Nuclear Information and Resource Service
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Statement of Mary Olson, Radioactive Waste Project
National Press Club, October 17, 1995
When you ask people in Oklahoma why they are fighting the bills in Congress that would send hundreds of high-level nuclear waste shipments through their communities, they respond: "Because we are not crazy." If these bills become law, it will launch the most intensely radioactive, deadly wastes of the nuclear age into motion for the next 30 years. Three decades, minimum, with continuous shipping, to move the irradiated fuel away from the nuclear power reactors that make it, all the way to Yucca Mountain, NV. In the first year as much high-level waste will be moved as the total that has ever been shipped to date, in the U.S.
I have spent the last few days finding "handles" -- ways to talk about this unfathomable material and the scope of this project. Here are a few comparisons:
The total amount of radioactivity that the nuclear industry wants to put on our highways and rails is in excess of 30 billion curies. Of this, the intensely radioactive cesium alone is 2 million times more than the amount of cesium released by the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Each large rail cask will hold the cesium equivalent of 200 Hiroshima bombs.
The average rail cask will carry 174 lbs of plutonium. The total waste payload of 85,000 metric tonnes, will include 1,800,000 pounds of plutonium...Just the plutonium 239-- a fraction of the total plutonium-- will be more than 120 times the total amount of plutonium 239 released by ALL the below-ground nuclear weapons tests, worldwide. These numbers do not include the DOE wastes, nuclear navy wastes or foreign fuel wastes that will also be moved if an "interim" storage site is approved.
The cancer potential of plutonium is well known. A single pound, if distributed across the world's population, to the lung, could cause global cancer. Probably equally unlikely is the environmental release of all the plutonium 239 in these shipments. However, if it did find its way into the pathways of the environment, a conservative estimate would be 1.5 million cancers from this one element. ALL the elements making up the 85,000 metric tonne total are carcinogenic. The cancer load from the total is probably sufficient to give cancer to as many people as have lived on Earth in the last 6000 years. These are "handles" to think about, not assertions of what will happen.
So the folks from Oklahoma say, "We're not crazy." They are not unique. S 1271, HR 1020, and the back room deals on Appropriations Bills are opposed by reactor communities and targeted dump communities alike. Over time those concerned with nuclear waste have come to realize that we share the same "backyard." August 27, 1994, proclaimed as National Radioactive Waste Day marked a clear determination of affected communities to work together. We dropped all misleading distinctions of the classification or source of radioactive waste. We recognized that this is one big problem, and we reached out to become one big community.
Those concerned about the Northern States Power nuclear waste piling up on the Dakota community on Prairie Island in Minnesota realize that it is no solution to ship the waste to Yucca Mountain on Western Shoshone Nation lands within Nevada. Yucca Mountain is known to have geologic flaws and will not isolate the waste from the environment. It should be disqualified as a site. We must recommit ourselves to science as the basis of our waste program, not politics. Further, shipping will only accommodate continued nuclear waste production on Prairie Island, resulting in similar amounts of irradiated fuel on the reactor site in a decade. Only about 1/3 of the projected total of 85,000 metric tonnes of irradiated fuel exist today.
It is also clear that the proposed legislation would just spread the problem around. Instead of reducing the number of waste sites, it would simply add one more, and all of the communities on the route will be affected. This deadly waste would travel through the "front yard" of thousands of communities in 43 states, including 3/4 of the U.S. population! Communities are organizing to oppose the proposed legislation. City Councils have taken action including: Mount Rainier and Takoma Park, MD, Philadelphia and Bucks County, PA, Santa Barbara, CA and Decatur, GA. Resolutions are springing up in many small towns as well
Citizens want what the nuclear industry promised all along: our health, our safety and containment and isolation of radioactivity from the environment and all life, for as long as it is hazardous. Moving the waste, in haste, to a temporary facility at a site which should be rejected from consideration as a permanent site, will not accomplish any of these goals.
Just as affected communities are determined to work together on all types of radioactive waste -- so called "low-level," military, (from both DOE and DOD) and irradiated fuel, any effective approach to a "solution" must also assess all types of radioactive waste. This effort must be within the context of one single affected community, and responsible to that community. It is no longer acceptable to create false factions to serve nuclear industry interests over public welfare.
Thus we are calling for something that has not been done before. An independent assessment by a panel that is controlled by those who are not vested (financial or otherwise) in radioactive waste production. This review needs to look at ALL radioactive waste programs, policies, and the waste classification structure itself. It will not be possible to grapple with the problems facing us in a rational manner until we have fully defined what the problem is, the scope of it and bounded the equation. A huge coalition of environmental and public interest organizations, the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, local, state and federal elected officials, have called for such an independent review. Senator Bryan's bill S. 544, would establish a Commission to do this job. We support it fully.