Technology Review Article on Yucca Mountain

Greetings, all --
 
Further to my earlier message, you may also be interested in this article  
from Technology Review.  Please note that I am not seeking to endorse any  
particular view here - just sharing information.  We had a lively  discussion about
radiation and nuclear power today at Jane's.
 
- Claiborne Booker -

 
The Witch of Yucca Mountain
 
By Richard A. Muller
 
March 12, 2004
 
 
 
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There is an almost  primal fear of radioactivity. It may be a new
manifestation of an old Jungian  archetype: the fear of unseen danger, perhaps originally
a predator or enemy  lurking in ambush. Other incarnations include the fear
of witches, germs,  communists, and monsters under our beds. But radioactivity
is worse. Not only is  the threat hidden, but so is the attack. Your genes are
invisibly mutated,  showing no sign of the assault until a decade or two
later when the damage  manifests itself in a growing cancer.
 

 
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I put radioactivity on this witch list in an effort to make sense of the  
furor over nuclear waste storage at the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada. When  
I work out the numbers, I find the dangers of storing our waste there to be  
small compared to the dangers of not doing so, and significantly smaller than  
many other dangers we ignore. And yet a contentious debate continues. More  
research is demanded, and yet every bit of additional research seems to raise  
new questions that exacerbate the public's fear and distrust.
I've discussed Yucca Mountain with scientists, politicians, and many  
concerned citizens. The politicians believe it to be a scientific issue, and the  
scientists think it is a political one. Both are in favor of more  
research-scientists because that is what they do, and politicians because they  think the
research will answer the key questions. But I don't think it will.  
Let me review some pertinent facts. The underground tunnels at Yucca Mountain
 are designed to hold 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. The most
dangerous  part of this consists of "fission fragments" such as strontium-90 and  
iodine-131, the unstable nuclei created when the uranium nucleus splits.
Because  these isotopes have a shorter half-life than uranium, the waste is about a  
thousand times more radioactive than the original ore. It takes 10,000 years
for  the waste (not including plutonium, which is also produced in the
reactor, and  which I'll discuss later) to decay back to the radioactive level of the
mined  uranium. Based largely on this number, people have searched for a site
that will  remain secure for 10,000 years. After that, we are better off than
if we left  the uranium in the ground, so 10,000 years of safety is clearly
good enough.  
How can we plan to keep Yucca Mountain secure for this long? What will the  
world be like 10,000 years from now? Think backwards in order to appreciate the
 time involved: ten thousand years ago humans had just discovered
agriculture,  and writing wouldn't be invented for another 5,000 years. Can we possibly
see  10,000 years into the future? No. It is ridiculous to think we could. So
nuclear  waste storage is obviously unacceptable. Right?
Of course, calling storage unacceptable is itself an unacceptable answer. We  
have the waste and we have to do something with it. But the problem  isn't
really as hard as I just portrayed it. We don't need absolute security for  
10,000 years. A more reasonable goal is to reduce the risk of leakage to 0.1  
percent, i.e. to one chance in a thousand. Since the radioactivity is only  1,000
times worse than that of the uranium we removed from the ground, that  means
that the net risk (probability times danger) is 1,000 x 0.001 = 1-that is,  
basically the same as the risk if we hadn't mined the uranium in the first  
place. (I am assuming the unproven "linear hypothesis" that total cancer risk is  
independent of individual doses or dose ratebut my argument won't depend  
strongly on its validity.)
Moreover, we don't need this 0.1 percent level of security for the full  
10,000 years. After 300 years, the fission fragment radioactivity will have  
decreased by a factor of 10; it will only be 100 times as great as the mined  
uranium. So by then, we should rationally require only a 1 percent risk that all  
of the waste leaks out. That's a lot easier than guaranteeing absolute  
containment for 10,000 years. Moreover, this calculation assumes 100 percent of  the
waste escapes. For leakage of 1 percent of the waste, we can accept a 100  
percent probability. The storage problem is beginning to seem tractable.  
But the unobtainable-and unnecessary-criterion of absolute security dominates
 the public discussion. The Department of Energy continues to search Yucca  
Mountain for unknown earthquake faults, and many people assume that the  
acceptability of the facility depends on the absence of any such faults. Find a  new
fault-rule Yucca Mountain out. But the issue should not be whether there  
will be an earthquake in the next 10,000 years, but whether there will be a  
sufficiently large earthquake in the next 300 years to cause 10 percent of the  
waste to escape its glass capsules and reach ground water with greater than 1  
percent probability. Absolute security is too extreme a goal, since even the  
original uranium in the ground didn't provide it.  
But  why compare the danger of waste storage only to the danger of the
uranium  originally mined? Why not compare it to the larger danger of the uranium
left in  the ground? Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a
geologically  active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out
of the  prairie, and there are about a billion tons of uranium in its surface
rock.  (This number is based on the fact that granite typically contains 4
parts per  million of uranium. I take the area of the Colorado Rockies to be about
300 by  400 kilometers, and consider only rock from the surface to 1,000
meters depth.)  The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the
legal limit for  Yucca Mountain, and will take more than 13 billion years-not
just a few  hundred-for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of ten. Yet water
that runs  through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the
Colorado  River, and is used for drinking water in much of the west,
including Los Angeles  and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the
waste in Yucca  Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is
water-soluble. Here is  the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility
was at full  capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment
immediately and  managed to reach ground water, the danger would still be 20
times less than  that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the
Colorado River.
 

 
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I don't mean to imply waste from Yucca Mountain is not dangerous. The  
Colorado River example only illustrates that when we worry about mysterious and  
unfamiliar dangers, we sometimes lose perspective. Every way I do the  
calculation, I reach the same conclusion: waste leakage from Yucca Mountain is  not a
great danger. Put the waste in glass pellets in a reasonably stable  geologic
formation, and start worrying about real threats-such as the dangers of  
continued burning of fossil fuels.
A related issue is the risk of mishaps and attacks while transporting nuclear
 waste to the Yucca Mountain site. The present plans call for the waste to be
 carried in thick reinforced concrete cylinders that can survive high-speed  
crashes without leaking. In fact, it would be very hard for a terrorist to
open  the containers, or use the waste in radiological weapons. The smart
terrorist is  more likely to hijack a tanker truck full of gasoline, chlorine, or
some other  common toxic material and then blow it up in a city.  
So why are we worrying about transporting nuclear waste? The answer is  
ironic: we have gone to such lengths to assure the safety of the transport that  
the public thinks the danger is even greater. Images on evening newscasts of  
concrete containers being dropped from five-story buildings, smashing into the  
ground and bouncing undamaged, do not reassure the public. This is a
consequence  of the "where there's smoke there's fire paradox" of public safety. Raise
the  standards, increase the safety, do more research, study the problem in
greater  depth, and in the process you will improve safety and frighten the
public. After  all, would scientists work so hard if the threat weren't real?
Well-meaning scientists sometimes try to quench the furor by proposing  
advanced technological alternatives to Yucca Mountain storage, such as rocketing  
the waste into the sun, or burying it in a tectonic subducting zone at sea,  
where a continental plate will slowly carry it into the deep Earth. Such exotic  
solutions strongly suggest that the problem is truly intractable, and they
only  further exacerbate the public fear.  
Let me return now to the danger of the plutonium in the waste. Plutonium is  
not a fission fragment; it is produced in the reactor when uranium absorbs  
neutrons. But unlike the fission fragments, plutonium doesn't go away by a  
factor of 10 in 300 years; its half-life is 24,000 years. Not only that, but  many
people think plutonium is the most dangerous material known to man.
Plutonium is certainly dangerous if you make nuclear weapons out of it. If  
turned into an aerosol and inhaled, it is more toxic than anthrax-and that's  
very toxic. But when ingested (e.g. from ground water) it isn't. According to  
the linear hypothesis, when consumed by a group of people, we expect about one
 extra cancer for each half-gram of plutonium swallowed. That is bad, but  
not a record-setter. Botulism toxin (found in poorly prepared mayonnaise) is a  
thousand times worse. The horrendous danger of ingested plutonium is an urban  
legend-believed to be true by many people, yet false. Moreover, I think it a  
mistake to bury the plutonium with the waste. It is a good fuel for reactors,
as  valuable as uranium. I sense that original reason for burying it (rather
than  extracting and using it) was to keep the public from worrying about it,
but that  approach has backfired.  
By any reasonable measure I can find, the Yucca Mountain facility is plenty  
safe enough. It is far safer to put the waste there than to leave it on site
at  the nuclear plants where it was made and is currently stored. We should
start  moving it to Yucca Mountain as soon as possible. Research should continue,
 because more knowledge is good, but the hope that it will reassure the
public is  forlorn. Further studies are no more likely to reduce public concern now
than  scientific research would have calmed the fears of the people of Salem
in 1692.  
(end of article)
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