Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
$216 million on buildings to clean the site, and when the buildings were
no longer needed, each had to be demolished, decontaminated, and
placed in the landfi ll. The DOE also built a pumping system to suck
contaminated water out of the aquifer and purify it. The cleansing
process is expected to be completed in about 2023. The Fernald site is
now open as a park, but the landfi ll is off-limits to the public. The
cleanup at Fernald took thirteen years and cost $4.4 billion.
There are 104 operating reactors at sixty-fi ve sites in the United States,
and many more reactors exist at many more sites that are no longer
operating. Fernald is an example of the problems, time, and cost of
cleanups.
What Should We Do with Old Nuclear Waste?
In April 2005, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report
assessing the dangers of keeping the spent fuel in cooling ponds at sixty-
four power plants across the United States. The NAS report noted that
choking off the water that cools the pools could trigger a radioactive fi re
that some scientists believe could cause as much death and disease as a
reactor meltdown.
However, long before the NAS report, it was obvious to all who
considered the problem that a large and permanent storage facility for
high-level radioactive waste was needed, and in 1982 Congress ordered
the federal government to fi nd a suitable site. Such a site would need to
have several characteristics.
Geological stability. The repository should be stable for perhaps 1
million years, meaning no earthquakes, crustal deformation, faulting, or
heat fl ow. Volcanic activity would be disastrous to the integrity of the
storage cavity.
Low groundwater content and fl ow at repository depths, with a
projected stability of at least tens of thousands of years.
Good engineering properties that readily allow construction of the
repository as well as operation for periods of at least decades.
Congressional representatives in the 1980s lobbied intensely against
locating the site in their districts. Who wants tens of thousands of tons
of waste that is highly radioactive and will remain so forever in terms
of human life span located near where they live? The 1980s was a good
time for a state to have powerful representatives in Washington. Most
states were clearly not suitable, and their representatives could rest easy.
