The Great Plutonium Problem
I was attending a public meeting of a local city council when a
representative of the electric company asked for a resolution
supporting the plan to make Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the national
depository for nuclear waste.
I suspect my mouth dropped open in disbelief as I listened to
this man's spiel. I suspect it was memorized from a company
promotional sheet. It was clear that he was not thinking about
what he was saying.
"The material will be sealed in lead canisters and placed in a
vault 1,000 feet underground, and surrounded by lava rock," the
man said.
After politely listening to the presentation, members of the
council responded like robots, someone making a motion to approve
the resolution, and another one seconding the motion. Before it
came to a vote, however, I asked to speak.
"Did you hear what this man just said," I asked. "He told you
that radioactive plutonium from nuclear power plants all over the
United States are going to be stored in lava rock. That means it
is being placed in the heart of a sleeping volcano. Is that what
you really want to do?
"Do you know what would happen if that volcano suddenly erupted
again after sleeping for a few thousand years? There would be a
nuclear meltdown such as the world has never seen. And since
Yucca Mountain is in the southwest part of the United States, the
westerly trade winds would blow radioactive materials all over
us. The United States could be turned into a wasteland overnight.
Is this what you really want?" I asked.
There was silence in the room. Then one voting member of the
board suggested that they still pass the resolution, but remove
the paragraph that named Yucca Mountain as the depository. That
way they would follow the letter of the resolution which,
basically, said, you can store nuclear waste, just not in our
back yard.
(By the way, Yucca Mountain was recently hit by a magnitude 5.6
earthquake.)
While traces of plutonium can be found in nature, it is generally
not a natural substance. It is made by bombarding uranium to
create neptunium-238, which then decays into plutonium. We
bombard uranium in our power plants to generate heat.
The disposal of plutonium, a waste product from using uranium to
heat nuclear electric plants and run our Navy's ships has been a
serious problem. It is a deadly waste product that remains hot
for a very long time.
The Russians tried dumping plutonium into the ocean and of
course, that was a very bad idea. Some people have suggested
shooting the stuff into space, but do we really want all that
plutonium floating around as space junk? Certainly putting it in
Yucca Mountain is not the solution.
To date, science has only found two ways to use plutonium; to
make nuclear bombs and to provide electricity for certain space
probes that will travel for indefinite periods and leave the
solar system. We successfully used Plutonium-238 to send both the
Gassini and Galileo probes into deep space.
Other than this, we have no other use for the tons of plutonium
being generated by our power plants so the stuff has to be stored
someplace where (1.) it will not be stolen and turned into
weapons by terrorists, (2.) humans cannot accidentally come in
contact with it, and (3.) it will not affect our environment.
The reason we need to take these precautions is because plutonium
is dangerous, and it remains that way for thousands of years.
Plutonium-244, for example, has a half-life of about 82,000,000
years. Once we make it, it takes a very long time for this stuff
to go away.
My suggestion for what it is worth, is to:
(1.) Stop using nuclear power plants and stop making plutonium
immediately.
(2.) Find the most unpopulated, isolated and uninhabitable piece
of land anywhere on this planet; possibly in the heart of a
desert. There we should build a giant concrete, lead and steel
encased bunker that not only sinks into the earth, but protrudes
well above the ground for everybody to recognize. All of the
world's nuclear waste should then be sealed in this thing, and it
should be clearly marked as highly radioactive, deadly, and off
limits to everybody. Then we place legions of solders at the site
to guard it from human contact forever.
Visit the author's web site at: perdurabo10.tripod.com
or contact him at: jdona999@bau-net.com
