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NUCLEAR LEGACIES
Nuclear Waste Disposal and Issues of Health and Safety

November 22, 1996

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Topics covered in this forum:
Topics covered in this forum:
Other Forum Topics for the Week of November 18-22:

November 18:
A panel of nuclear policy expert on nuclear weaponry in the U.S., Russia, and around the world.
Nov. 20, 1996:
Issues of nuclear power, the pros and cons, and also look at the imagery of nuclear energy, the dual symbols of death and rebirth at the core of the atom.
OTHER RESOURCES:
A NewsHour report on what to do with discarded nuclear warheads.
Our guest Tom Carpenter's Government Accountability Project.
The Nuclear Control Institute's page on current nuclear dangers.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the government agency in charge of regulating commercial nuclear power plants.
The Critical Mass Energy Project is a nuclear watchdog group.
Yucca Flats Project - The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
EPA's Yucca Flats
A whistleblower report on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state.
"Whistleblowing almost always involves very acrimonious litigation.... In many ways, it's like divorce court. It gets very ugly."

Try telling the government that its contractors are putting thousands of people in peril, and you might feel like you're alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean. "Whistleblowers"-- employees who report health and safety risks at nuclear facilities-- must wade through unwieldy bureaucracies, face persecution on the job, and the likelihood of dismissal.

Workers are usually the first to recognize safety problems. And in the nuclear industry, safety violations can be devastating to whole communities and regions. Currently, there are a number of pending lawsuits pitting employees who report violations against their employers. This Forum looks at their plight, and general health and safety issues at nuclear facilities.

Waste storage for nuclear weapons production has been a concern for half a century. Add to the equation the emergence of nuclear power plants, and the situation becomes even more complicated.

As nuclear plant owners nationwide try to position themselves as low-cost power producers, health and safety considerations sometimes get short shrift. Deregulation is moving the utility industry to greater competition, leading the NRC to a safety crackdown, and a rethinking of how the nation's 109 nuclear plants should be run. In 1996, the agency is looking at nuclear safety with a rigor not seen since the early 1980s, following the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

Early last month, the NRC ordered all nuclear plants to show, within 120 days, that they fully comply with their licenses. Because over time, engineers have modified or upgraded parts of nuclear plants, the NRC is finding operators don't always know whether safety systems will work as designed after these changes have been made.

And proving that a plant will work as designed is no small task. That's because the NRC wants to know not only whether a safety test is effective, for instance, but the rationale for using that test as a diagnostic tool.

The task is formidable. The United States and Russia have begun scrapping thousands of warheads in their nuclear stockpile. High-level nuclear waste must be isolated for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. A good example of the problems of dealing with waste is the 560 square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Southeastern Washington state. Hanford was the country's main plutonium factory until it shut down in the 1980's. Since then, workers have been cleaning up and processing the debris for safe storage. Hanford is one of the top six sites being considered for the storage and possible disposal of enough weapons-grade plutonium to build 10,000 nuclear bombs. But many who live and work near Hanford are worried that importing plutonium warheads poses too many dangers.

There also is no consensus on how to dispose of the extra plutonium once it gets to Hanford. One choice is to mix the warhead plutonium with uranium, making a fuel that then could be burned to generate electricity. But environmentalists warn that burning poses too many risks to the environment and public health. Some environmentalists propose casing plutonium in glass, a method now being tested at Department of Energy's Savannah River South Carolina plant for treating highly radioactive liquid wastes.

Eventually, all high-level waste was marked for delivery to a national permanent waste dump in Yucca Flats, Nevada. But that project is a decade behind schedule and political battles have postponed further congressional action until 1997. Nevadans argue that Yucca Flats is geologically and hydrologically active and complex. They say the project would not only harm the economy of Nevada, but it would be dangerous, as large-scale radioactive releases could occur from the volcanos, earthquakes or hydrothermal activity at the site itself.

Transportation is also an issue. Nobody wants trucks of nuclear waste passing near their homes. Residents in Colorado are fighting the Yucca Flats proposal because the dangerous materials would have to travel through their state.

Our Forum guests are whistleblower Tom Carpenter, the head of the Government Accountability Project, and Jim Werner, the Director of Planning and Analysis of the Environmental Management Program at the Department of Energy.

Topics covered in this forum:


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