Storing Nuclear Waste

Underground `Beehive` Could Be The Answer To Disposal Dilemma

June 29, 1986|By Casey Bukro, Environment writer.

FOR MORE THAN 40 years, since the dawn of the atomic age, highly radioactive nuclear wastes have been piling up in sites throughout the United States while the government searches for a safe way to store them.

Commercial nuclear reactors have been operating since the late 1950s, and there are now 101 of them generating electricity and 26 more planned to come on line. Yet what to do with spent but still lethal fuel is one of the missing links in the American nuclear dream.

In the past, there have been proposals to dispose of radioactive waste inside the earth, in ice sheets, beneath the ocean floor and in space.

Until 1977, the nuclear industry expected to some day recycle wastes, recovering enough plutonium and uranium to manufacture more fuel. But facilities built for that purpose were plagued by serious design and leakage problems, and the Carter administration finally banned recycling because of fears that recovered plutonium could be stolen by terrorists and used to make nuclear weapons.

Now the government has an ambitious plan that would employ advanced technology to store nuclear wastes for up to 10,000 years in a bee-hive like subterranean labyrinth extending more than 4,000 feet below the earth`s surface.

Federal officials recently announced that this permanent storage unit

--seen as costing between $6 billion and $12 billion to construct--will be located in one of three Western states: Texas, Nevada or Washington. Final selection is scheduled for 1991.

But even the most optimistic projections say the storage complex cannot be functional for at least 12 years. And with the American public growing ever more wary of hazardous materials of any sort--the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine undoubtedly has eroded public confidence even more--the planned facility has come under bitter political opposition that could delay or derail its implementation.

Whether the unit will work up to the government`s expectations--sealing wastes so well that they will pose no threat to human welfare or the environment into the far-distant future--is a question later generations may be able to answer.

It is expected that the facility could reach its maximum capacity of 70,000 metric tons of waste within 25 or 30 years. But it must be designed to safely contain radioactive matter for up to 10,000 years, until it has decayed and become relatively harmless.

But that time frame boggles the mind. No one knows what factors might arise over the centuries to undermine the facility and transform it into a menace. Even so pedestrian a factor as the climate cannot be predicted over so long a period of time.

If weather patterns change, surface evidence of underground caverns filled with hideously dangerous materials might vanish, or extreme erosion might expose the wastes.

``There is an attempt to develop methods for alerting future generations that they should not dig in the area of the repository,`` said Brian Quirk, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy, which is exploring the idea of leaving warnings for future generations in several languages and pictographs. Lending a sense of urgency to the search for a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem is the fact that many of the water-filled pools that serve as temporary storage sites at commercial reactors today are expected to become filled within the next decade.

Once a year at commercial reactors, spent fuel is removed and replaced with fresh uranium. Though the burned-out fuel is no longer able to sustain nuclear reaction, it is still extremely lethal, casting both a blue glow and intense radiation.

Today, about 12,500 metric tons of spent fuel are being contained in pools at commercial reactors. Wastes have also been building up at three Energy Department plants that manufacture atomic weapons for the military.

In all there are about 22,500 metric tons of civilian and military radioactive wastes, and the total is expected to more than double, to 50,000 tons, by the year 2000.

In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which mandated the Energy Department to locate sites for two permanent waste repositories, one in the West and another in either the East or Midwest.

On May 28, while announcing the three states still in the running for the Western site, Energy Secretary James Herrington said the agency was postponing indefinitely consideration of a second storage facility. He cited the slowdown in nuclear power plant construction in the United States since 1978.

The slowdown began when the industry first realized that nuclear energy was not an economic panacea. Then, in 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident cast an even darker pale over nuclear prospects. The fire and radiation leak at Chernobyl is expected to have an even more negative impact.