ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 31, 1996 TAG: 9607310023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JESSICA MATHEWS
FOR MORE than 40 years, this country has single-mindedly pursued a nuclear-waste disposal plan that is not going to work. In all that time, only one person in a position to change it has perceived its inescapable flaw.
The plan is to dispose of nuclear wastes once and forever in a deep hole in the ground. A repository would be built, filled and sealed. This difficult, new technology must work perfectly the first time, protecting the wastes for 10,000 years. There can be no pilot project, no improving of the technology, no learning curve; yet there must be public confidence that it will work.
It was former Defense and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger who saw that this strategy violates every principle of sound engineering and also may be a political contradiction in terms. Schlesinger chaired the Atomic Energy Commission in the early '70s when the first attempt at deep disposal, in a Kansas salt cavern, had just proved an embarrassing failure. Critics, as Schlesinger later explained, ``were asking, why take a risk on geologic disposal before more is known about it? I thought this was perfectly sensible.''
Wanting to ``keep my options open,'' he proposed that wastes be stored in a mausoleum where they could be monitored and managed, either until geologic disposal proved workable or indefinitely. So-called retrievable storage ``was the opposite of the AEC approach, which was to design high-confidence solutions on paper, trying to convince the public without test work that the solution was acceptable.''
Before his idea could gain a bureaucratic toehold, Schlesinger left for his next job. Geologic disposal has remained the goal ever since, through years of expensive failure at various sites, cost overruns, missed deadlines, eroding public trust and two notably unsuccessful congressional efforts to paper over the plan's inherent contradictions.
This week, there will be a high-profile, third try. The administration and the Senate are locked in down-to-the-wire arm-wrestling over the votes to sustain or override a threatened veto. Whichever side wins, the result will be to prolong the long, dismal record of failure.
The Senate bill, which embodies the nuclear industry's hopes, gets halfway back to Schlesinger. It mandates construction of a retrievable storage facility at Nevada's nuclear weapons testing site, where a geologic repository is also being prepared inside Yucca Mountain. Wastes would be stored in the building until the geologic site is ready.
Unfortunately, the bill sets another in a long line of impossible deadlines, does not provide enough money for both facilities, adopts the awful practice of legislating safety standards and, in the industry's hurry to get the wastes off its hands, stupidly and unnecessarily exempts the plan from several environmental protections. The nuclear industry never has managed to learn that such shortcuts - whether from environmental regulation or opportunities for public review - always backfire for a technology burdened by so much bad history.
These deficiencies all could be corrected. The administration's adamant opposition ostensibly rests on the bill's fudge of the central issue. Putting wastes at the Nevada Test Site before the site has been judged suitable for deep disposal, it argues with reason, will prejudice that judgment. Nevada, it says, is owed a decision based on good science, which can be made in a few more years.
What's really at issue is not science but electoral votes. While the Nevada Test Site has some risk of earthquakes, it is clearly the best place in the country for nuclear wastes. It is huge (bigger than Rhode Island), remote, secure and desert dry. It has, however, the worst political attributes. Nevadans brazenly were lied to by the Atomic Energy Commission through years of atmospheric nuclear tests and then stiff-armed in the courts. That bitter legacy makes unyielding opposition to nuclear wastes a sine qua non for Nevada voters.
And in fact, a sound scientific judgment never can be reached. By the Department of Energy's own admission, the information needed to judge the repository's safety over thousands of years ``can only be gathered and analyzed after a repository is built and loaded.''
The tangle must now be cut. Geologic disposal has had a 40-year run, yet a functioning repository is as far in the future as ever. The reason is the plan's mix of inherent engineering and political drawbacks. More years of banging our collective head against this wall will not yield a different result.
We should opt instead for permanent, underground, retrievable storage. Safer than a surface facility, subsurface (but not deep) storage would rely on human management and improved technology rather than uncontrollable geology to keep wastes isolated. This makes choosing a site enormously easier. And much more can be done through engineering than the United States has yet tried. Sweden, for example, is working on a storage cask designed to last for a million years.
Nuclear energy should revive or fall on its merits, not because it strangles on its wastes. There is no immediate crisis that justifies the overly hasty pace of the Senate-industry bill. But there is also no more time to waste on deep disposal. Starting over will be politically difficult, but it is the quickest, surest way to the finish.
Jessica Mathews is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Washington Post
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