The Glass of Nuclear Waste Is Half Full and Leaking THOMAS M. LESCHINE
The release this month of another in a long series of National Research Council reviews of the Department of Energy’s environmental programs attracted an uncommon amount of attention in the news media. The report, produced by a committee that I chaired, made the point that the Energy Department needs to take seriously the inherent fallibility of what it calls long-term stewardship for nuclear waste sites that it has admitted it can’t clean up.
The department’s long-range approach must take into account the limited capabilities of its technical tools and its limited knowledge concerning the character of the sites and the contaminants they contain. It also must plan in a way that acknowledges the inherent limits to the managerial control that governmental entities like the Department of Energy are likely to be able to exert over problems so large and complex and over long time periods.
What resonated in the national press, however, was a more basic point, which the review committee took as a given in its study: Scattered throughout the nation, in more than half the states, in Puerto Rico and in the Pacific trust territories, lies a legacy of sites that are lost to public use except under highly restrictive controls. In short, the “national sacrifice zones” that weapons programs critics had long feared seem now about to become the permanent legacy of our national effort to win the Cold War.
Is this another case where experts and those in the public and press just don’t see the world in the same way? I don’t think so. The two groups are in fact raising the same questions. They just don’t raise them in the same way. Understanding these differences is important to understanding how scientific opinion can and should influence the direction of national policy on issues such as those raised by the current conditions at nuclear sites.
At sites such as Hanford in Washington state, vast quantities of hazardous and long-lived wastes were generated in the chemical separations operations and disposed of directly to the ground or “stored” on-site in large underground tanks. It is becoming more apparent that some portions of this and many other sites cannot be cleaned up to the degree that most citizens might have imagined would occur. The underground storage tanks at Hanford are leaking. Worse, the hundreds of billions of gallons of waste water that were discharged deliberately to the ground over many years of reprocessing drove some contaminants deep into the ground and generated huge subsurface contamination plumes whose dynamics remain poorly understood.
The public is angry over what was done in the past with far too little oversight. The review committee concluded that the Energy Department’s stewardship planning must move forward in ways that are flexible in the face of the uncertainty and must anticipate the possibility of eventual loss of control. So what do these two views have in common? The answer is that both embrace the belief that the myopic approach that created the mess at the nuclear sites is still with us and frustratingly hard to change. When we as a public express disdain for the legacy a weapons-focused bureaucratic vision has given us, we are at odds with the thinking that created the problem. When we in the scientific community analyze a decision-making approach that scientific intuition suggests is ill-founded, we are propelled by a sense that what we see at the sites is not as it should be.
The bonds between scientific-technical and public thought will perhaps always be relatively fragile in a democratic society. However, the health and safety of all of us depends on each view being able to encompass what the other sees.
