Speaking to the Future from the Past About Nuclear Waste

UPDATE: The Yucca Mountain Project was defunded by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nevada) in 2010. The project was terminated in the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed by Congress on April 14, 2011. The United States General Accounting Office concluded that the project was stopped solely for political reasons.

We struggle with complex political decisions on many different levels. A political choice does not have to land in the lap of the President of the United States in order to be more than just a simple, easy decision. Quite often the interaction between government, private citizens, and organizations with political agendae produces an unwanted effect of overcomplicating a simple process.

The March 2011 Nuclear Reactor Accident at Fukushima — a direct consequence of the magnitude 8.9 earthquake that rocked northern Japan and sent a deadly tsunami across the Pacific ocean — has once again highlighted the immense peril that nations around the world face when they develop nuclear energy.

The United States currently lacks the political will to bury a growing stockpile of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the only location in the country designated by the U.S. Congress to be suitable for holding nuclear waste.

Environmental and tourism advocates have argued against burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain since 1987, forcing numerous nuclear plants to build up increasingly dangerous and risky stockpiles of highly radioactive waste that cannot be recycled. The greatest risk from the waste is that a natural disaster like an earthquake or flood could release the radioactivity into the local ecosystems, threatening both human and animal life.

Some opponents of creating the nuclear waste repository want to hold off on the implementation of the storage plan until we can reasonably contrive the means for conveying to anyone who lives in the area up to 10,000 years from now that the storage facility is inimical to life as we know it. That type of objection is extremely short-sighted — it’s extremely dangerous.

Allowing ignorance of as-yet unknown languages to stand between our present nuclear waste and our long-term eco-health is tantamount to standing in a heavily trafficked intersection, waiting for city engineers to activate red light signals in all directions.

The path to safety may be faught with peril but the inactivity of doing nothing while the planet goes about its business is incredibly stupid. It’s not like we won’t have the opportunity to study methods for communicating with the future after we start moving nuclear waste into Yucca Mountain.

Ironically, nations that compared to the United States seem very land-poor like Sweden and Finland have begun preparing nuclear waste repositories that — hopefully — will last up to 100,000 years into the future. The U.S.’ inability to commit to a mere 10,000 year enduring facility is more than embarrassing — it’s irresponsible.

All of the environmental and economic concerns that have been raised by opponents should be addressed in turn, not by overriding them or dismissing or disproving them, but by compensating for the inevitable consequences that will arise from taking what is a necessary action.

Maybe we can say with certainty that exploring the potential of nuclear energy without fully understanding what we were doing was irresponsible and dangerous — but pointing fingers at the past isn’t going to change the present or avert a horrific future should the worst case scenario occur.

The worst-case scenario is that over the next 200-300 years all those waste piles we’re harboring at various nuclear facilities will begin to decay and break out of their containments. None of those facilities offers anything like the protection offered by Yucca Mountain. So instead of working together to find a way to move the nuclear waste into Yucca Mountain and then begin addressing the issues that will cause, we continue to bicker and debate and leave the nuclear waste where it can do the most harm to both us and the environment.

Collective or political indecision has led mankind down the garden path to disaster many times throughout our history. Two of the most recent examples of the consequences of political indecision are the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 and the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States September 11, 2001. While American intelligence services and political decision-makers dithered and dallied, enemies launched sneak attacks on the country.

More subtle examples include our inability to commit sufficient resources to developing alternatives to petroleum-based energy (other than nuclear power) and our reluctance to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure (highways, water processing, waste treatment, electrical distribution, etc.). We know we have problems but we take no action because we’re waiting on more perfect solutions than those we have available.

Perfectionism does not solve problems — nor does it slow the passage of time. Perfectionism is the worst of political arguments because it holds society to a false standard of acceptability. Look at the U.S. government’s mounting debt. We increase the ceiling every one or two years and refuse to enact the painful changes that will help us pay down that burden of debt.

Eventually, the unemployment and other apocalyptic nightmares that we fear would occur if we cut back on government services and pay higher taxes will occur anyway. We cannot prevent them by borrowing more money — we only increase the degree to which we or our descendants will suffer. The recent Great Recession of 2008-2009 should have served as a warning sign — not because it was caused by government borrowing but because it forced government to begin curtailing services without raising taxes.

We had a collective opportunity to address the national debt in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead of making a difference that would have imposed a brief period of financial struggle for millions of families, we deferred the choice — magnifying the probable length and depth of the future days of dearth. The longer we wait to pay down our debt, the more likely that 10s of millions of families will suffer in the next great economic downturn.

Doing nothing because we don’t know how to solve the problem with the least amount of pain allows the problem to grow worse, thus complicating any eventual resolution even further.

We have the next 10,000 years to learn how to warn people living 10,000 years from now NOT to dig into Yucca Mountain. Unfortunately, we don’t have that long to figure out what to do with all the nuclear waste.