Nuclear Waste Part 1: The elephant (shrew) in the room

Nuclear Waste Part 1: The elephant (shrew) in the room

Posted on 29 July 2013 by Barry Brook

This is the first in a four part series on nuclear waste which will run on BraveNewClimate.com over the next four days.

Geoff Russell, August 2013http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/07/29/nuclear-waste-series-p1/

Abstract: The nuclear industry used to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe and environmentally benign way. It’s a trivial technical problem compared to many other much larger waste problems that kill and sicken thousands of people daily. But they stopped. Not because of any problems, but because people who understand reactors and medicine and isotopes and engineering discovered that nuclear waste is far too valuable to simply throw out … it is already being used to kill cancer … and it has many other uses. So the policy changed from disposal to “retrievable storage”: don’t put it anywhere you can’t get it back from.

That abstract will surprise more than a few people who talk about nuclear waste as if its some kind of elephant in the room. “But they can’t even solve the waste problem!” they shout, or “I wouldn’t mind nuclear if only there was a solution to the waste problem”. If it really is an elephant, then it’s incredibly small. Just a little shrew scurrying along hoping to hell somebody doesn’t decide to make its habitat collateral damage underneath tonnes of concrete, steel and mirrors for a solar farm.