Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste

What does 'Yucca Mountain' mean to you? To many of us, it conjures a number of things, most of them unfavorable. A nondescript ridge along the western boundary of what used to be called the Nevada Test Site. Government incompetence and duplicity. DoE SNAFU. Political payoff. Screw Nevada bill. Boondoggle. FUBAR. Politics. Gravy train. WTF? Good science. Politics.You get the picture. But whether you do or not, Too Hot To Touch by William M. (Bill) Alley (herein referred to as WA) and spouse Rosemarie Alley (herein referred to as RA) is must reading (don't confuse it with the bodice-ripper (??) of the same name). Trust me - I was involved in nuclear waste, nuclear weapons, and the like at various stages of my career, yet I still learned a lot from this book.And if you think the issue of high-level waste (HLW) disposal/storage is settled...well, read the book.Regarding the title of this post: you'll have to forgive me - the title of the book reminds me of an M.C. Hammer hip hop tune or two. But the full title of the book dispels any notion of pop culture or my feeble attempt at being a smart-ass: 'Too Hot To Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste'.1) Well-written, well-organized, even-handed, and extremely well-documented. These aspects do not surprise me, given the talents of the authors. Even a Member of Congress (well, some anyway) could understand the book.2) The perspective.The policy and political aspects (most interesting to me these days) and the scientific/engineering aspects are both addressed. More importantly, so are their interactions.3) The history is there - is it ever - from the very beginning. Didn't think there was any deep-well radwaste injection in the USA? How about ocean dumping? Dry storage?4) The 'tag-team' authorship seems to be a true collaboration in every sense of the word, with WA and RA bringing different skills to the table. But the book reads as though one person wrote it, unlike some recent ones I have read. Great editing by the Alleys and editor Laura Clark.5) Great discussion questions in the appendix. Some seem worthy of MS or PhD theses. The questions were framed by Dr. Deserai Crow at the University of Colorado.6) Although the book's title alludes to HLW, other types of radwaste and their storage/disposal sites are discussed: Ward Valley, Hanford (enough liquid waste to fill the tank cars in a 26-mile-long train), Beatty, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. They also discuss why WIPP (bedded salt repository) would not work for the HLW from commercial power reactors.7) Discussion of what some other countries are doing.8) The book is very reasonably priced for a 370-page hardcover from Cambridge - $22 ($13 for the Kindle edition) from Amazon.com. Affordable for classes!9) Great title - true on anumber of levels.10) Some good things that came out the YMP (pages 305-306). Incredible enhancement of our knowledge of unsaturated fracture flow and mass transport. Interdisciplinary science. Seismic hazard evaluation. Volcanic hazard analysis. Natural analogues. As one of my colleagues said, "DoE was hydrogeology's NSF." Not that it wanted to be.11) Part III - 'No Solution in Sight'Weak Points1) No answers for the discussion questions! Only semi-joking.2) WA's stint as the Director of the USGS's Yucca Mountain work may cause some to question his objectivity. But the USGS was 'just' a DoE YMP contractor and I know from experience that they and the YMP folks did not always see eye-to-eye. I think I also recall an issue with QA/QC and a USGS infiltration estimation. But I don't have a problem; WA is critical of the DoE YMP when he needs to be.Other ThoughtsWhat stood out is the Alleys' treatment of the 'certainty' required by society. Ensuring that no radioactivity from the YM repository reaches the 'accessible environment' in 10,000 years? 1,000,000 years? C'mon, man!I am also amazed on how the disposal/disposition of wastes and health aspects received such short shrift when the commercial nuclear age began in 1954. The 'experts' seemed to believe that the disposal problem to be 'unimportant'. Yes, that's the word J. Robert Oppenheimer used.The press was often times unhelpful in elucidating the facts and seprating them from opinion. But newspaper articles are not peer-reviewed. The Alleys brought this home with the story of DoE geologist Jerry Szymanski, who stirred the pot in the mid-1980s, claiming that earthquakes had periodically caused catastrophic water table rises beneath Yucca Mountain. You don't need a PhD to imagine what this would do to the radwaste stored in the repository. Szymanski was treated by the press as some sort of folk hero. I recall being asked by the State of Nevada to review part of the 'Szymanski report'. I found it wanting. No matter...even the New York Times drank the Kool-Aid.For good measure, to illustrate the foibles of the press when it comes to science, the Alleys recount the tale of the 'expert' who predicted a major earthquake along the New Madrid (Missouri) fault zone that would be caused by alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. It would occur on 3 December 1990. Seismologists discounted it, but the story persisted in the press. Nothing happened.The Alleys lament the lack of the public's ability to place much value on facts. As they say on page 327:"It is extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to address the problem of high-level nuclear waste in a society where a large percentage of the public places little or no value on facts. Today's culture of infotainment, sound bites, fundamentalist religion, ideological extremism and rigidity, and the politics of fear and hate impairs reasoning and thoughful debate. As an astounding case in point, contemporary Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending upon how the questions are worded, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each."This passage appears on page 328:"Without their cooperation, State and local interests odften prevail over national needs. This lesson has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout the history of nuclear waste disposal. To move this mountain of instinctive opposition, citizens of the State and local jurisdiction must see a clear benefit, feel empowered to voice their concerns and have them seriously addressed, and have a basic sense of trust and fair play as the process moves along. People also need to know why it matters. This involves more than an information campaign whereby the operating agency tries to educate the public. What is long overdue is a mature dialogue, as equal partners, between an informed public and the operating agency. Short of this, it is doubtful whether the public will ever come to appreciate why it matters for society to take responsibility for its high-level nuclear waste."This book is more than about nuclear waste disposal; it is parable for yesterday, today and what lies ahead of us. It likely could have been written about the effects of climate change, the debacle that was Hurricane Katrina, or even a discussion about a national water policy/vision. The nuclear waste issue will get ugly by 2050 when all today's commerical power reactors will be offline. So will these other things. Our work is cut out for us.Read this book. It's an object lesson.More than I wanted to know about our HLW program. But in this case, ignorance is not bliss.**********************************Disclosures: I worked on various DoE Nevada Test Site (since renamed the Nevada National Security Site) projects while working at the Desert Research Institute from 1976 through mid-1989. None of this DoE work involved the Yucca Mountain HLW repository, which straddles the western border of the NNSS. However, DRI did have a project, on which I worked, funded through the State of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects (then called the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office, if I recall) which provided oversight for the Yucca Mountain work. In New Mexico I also did some minor consulting work for one of the WIPP subcontractors. I was provided a free copy of the book by the publisher, Cambridge University Press. I have known the senior author, Bill Alley, for about 25 years, and greatly respect his scientific abilities and integrity.Bill recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, where he most recently served as Chief of the Office of Groundwater, which was two words when he started; budget cuts forced the merger of 'ground' and 'water'. He oversaw the USGS activities on the Yucca Mountain Project from 2002 until 2010. He is now Director of Science and Technology for the NGWA. Spouse Rosemarie Alley is a literacy specialist and writer.

Modern society provides a long menu of predicaments to inspire our nightmares. For a number of years, climate change has been hogging the spotlight. It’s time to have more nightmares about radiation. Folks think that if we simply quit building new reactors, the nuclear boo-boo will go away, and we can forget about it — wrong! William and Rosemarie Alley have shed much light on the subject with their book, Too Hot to Touch. It reveals a deeply embarrassing chapter that has been omitted from the glorious epic of technology and progress.Nuclear weapons were invented during World War II. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were turned into ashtrays, but the enormous unintended consequences of half-baked genius have dwarfed the destruction of two cities. We continue to create stuff that will remain extremely toxic for millions of years, and none of it is stored in secure permanent facilities, where it will cause no harm.The war was followed by an arms race. A hundred new bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Range between 1951 and 1962. Nuke tests became a tourist attraction. Families sat in folding chairs at open-air spectator sites to see the amazing mushroom clouds. A few minutes after the blast, they were sprinkled with fine dust. Several decades later, the region became “the thyroid cancer capital of the world.”Lunatics became giddy with nuclear mania. Some wanted to blast a new canal across Panama. Others dreamed of a coast-to-coast waterway across the U.S. Others wanted to nuke Gibraltar, and turn the Mediterranean into a freshwater sea. In the Soviet Union, 120 bombs were used for earthmoving projects.In 1954, construction began on the first U.S. nuclear power reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. At that time, nuclear waste was not seen to be especially dangerous. Robert Oppenheimer, at the Atomic Energy Commission, referred to the issue of radioactive waste as “unimportant.” Experts were possessed by a stupefying blind faith in scientific magic — there is a brilliant solution for everything!They contemplated a variety of schemes for making high-level waste disappear. Some recommended shooting it into space, or burying it in sea floor clay beds. The Soviets disposed it via deep well injection, in a liquid form that may not sit still for millions of years. The U.S., U.K., France, and the U.S.S.R. have dumped a lot of waste in the oceans. The Irish have caught contaminated lobsters and fish.There are a number of radioactive elements and isotopes. All of them are unstable and become less dangerous over time, degrading at varying rates of speed. Most forms of uranium are mildly radioactive. The atoms that are heavier than natural uranium are manmade, and some remain dangerous for millions of years. Some are water soluble and highly mobile. Some are picked up by plants and animals, and are biomagnified as they move up the food chain.Experts eventually realized that high-level radioactive wastes were nastier than expected. They had to be stored underground, in geologic repositories that would remain stable for a million years. Serious research began at an old salt mine in Kansas. Then, a plutonium plant in Colorado burned, and high-level waste was shipped to Idaho, where cardboard boxes of it were dumped into open trenches. The media reported the story, and the nation soon realized that nutjobs were in charge of handling terrifically toxic dreck. This detonated high-level fear. Kansas promptly nuked the proposed repository.The next hot prospect was Yucca Mountain, on the edge of the Nevada Test Site. The government invested $10 billion on 25 years of research. The objective was to prove that the site would be safe for a million years. No place on Earth would be a perfect site. Dr. Alley believed that Yucca Mountain was close enough to ideal. (He spent years on the project, working for the U.S. Geological Survey.)The core problem was that there were no politically suitable sites in the entire U.S., because every state would fiercely oppose a repository within their borders. The public had a reasonable fear of high-level waste. They also had a reasonable lack of trust in anything the government told them, after years of lies and deceptions. Nevada was no exception. The government’s nuclear testing had already turned much of the state into a radioactive wasteland.Obama was elected in 2008. Steven Chu was his Secretary of Energy. In March 2009, Chu announced, “Yucca Mountain was not an option.” He presented no explanations or alternatives. Why did Chu kill the project? “Virtually all observers attributed the decision to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain as political payoff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. Nevada was a swing state in the election, and Obama had pledged to kill Yucca Mountain, if elected.”So today, “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31 countries. More are on the way. Yet, no country on Earth has an operating high-level waste disposal facility.” As of 2012, American taxpayers were responsible for storing a growing collection of high-level waste — 70,000 tons of spent fuel, and 20,000 canisters of military waste. It’s being stored at 121 sites in 39 states. In 15 other nations, 60 nuclear reactors are being built.Industrial civilization is doing a fabulous job of trashing the planet’s atmosphere, forests, soils, oceans, aquifers, and biodiversity. This is simply business as usual, and most of humankind is staring at their cell phones. The future doesn’t matter — with the exception of nuclear waste repositories. Almost no study has been devoted to the risks of doing nothing, and letting the crap remain where it is forever. The Alleys steer around this red-hot issue, leaving readers to conjure worst-case nightmares.In the U.S., the planned geologic repository did not materialize by the promised date, and no site has been approved, so spent fuel is piling up at reactor sites. The Alleys note that some U.S. pools have been loaded with four times more rods than they were designed for, which increases potential risks. Moving the rods to safer dry casks would cost billions of dollars.Are we feeling lucky? What will the world look like in 50 years? Will effective geologic repositories be built in time? Fifty years from now, will we have the oil, heavy equipment, transportation systems, functional governments, work crews, and wisdom to safely decommission the existing 440 reactors, plus the new ones being planned? Will all of the reactors safely avoid disasters resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, plane crashes, warfare, equipment failures, human errors, and sabotage?

Too Hot to Touch is a splendidly written book on the almost unsolvable problem of storing spent nuclear fuel. It is a very easy read that doesn't lose the reader in technical jargon. It explains the legal and technological hurdles of safely storing nuclear waste. Too Hot to Touch is a "must read" for anyone who is involved in nuclear waste policy or politics. It is a fast-paced story with an absolutely fascinating history.

This is a good book on the nuclear waste situation. I enjoyed reading some of the details regarding the devils pool near the Yucca Mtn site.

As one of the Hanford Project retirees, i felt this book did a good job. Did a good job of keeping politically neutral.Len Gustafson

Recommend this book to those who care about the nuclear waste in their backyards. This will be Obama's legacy to the U.S. if recommendations in this book aren't taken seriously. Thanks! Sallie

Good history of the various waste policies ands sites. This is a subject people need to know more about so book is useful

Very interesting read about the problem with long term storage of nuclear waste. Discusses the unrealistic expectations of long term storage requirements and how politics has resulted in waste being currently stored in conditions that are worse than the discarded possible long term storage options. Short-term political interests v long term scientific facts. Interesting whichever side of the nuclear argument you are on.