Nuclear Waste, Yucca Mountain, and Fukushima: “This is not a place of honor”

Alejandro Nadal

Suppose you had to deliver a complex message alerting future societies about a horrific manmade danger. Assume furthermore that you had to ensure your message would survive the ravages of time in order to deliver this warning to generations well into the future, say 10,000 years from today. How would you design a message for future societies that may not necessarily speak our language or share our cultural references?

Although this may sound like science fiction, finding an answer to this question was the task of a group of experts convened in 1993 by Sandia Laboratories of the US Department of Energy (DoE). Their mission was to design a marking system informing potential intruders from future societies about the dangers of radioactive material stored in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The group was formed by archeologists, linguists, anthropologists and experts in materials sciences.

Yucca Mountain was supposed to be the long-term storage facility of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors and high-level radioactive waste coming from nuclear weapons programs. Spent nuclear fuel is no longer efficient in generating electricity because its fission process has slowed down. However, it remains highly radioactive and continues to generate significant amounts of heat. If the spent fuel rods are not cooled, their temperature may rise and their claddings may catch fire, releasing vast amounts of dangerous radioactive material into the atmosphere. This has been one of the problems in Fukushima in Japan.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates the global cumulative amount of spent fuel at 340,000 metric tons. By 2020 the total amount of spent fuel will be 445,000 tons. Today, most of the spent fuel is kept under water, but dry storage is also used (more than 12,000 tons are stored with this technology). In the United States, until a permanent disposal repository for spent nuclear fuel is built, licensees must safely store this fuel at their reactors. In Japan, half of the spent fuel discharged annually is kept in wet storage within the buildings housing the reactors (as in Fukushima) while the other half is sent to reprocessing units.

In 1982 the US Congress approved the National Waste Policy Act and made the Department of Energy responsible for finding a site for an underground disposal facility for nuclear waste. This would be the US strategy for long-term disposal of spent nuclear fuel. In 1987 it was decided the DOE would concentrate on Yucca Mountain, a promontory located in the Nevada desert and commence development of the project. The storage areas were to be located 700 meters underground. The site was chosen due to its relative geological stability and very small risk of water filtering into the storage facilities (official site performance assessments were hotly disputed by independent research).

The project came under fire from many quarters. In 2009 the Obama administration suspended financial resources for the WIPP and the US found itself without a long-term strategy for the storage of nuclear spent fuel (the Republican Party may very well resurrect the project).

The Fukushima disaster alerted the world about the dangers of spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel pools in all of its reactors were a matter of serious concern, activating a powerful alarm bell: the accumulation of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors constitutes a clear and present danger. Reading the full report and the key recommendations of the expert panel convened by Sandia Laboratories is a forceful lesson about the magnitude of the dangers posed by the longevity of this threat.

The panel worked systematically and thoughtfully. It was concerned about the cultural context against which the architecture of the physical construction would be interpreted. Remember, the message had to warn potential intruders over a time span of at least 10,000 years! The waste isolation facility could be mistaken for a hallowed grave or an underground mausoleum. This is why the panel concluded the message had to convey, in addition to technical information about the radioactive danger, more fundamental concepts in a credible manner. The core recommendation of the panel was to install the following message at several strategic points of the WIPP.

“This place is a message. Pay attention to it. Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.

“What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill.”

The expert panel overlooked the most obvious fact: that this conclusion is a lesson for our own times! Did they do it on purpose? If we feel compelled to warn future societies about the dire consequences of playing with radioactive substances, obviously the technology associated with these materials is a clear and present threat to ourselves. So, why not alert today’s society? The short answer was provided by Carl Sagan in his letter declining to participate in the expert group: “I think the only reason for not using the skull and crossbones is that we believe the current political cost of speaking plainly about deadly radioactive waste is worth more than the well-being of future generations.”