Nuclear waste: Roll back the “free release” limits ..
…or let everyone everywhere become ever more radioactive
By Gordon Edwards – Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility September 16 2011
ACTION ITEM: It is urgently necessary to start an
international campaign to roll back the “free release”
limits which allow radioactively contaminated materials
to be dumped into the environment and the marketplace.
We need to talk about this at a global level — North
America and Europe to begin with. Who will formally
join in such a campaign? What name and mandate
shall we have? How will we operate?
I just returned from a CNS = Canadian Nuclear Society
Conference on “Waste Management, Decommissioning
and Environmental Restoration for Canada’s Nuclear
Activities”. Three days of plenaries and workshops,
devoted entirely to cleaning up the nuclear mess and
not to any form of promotion, new build, expansion, etc.
There were tons of nuclear scientists and engineers there,
mainly Canadian, with some from USA, UK, France….
On one level it was encouraging to see all these nuclear
scientists and engineers adapting to their role as nuclear
garbagemen, and realizing that it ain’t so bad — lots of
challenging problems, lots of money available to do the
job, a sense of importance and urgency due to the sad
state of the nuclear industry and the growing impatience
of the public and politicians re. the nuclear waste problems.
On the other hand it was profoundly discouraging to see
that the same old attitudes prevail and that the main goal
is to spend billions of dollars consolidating, packaging, and
stabilizing the wastes without really acknowledging that
this does not a solution make. Also an increasingly disdainful
insistence that “we nuclear guys are being held to too high
a standard”, as they regard with envy the crimes that
chemical polluters are “allowed” to commit.
So over the last 5-10 years, there has been an alarming
growth in the amount of radioactive wastes of all kinds
that have been “free released” into landfills, into the envi-
ronment, or into the marketplace, facilitated by a flurry
of regulations, guidelines, policies, etc. that allow and
encourage the free release of these contaminated materials.
The code words are “segregation of wastes” (to separate
those that can be dumped offsite without any further need
for labelling, monitoring, or tracing, from those that have to
be stored onsite, or on some site, in perpetuity.)
The story line is this: The nuclear renaissance has never
got off the ground, despite all kinds of huffing and puffing,
and so now the nuclear industry is requisitioning and obtaining
enormous budgets to deal with the radioactive wastes that
they themselves have created. For example, the Nuclear
Legacy Liabilities Program here in Canada is designed to fund
AECL to deal with their wastes at an estimated cost of $7
billion. (I’m sure it’s more.) In the UK, the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority is looking after some very nasty
wastes at an estimated cost of $80 billion. Yucca Mountain,
you may remember, cost more than $10 billion before it was
cancelled.
So now the industry, worldwide, is taking a sharp turn to the
rear end of the nuclear fuel cycle. And now, more than ever
before, there is a veritable tsunami of “very low level”
radioactive contamination flooding into the non-nuclear world
from our exceedingly generous nuclear industries.
Gordon Edwards, Robert Del Tredici, Theresa McClenaghan,
Brennain Lloyd, Anna Tillman, Janet McNeill, Gordon Albright,
have all signed a solemn pledge by the light of the full moon
to dedicate themselves to this endeavour.
Who else is with us?
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