Nuclear Waste: ‘Cleanup’ Means  Dumping It ‘Somewhere Else’

Current classification categories for nuclear wastes have little to do with their longevity or their hazard to health.

High-level wastes are weapons production byproducts and the unstable used fuel rods from nuclear reactors, one million times more radioactive than before use. The term ‘spent fuel’ is a deceitful misnomer.

Low level wastes include everything from hospital equipment to every broom and pair of booties from a nuclear reactor, to the buildings themselves.

Transuranic wastes are mixtures of radioactive materials and other heavy metals, mainly generated by nuclear weapons production.

Mill Tailings are the radioactive soils and heavy metals remaining after uranium mining and milling into ‘yellow cake’ ore.

Radioactive isotopes have a vast range of lifetimes, from a few days to millions of years. New isotopes with their own properties are created as radioactive materials break down. We are talking about effects on future generations that exceed our understanding of life on Earth.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated materials are piled up all over the country, in addition to what has already been leaked or dumped. Little research or money has been applied to reversing the problem. All efforts toward ‘cleanup’ involve transporting it on freeways or trains through highly populated areas and dumping it somewhere else.

A few notable and deadly exceptions are:

• the "recycling" of vast stores of unwanted depleted uranium (DU) into conventional munitions and armored vehicles (widely used in the Gulf War and Eastern Europe) which are causing disease, and birth defects in children of exposed individuals;
• the ongoing attempt to avoid cleanup costs by returning thousands of tons of contaminated metals from weapons plants to commercial use, where, according to Robert Alvarez, "some percentage of it would inevitably end up in stainless steel items such as intrauterine devices, surgical tools, children’s orthodontic braces, kitchen sinks, zippers, and flatware."

Efforts to site low-level waste dumps in Ward Valley, CA, and Sierra Blanca, TX, were defeated in 1999-2000 by multi-ethnic grassroots coalitions after years of hard work. New efforts have been now initiated by waste-handling corporations in West Texas to site a dump in Monihans, east of Pecos. Utah has passed a ‘nuclear waste tax’ to discourage more dumping there.

While one particle of plutonium can kill, it can be called low-level if mixed with enough dirt or other material. This definition fits the truckloads of waste that roll in to the Nevada Test Site every day from weapons plant cleanup operations all over the country. There, it is bulldozed into the ground with boxes and barrels of other contaminated material in what opponents call ‘kitty-litter technology’. Workers wear no protective gear, and are assured that they are safe.