Radioactive Wastes

The article by Gibson describes a new method to neutralize radioactive waste. Essentially, by bombarding the most dangerous radioactive materials with protons, it is possible to reduce their half-lives from tens of thousands of years to a few decades. The problem is that this method--called transmutation--costs in the neighborhood of $2.5 million per kilogram of waste.

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider another solution that I have been advocating for many years, namely, sending our most dangerous waste to the sun. The idea is more reasonable than ever given the present political climate, because we and the Soviets--the world’s greatest producers of nuclear waste--are disarming. What better use for our ICBMs than to use them to rid ourselves of hazardous waste forever? If the payload of a single rocket is one ton, that amount of material would cost $2.5 billion to transmute, far less I would assume than the cost of retooling a never-to-be-used rocket.

LOUIS J. DeFELICE, Pasadena