000 households, discharges about one ton of nuclear waste material a year in the form of spent fuel rods stored in pools of water at the reactor...

...They're eventually going to mine out an area that's going to cover approximately 2,000 acres...

...On those same 17,000 acres is one of the sites the Department of Energy is considering for a repository...

...He explained that heat from radioactive waste could make rocks expand, and that movement, in turn, could fracture the strata above the salt and enlarge small fractures already there, providing openings for water to seep in and out...

...The idea is politically attractive, because siting a repository in the populous eastern United States, where most of the nuclear plants are located, will be even more difficult than siting one in the Western desert...

...But nonnuclear nations are not powerful nations...

...In one state after another, efforts to explore potential repository sites have come up against stiff opposition...

...field tests in the Upper Midwest and Appalachian Mountains might begin within a year...

...For years, the industry has hoped to find a solution in reprocessing—the chemical recovery of valuable plutonium and unburned uranium from spent fuel rods...

...DOE has admitted that water in salt moves toward heat...

...no one compared each day's readings with the readings the day before...

...Some FOIA requests for waste-management documents have been "exceedingly onerous," one DOE official complained publicly...

...Pondering the difficulty of warning our descendants for that many years—warning them, for instance, not to mine salt there, or potash, or anything else—the authors of the 1980 environmental impact statement on radioactive waste management wavered toward tentative optimism...

...If the DOE thinks it can keep that salt from blowing Carol Polsgrove, a contributing editor of The Progressive, has written on environmental issues for Sierra and Environment magazines...

...Who said anything about outrunning a grizzly bear...

...But the states with potential salt sites have given the DOE a run for its money...

...We cannot, in DOE language, run "real-time" tests...

...The danger comes, he said, "when, having isolated some particular aspect of a phenomenon for special attention, we then forget there are other aspects...

...She believes transuranic and high-level waste is best left where it is, retrievable from storage foi several more decades...

...Byrd and Devin are men of advanced middle age, their faces ruddy from years in the sun...

...After decades of meandering down an erratic course, the Federal management program has jumped to what some perceive as a fast track...

...Obviously, there is high potential for conflict among the states, as well as between the states and the Federal Government...

...Two Texas farmers, Wylie Byrd and Delbert Devin, are at least as determined not to let the waste be buried in the Texas Panhandle...

...And, above ground, they would heap tons of salt dug out of the repository, which would resemble a big underground mine...

...In addition, the waters of the Colorado River would be contaminated and be unfit for any use of mankind," Mattox wrote...

...later on, we say, we'll solve it for millennia...

...More radioactive waste has been stored in Hanford, where studies for a permanent repository are farthest along, than in any other place in the country...

...1 "The area is not free from danger of earthquake activity...

...Thus one state's solution becomes another state's problem, whether the issue is temporary storage or permanent repository...

...Mattox said flatly that high-level nuclear waste should not be stored in any salt body, and the Paradox salt might be "more dangerous than most...

...The studies done under time pressure And Not Past My Front Door A pressurized water reactor discharges about sixty irradiated fuel assemblies every year...

...In 1973, a sustained leak totaling 115,000 gallons went undetected for fifty-five days, even though levels in the tanks were being recorded daily...

...Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed by Congress late last year, the number of nuclear fuel shipments is expected to increase dramatically, with up to 120 trucks on the road every day by the year 2000...

...Terry Lash of the Scientists Institute for Public Information said, "I almost felt like the project managers were mounting quick horses ready to lead the charge...

...The tests include a thirty-foot drop onto a flat, unyielding surface...

...The ocean also has the political advantage of being an international site under consideration by other nuclear countries, some of which, individually, produce too little waste to justify building national repositories, even if they have reasonably safe places to put them...

...The new waste act passed by Congress orders DOE to choose three to five sites by June 1985 for an interim away-from-reactor storage facility where spent fuel rods could be kept until the commercial reprocessing problem is solved...

...Do these performance tests mean no radiation woulcJ be released in an actual accident...

...Interstate highways will become the connecting links and conduits for this highly toxic material...

...Once we lift our eyes from the narrow horizon where nuclear waste will be buried, once we remember why we are seeking geologic mediums that will not crack, leak, or swell for thousands of years, we can see— even if our leaders cannot—the enormity of what we do each time we split an atom...

...But on balance, they concluded, we had better not rely on human management after the repository is closed...

...Yet the wells planned by the contractor were not, in fact, downgradient...

...The notes tell of three small Indian tribes of the Skagit who worked to block licensing of two nuclear plants...

...Some citizens have asked why toxic nuclear waste must be shipped to a temporary storage facility and then to a permanent repository when the fuel could remain at the reactor site until a permanent repository is available/Until shipping casks are designed and tested to withstand accidents, emergency personnel are trained and equipped to handle accidents, and it can be shown that these shipments are necessary, the message from local communities to Washington is, "Not past my front door...

...After that, the geologic medium in which the waste is implanted must contain it for 10,000 years more, while the remaining active and quite dangerous elements move toward inertness...

...Their culture had not yet climbed to its heights...

...No guarantees exist, of course, and there is reason for concern...

...Neither farmer thinks much of the choice...

...Few barriers on a highway are "unyielding," but a bridge abutment comes close...

...One thousand years is a long time in human history...

...Somebody must accept it, after all...

...The Federal radwaste research program already costs almost a quarter of a billion dollars each year...

...The coast seemed relatively clear only in Washington and Nevada...

...The Paradox Basin is geologically famous for the joint sets that exist throughout the Basin...