An Immodest Proposal for Dealing with Radioactive Wastes

Chernobyl has pushed waste disposal into second place as the aspect of nuclear energy that most concerns the public. Nevertheless if there is to be a second nuclear era, the issue of waste disposal must be resolved. Unlike reactor accidents, waste disposal has generally been regarded by the technical community as a second-order problem. The nuclear community has never denied that a serious reactor accident could happen; the issue has always been what frequency and what consequences would be acceptable to the public. By contrast, the nuclear community has never identified a plausible accident sequence involving solidified high-level wastes (short of a nuclear attack on a spent fuel storage pool) that could have anywhere near the consequences of an accident like Chernobyl. Essentially all high-level waste accident scenarios involve at worst exposure to levels of radiations that are so low as to be in the range where the health effects, if they exist, are miniscule; indeed, they are in a range where there is some evidence for the exposures being beneficial.