Rolling Stewardship of Nuclear Waste
Questions and Anwers with Gordon Edwards, Nuclear-News.net
Pusblished on 28 July 24.
Rolling Stewardship is not a solution to the radioactive waste problem, but an acknowledgement that we do not have a solution. Instead of assuming a solution exists, we should recognize that there is no proven solution.
Instead of abandoning the waste, we should monitor it and make sure it is retrievable.
We know how to package these wastes well enough to keep the radioactive contents out of the environment. The containers should be thick-walled, very robust, and built to last. They should not be right beside major bodies of water. They should be subject to Hardened On-Site Storage away from the shore.
Radioactive Wastes from Nuclear Reactors, Questions and Answers, Gordon Edwards 28 July 24.
Rolling Stewardship is a concept put forward by the National Academy of Sciences in connection with other long-lived toxic wastes like heavy metals and asbestos. When we do not have a genuine waste solution, we must not abandon it. We must continue to look after it on an intergenerational basis, passing the responsibility, the knowledge and the resources to the next generation, with the object of continually improving safe storage.
For the first thirty years of the nuclear age, until mid 1970s, no one knew about radioactive waste. The nuclear industry did not tell anyone about it. People were told that nuclear power is clean. And they believed it. But it was not true.
In the mid-1970s, radioactive waste suddenly became public knowledge. Major reports in several countries called for a halt to nuclear power unless the problem is solved. The waste problem became an existential problem for the industry. In self-defence, the industry claimed – without real evidence – that they had a solution: “Bury the waste in an undisturbed geologic formation”. But of course, the moment you dig, it is no longer undisturbed. We have seen three deep underground repositories for lower level radioactive waste fail – two in Germany, and one near Carlsbad New Mexico. As for high-level radioactive waste, the USA has tried eight times to locate a deep underground disposal site, and they have failed all eight times.
Here in California, in 1976, hundreds of thousands of people signed a citizen’s initiative bill to stop any new reactors from being built in the state because there is no waste solution. That bill was passed into law, and it is still the law. The California Legislature asked the Energy Resources and Conservation Commission to determine if there is a safe disposal method. After 2 years of intensive public hearings the verdict was “no”.
The Commission Chairman said : “We think it probable that [safe permanent disposal] will never be demonstrated. Excessive optimism about the potential for safe disposal [of nuclear wastes] has caused backers of nuclear power to ignore scientific evidence pointing to its pitfalls. That’s the real crux of what we found — that you have to weigh scientific evidence against essentially engineering euphoria.”
Emilio Varanini III, Chairman, California Energy Resources and Conservation Commission, 1978
Rolling Stewardship is not a solution to the radioactive waste problem, but an acknowledgement that we do not have a solution. Instead of assuming a solution exists, we should recognize that there is no proven solution.
Instead of abandoning the waste, we should monitor it and make sure it is retrievable.
Instead of waiting for the containers to fall apart underground, we should repair and repackage and improve safety measures from one generation to the next. Instead if walking away from the waste, we should keep it under close surveillance.
Leakage in a burial chamber will not be detected until it is too late. Rolling Stewardship will allow us to take timely action to intervene – to stop the leak and prevent recurrence.
Instead of waiting for the containers to fall apart underground, we should repair and repackage and improve safety measures from one generation to the next. Instead if walking away from the waste, we should keep it under close surveillance.
Leakage in a burial chamber will not be detected until it is too late. Rolling Stewardship will allow us to take timely action to intervene – to stop the leak and prevent recurrence.
Instead of closing the door on research to find a genuine solution to the waste problem, Rolling Stewardship will ensure that we keep that quest at the forefront of human consciousness.
This may sound idealistic, but in fact it is simply realistic. The worst thing about self-deception (thinking you have a solution when you don’t) is that you end up with a radioactive mess – a vastly inferior and dangerous form of rolling stewardship – and very much costlier, because it was not planned at the outset.
We know how to package these wastes well enough to keep the radioactive contents out of the environment. The containers should be thick-walled, very robust, and built to last. They should not be right beside major bodies of water. They should be subject to Hardened On-Site Storage away from the shore.
The main reason waste storage is currently so unsatisfactory is that the industry has told us it is only temporary. We have to stop thinking that way.
Because we do not have a solution, Rolling Stewardship is what we do in the meantime to keep ourselves and our environment safe from the radioactive legacy of the nuclear age.
One of the worst things about abandoning radioactive waste is that, over the very long term, amnesia sets in. Everyone forgets where the waste is or what it is or how to contain it. So when it leaks out into the environment – and it will leak out sooner or later – no one knows how to even detect it or to deal with it.
Rolling Stewardship, on the other hand is predicated on the persistence of memory. The knowledge of these highly toxic wastes and how to deal with them must be kept alive from generation to generation because it remains an ongoing risk.
In 2019 I attended a 3-day conference in Stockholm about how to warn future generations abut the legacy of radioactive waste that we are leaving behind. We do not know what languages people will be speaking in 2,000 years, or 10,000 years.
So how do we warn them? Do we put up a sign saying “Do not dig here”? Will they understand the sign? And if they do understand it, will they obey it? If I were a future archeologist who came across such a sign, I would say to my team “Hey guys, Let’s dig here!”
The Strockholm Conference was a fascinating affair. One-third of the participants were nuclear scientists from several countries. One-third were independent commentators and critics of nuclear power, such as myself. And one-third were librarians, archivists and curators who knew little about radioactive waste, but lots about preserving Records, Knowledge and Memory (RKM). The conference was an outgrowth of the European Nuclear Energy Agency’s “RKM Project”, already working eight years on this exact question.
We were all keenly aware that the problem under consideration is similar to the problem of communicating with extra-terrestrial intelligence. How do we communicate with others, with no assurance that they understand any human languages that are used in the 21st century?
One of the advantages of Rolling Stewardship is that we can more easily pass on knowledge, information and advice from one generation to the next – rather than trying to communicate with a completely unknown society of the future, thousands of years away from us. We can still leave records for future societies, but each generation can review the adequacy of those records and try to improve them.
It became evident during the conference that if we want to communicate with future generations we have to begin by communicating with the present generation. If we cannot tell people today the truth about radioactive wastes, what hope do we have of telling future civilizations?
One of the conclusions of this conference was that decision-making about radioactive wastes can no longer be left solely in the hands of the nuclear industry and its captured regulator, the NRC. We have to plan now to address the future. This is a societal problem, not just an industry problem.
We need radioactive waste and nuclear decommissioning agencies that are independent of the promoters of nuclear energy, whether commercial or governmental.
We need agencies whose sole focus is the protection of people and the environment.
We need agencies that can communicate openly and transparently with citizens about the nature of the radioactive waste problem and the range of possible options.
The Age of Nuclear Energy will come to an end, but the Age of Nuclear Waste will continue forever – unless we learn how to completely eliminate that radioactive legacy permanently. At present we have no idea how to do that.
As long as we continue to operate old nuclear reactors and build new ones, we are simply compounding an already intractable problem. No matter how fast we bury the old waste, the surface of the Earth will always be prone to catastrophic releases from the freshly produced nuclear wastes which accumulate every day in the cores of operating reactors and in the immediate vicinities of those plants. Burial is no solution as long as the industry is growing, or even continuing with the status quo.
California was wise to pass a law in 1976 that phases out the production of new nuclear waste, by banning the building of any new nuclear plants. It is time for other states and other nations to follow suit.