The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; What to Do With Nuclear Waste

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. This week the federal government came under greater pressure to do something fast about the growing problem of nuclear waste. Republican Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland accused the government of floundering, and thus eroding public confidence. Another Republican, Charles Percy of Illinois, introduced legislation demanding that the administration produce a comprehensive plan for waste disposal by the end of January. In the past year the question of what to do with the highly dangerous nuclear garbage has become as urgently debated a part of the nuclear safety question as the reliability of the reactors themselves. Some people in Congress even want all new reactor development stopped until the waste problem has been solved. Tonight, the problem that threatens to halt the development of nuclear energy. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, nuclear waste is just like any other kind of waste, it`s what`s left over once various nuclear processes are completed. It could range from relatively low-level things like gloves worn by a nuclear power plant worker to the so-called "hot" waste used or spent nuclear reactor fuel assemblies which stay radioactive almost forever, as long as 300,000 years, at least. An average nuclear reactor can turn out as much as thirty- two tons of this spent fuel a year and an estimated 5,000 tons of it exists in the United States right now from present power plants. It`s expected to go to 10,000 tons in five more years; over 100,000 tons by the year 2000.

Right now nuclear waste is stored on a non-permanent basis, buried below ground, placed in steel holding tanks or submerged in cooling pools near reactors. The federal government has been working for many years now to establish a permanent burial ground for nuclear waste. Locations in some thirty-six states have been earmarked for potential study. Testing is either under way or planned in nine of those states. It`s a kind of testing that involves politics and emotions as well as geology and science. The government`s search for a suitable site is now centered in New Mexico, where a pilot project is under consideration for the state`s southeastern corner.

MacNEIL: The New Mexico plan is called WIPP, for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The Energy Department is planning to use a deep salt formation some twenty-six miles southwest of Carlsbad. The backers of the WIPP project see it as a potential national repository for nuclear waste, which could be transported from reactors around the country in special protective cases. Ferried by cranes, metal rods filled with spent fuel, and other radioactive waste, would be carried to shafts, which would extend from the surface of the mine down to burial rooms almost half a mile underground. As this animation illustrates, once placed in the shafts, the rods would be lowered through layers of rock into the salt mine itself.

Energy Department officials say salt, because of its impermeable nature, would make a safe shield for the radioactive material. Some critics, however, caution that salt`s soluble qualities make storage dangerous if water is nearby. At the end of the shaft the radioactive rods would be carried in shielded transporters to storage holes in the mine. Energy Department plans tentatively call for the storager. of 1,100 spent fuel assemblies at the WIPP project; that`s the amount of fuel used by seven reactors in a year. Once in place in the storage holes, the rods would be covered with salt. Once all the storage holes in a section of the mine were filled, plans call for then filling up the mine area itself, sealing the whole area with salt. Scientists estimate that the canisters would survive for about twenty-five years before they became corroded. Containment of the radioactivity after the canisters corroded would then depend on the geologic stability of the salt formation.

LEHRER: The Carlsbad project specifically, what to do with nuclear waste generally is the responsibility of the Department of Energy. John O`Leary is Deputy Secretary of Energy. He formerly headed the old Federal Energy Administration and before that was with the Atomic Energy Commission. Mr. Secretary, why did you select that particular salt mine near Carlsbad for this project?

JOHN O`LEARY: Well, for about the last ten years there`s been a search going on all over the United States. It`s ranged up to Michigan, out to New York, down to Louisiana, into Kansas, looking for the right place. One of the right places that we found -- and this goes back to about 1970 -- is in the Carlsbad area, where you have a combination of arid land, which I think is a very useful thing to have here; deep, very very stable geologic formations that have been there in place, haven`t moved for perhaps 200 million years; thick, component beds of salt, and no intrusions nearby. And we`ve been narrowing down...

LEHRER: Intrusions meaning water...

O`LEARY: Geologic intrusions of water, no old evidences of earthquakes that have cracked the structures; pretty stable.

LEHRER: All right. It`s a pilot project, an experiment, in other words. What kinds of answers are you looking for in this project?

O`LEARY: Well, the first thing that we`re trying to do is to find out whether we can find a satisfactory way for shielding from the environment low-level wastes that come out of the military program, the so-called TRU, or transuranics. That`s the primary mission of WIPP. Beyond that, we would like to do experiments in the facility. We`d like to take a look at what we can do with various forms of military high-level wastes, for example. And the question here is what are we going to do about commercial wastes coming out of reactors? We don`t have an answer for that now.

LEHRER: Do you think it`s the government`s responsibility to come up with an answer for that? O`LEARY: Yes, quite clearly. This is the sort of thing, the one element of the nuclear fuel cycle I believe only the government should be involved in; that is, the permanent disposition of high-level wastes.

LEHRER: And pay the cost of it as well?

O`LEARY: No, no. The costs should be borne by the industry itself. Indeed, we`ve taken a look at the costs, and they`re remarkably low. But regardless of that, if they were high, they should be borne by industry and of course ultimately by the customers for the electric power that the industry produces.

LEHRER: In other words, industry pay for it but under the supervision, et cetera, of the federal government.

O`LEARY: No, not simply the supervision. I believe that ultimate disposal of high-level waste is purely a federal responsibility, a governmental responsibility, and we should take not simply supervisory responsibility of the process.

LEHRER: I see. All right;, now, you`ve agreed to let the State of New Mexico have veto power over whether this project goes forward or not. Why have you done that?

O`LEARY: Well, let me back up and tell you what we have and what we haven`t done. We have decided that this is an appropriate place for TRU, the low- level transuranics. We`ve decided it`s an appropriate place for experiments. We have not as yet decided that this is an appropriate place for the disposition of that limited number of fuel rods permanently. That is a decision that we`re going to be taking over time, and as yet we have not even made the policy decision whether or not to try.

Now, getting to your question, if we decide to try we think it appropriate, because this is first of a kind in recognizing the public sensibility, that the State of New Mexico march hand in hand with us down in the evaluation stages and ultimately, after we`ve gone through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process, that they then cast their vote as to whether or not they want this facility in their state.

LEHRER: Some states, as you know, have already said no thanks to this kind of thing, in a general way at least. What are you going to do if New Mexico eventually says no and all the other states say no?

O`LEARY: Well, if New Mexico State says no and all the other states say no, I think that that is a fairly clear vote on the part of the American public that they don`t want nuclear power. I don`t really contemplate that.

LEHRER: I read a clipping today of a story about your going to Carlsbad and meeting with the people out there; that situation plus other things you have picked up: is there great public resistance to putting nuclear storage facilities in various locations?

O`LEARY: There`s public resistance to it; there is great public concern to it. I think it`s our job over these next months to see it that the people understand enough so that if their concern can be allayed it is allayed, if their concerns are real that they`re expressed as real concerns.

LEHRER: If all goes according to schedule, when do you anticipate the Carlsbad project being open for business?

O`LEARY: Sometime between 1985 and 1988. But the licensing decision would be made considerably earlier, as early as 1981 to 1983.

LEHRER: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes. Well, as you gather, not everyone is convinced salt mines are the best nuclear graveyards. An outspoken critic of the Carlsbad WIPP plan, Peter Montague, has been one of the dissenting voices heard on Capitol Hill. A former head of an Albuquerque public interest group fighting the waste facility, Dr. Montague is currently director of the

Center for Environmental Research and Development at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Montague, why are you opposed to the New Mexico plan, even as a pilot project?

PETER MONTAGUE: Well, there are several reasons, Robin. First let me say that I`m not representing the University of New Mexico here this evening, I`m representing myself. There are overall problems with the WIPP in relation to the nation`s waste management effort. The goals for WIPP are not firmly established. As late as June 1978 the WIPP team reported that it does not have a firm mission. And if you look at a project like this in terms of the nation`s overall waste management program, you certainly would want to have goals clearly established for the project, and criteria so that...

MacNEIL: Didn`t Mr. O`Leary fairly clearly outline the goals, at least as far as the pilot project is concerned?

MONTAGUE: Well, he said it was for the placement of transuranic contaminated wastes, TRU wastes, and then he said there would be some experiments. And it`s of course the experiments that would change the size and scope of the project; and until it`s very clear exactly what kind of experiments with what quantities of which isotopes, it`s really difficult to say what would constitute success or failure of the WIPP project.

MacNEIL: Well, apart from getting the goals more clearly defined, what kind of waste they might ultimately put there, do you have an objection to the use of salt as an effective geologic structure in which to put this waste?

MONTAGUE: Yes; there are several basic problems with bedded salt. In addition there are specific problems with the WIPP site in New Mexico But I`ll talk about the general problems first. Salt is associated with valuable resources; it`s typically associated with sulfur and with gas and oil, and sometimes with potash, which is a fertilizer for human food And so humans will tend to explore salt beds looking for resources, and so in the future intrusions by unsuspecting humans into this kind of a site is a serious difficulty. Water, of course, dissolves salt; salt is dissolved about a thousand times more readily than any other rock in the surface of the planet, and so it seems like there`s an inherent difficulty there because the intrusion of ground water could lead to the wastes migrating out of the site. Finally, the critical barrier that has been described by the U.S. Geological Survey is really not there with salt. Scientists currently think that it would be foolish to rely on structures or facilities that were engineered by humans to do the job of containing these wastes over a period of 300,000 years. They want to rely on the ability of the rock mass itself to contain these wastes, and salt has a very serious drawback in that regard: it does not adsorb or tend to react with the wastes in a way that would fix them in place in the case that water were to get into the repository. And so the wastes would be transported quite readily out of a salt repository if water were to intrude.

MacNEIL: Okay. Now, you said you had an objection to this particular site; can you briefly say what that is?

MONTAGUE: Yes, I can. Six miles from the proposed WIPP plant is a major waterbearing aquifer, a major stratum of rock carrying water. It is something called the Capitan Reef or the Capitan Aquifer; it is made of limestone. You can think of it as a huge limestone pipe, and it is carrying water under pressure. The evidence for this is that the Carlsbad Caverns have been hollowed out of the limestone reef by large flows of water in the past, and this reef is six miles from the proposed site.

MacNEIL: Okay. Let`s put some of these points to Secretary O`Leary. Mr. Secretary, what about the first objection that Mr. Montague makes, that your goals are not clearly enough defined? He says you leave it a bit vague how you`re going to use this.

O`LEARY: No, we`ve defined for the citizens of the State of New Mexico with exhaustive precision exactly what we intend to do in that site.

MacNEIL: Well, Mr. Montague is at the moment a resident of New Mexico, and he doesn`t find it exhaustive enough.

O`LEARY: He`s participated with me in some of these hearings which, I want to tell you, are not only exhaustive but exhausting. What we intend to do is to take spent fuel rods, not more than a thousand fuel assemblies, and put them underground at 2,600 feet into bedded salt in a retrievable mold so that in the event that something goes wrong with the demonstration in the next fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, we can withdraw without doing any damage and without incurring large costs; that would take about twenty acres of a site that has a total of approximately 2,500 acres, a very limited, very contained experiment, carefully monitored and one that we believe can be conducted with no threat at all to health and safety. Now, he`s quite right, salt -- indeed, no medium is perfect. We are going to find over the next fifteen to twenty years that we`re going to be looking at basalt, at rocks of volcanic origin; we`re going to be looking at granites; we`re in all likelihood going to be looking at shales, perhaps alternatives to forms of disposal. We don`t have all the answers yet. We`ve spent a great deal of time over the last year working out a comprehensive plan, which will be filed with the President in October.

I think we`re on the right track, and I think that the WIPP facility can make a significant contribution to our understanding and ultimately to our capacity to move these wastes away from the human environment without disturbing it.

MacNEIL: Mr. Montague?

MONTAGUE: I`d like to respond to what Mr. O`Leary said. I`ll quote, first of all, the June 1978 WIPP project report from Sandia Laboratories; page eleven says, "The mission of the WIPP is not firmly established," and so as of June `78 some of the people out in the field do not have a firm feeling that the project mission is established.

MacNEIL: Has it been more firmly established since that report was issued, Mr. O`Leary?

O`LEARY: No. I made the point just a few minutes ago that we have not as yet progressed far enough in our studies to determine whether or not we want to go with this thousand-fuel-assembly demonstration.

MacNEIL: So then Mr. Montague is right in saying that you haven`t firmly defined the mission of WIPP.

O`LEARY: That`s right. As I said in my opening remarks, we know the primary mission will be TRU. We know also that we want to conduct limited experiments there. We know that. Now, we think that we will want to go ahead after we`ve done some more geologic work and make the very limited, contained demonstration that I`ve just described with regard to the spent fuel rods.

MacNEIL: Yes. What about Mr. Montague`s point that there is what he calls a limestone pipe through which water moves under pressure only six miles from this site? Does that concern you?

O`LEARY: There is an aquifer nearby; he`s quite right in saying the Carlsbad Caverns are an indication of the effect of that water on the local environment. I want to point out, however, that these are very long lived geologic processes. You have a thousand years of high-level concern, at which point these wastes get down to a background that presents no particular threat to the environment were they to get out. And you`re looking at geologic processes in the dissolution of the salt that will take from hundreds of thousands of years to, in the estimate of some of our geologists, a few million years.I think that that`s part of the uncertainty with regard to this. We`re going to have to pin down with more precision the probable geologic future of these rocks, as we are trying now to understand their geologic past.

MacNEIL: Is that an acceptable risk as far as you`re concerned -acceptable degree of uncertainty?

MONTAGUE: Well, the government studies that have been done by geologists under contract to the WIPP team have indicated that there`s been a great deal of dissolution occurring in the area of the proposed WIPP site; less than half a mile away there`s...

MacNEIL: Dissolution meaning what?

MONTAGUE: Dissolution meaning large-scale dissolving of masses of salt by flowing ground water.

MacNEIL: I see.

MONTAGUE: There is geologic evidence within half a mile of the site and perhaps even within the selected site area itself of fairly large scale dissolution in the past; and it now is up to the government, it seems to us, to demonstrate that what has happened within a half a mile of the site in the past will never again happen in the future, because as Mr. O`Leary said, correctly, the time period of concern is 300,000 years or possibly even longer.

MacNEIL: Well, we have a slightly shorter time period of concern right now, so let`s move on. Jim?

LEHRER: As we`ve said, military reactors have produced the largest amount of nuclear waste so far, but that is about to change as utilities build more nuclear power plants and the current moratorium on reprocessing commercial wastes stays in effect. Industry`s stake in the waste problem is thus enormous. Dr. Ralph Lapp is a nuclear scientist who is a consultant to the utilities industry. He is the author of twenty-one books, several of them on the subject of radiation and nuclear waste. Dr. Lapp, from the industry`s point of view, how big is the general problem of nuclear waste?

RALPH LAPP: Well, from the industry point of view, industry is looking to the government to come to some decision on this problem, which has been pushed aside and, I think, has been exaggerated as a technical problem. I`ve heard remarks made in these twenty minutes of the program with which I thoroughly disagree.

LEHRER: Give me an example.

LAPP: 300,000 years for the containment time for this waste. As a nuclear scientist suffering from thirty-six years of experience in the field, going back to the wartime days itself, I can tell you that this problem is not a technical problem. It`s ,a political and institutional problem. And under President Carter the environmentalists, who are having a heyday, are magnifying this problem into a political problem, which really is an exaggeration beyond belief. 300,000 years? We have in New Mexico itself proof that nature knows how to store radioactive wastes which are just as dangerous, were as dangerous, as all the wastes which Would be accumulated in reactors to the year 2000. And I`m talking about a uranium mine, because a uranium mine contains radioactivity -- and I made these calculations and published them -- which are every bit equivalent to a waste repository; and we have seventy-two drill holes in New Mexico, we measure the water contamination, and right under the Jackpile Paguate mine west of Albuquerque, where we had...

LEHRER: Which is a uranium mine.

LAPP: A uranium mine equivalent to a waste repository in bad geology, in water-soaked sandstone close to the surface of the earth, a thousand times more conservative than we would need; and it proves that right in the aquifer, right underneath this leaky deposit, the radium in that water, which is the determinant of radioactivity, is twenty-three times less than what one million Americans drink in their municipal water in the United States today.

LEHRER: Well, what`s going on then? Secretary O`Leary and his colleagues at the Department of Energy are just not free to do what they would otherwise want to do because of political pressure?

LAPP: Oh, I think you are expressing something that`s quite clear, that we have seen in the past two years a turnaround on nuclear power, we have seen a lack of decision-making, we`ve seen problems which are non problems become problems, we`ve seen the administration bow down to the environmentalists; and we`ve seen people who have no technical competence whatsoever, who have no degrees in geology or in physics making statements on problems which are basically physical problems.

LEHRER: All right. Let`s talk about the physical problem for one minute. If the industry had its way, exempting the reprocessing thing, on which there`s a moratorium now, how would you resolve the nuclear waste problem? And I`m talking technically now. Would you do it in a salt mine?

LAPP: We would proceed directly in the fashion that we had outlined for over ten years and had studied and studied over and over again, in good research that`s been done by converting the spent fuel in a facility that`s already in existence in Darnwell, South Carolina, into a solid, into a glassified solid, putting that solid into a steel canister and putting these steel canisters into, if you want, a salt repository, but it could be a granitic formation -- whichever you wish -- and lowering it into that formation to be there in perpetuity. And you`re not talking about 300,000 years. We have analyzed this in detail and we are talking of periods that are hundreds of years, and that is no real problem for sequestering something. And all of the time constants involved are really quite acceptable, in my opinion.

LEHRER: You do support, though, the Carlsbad project as a beginning, I assume.

LAPP: Well, I think it`s diversionary, but if this is ...

LEHRER: Diversionary?

LAPP: Diversionary, because I think we know where to go. I think we know the solution to this problem; it`s not a technical problem. And if this is the politics that we have to go into these things, I`ll support it.

LEHRER: All right; thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Secretary, is the administration bowing down to the environmentalists and giving them a heyday and creating a political problem where there is none?

O`LEARY: No, I think the political problem exists; I think the administration is being scrupulously careful in its handling of the entire nuclear issue. You know, there are inherent dangers associated with nuclear power. We`ve established extraordinary precautions in the form of a regulatory commission, first called the AEC, now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to handle those; there`s no two ways about it that the emissions from these reactors are potentially hazardous if they were to get out, and I think that we should spend a moderate amount of money, and in terms of power costs the WIPP site demonstrates to us that we can, with a moderate expenditure in terms of power cost, safeguard this beyond any near possibility, any sort of a possibility of this coming out into the environment and endangering people now or a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years from now. Incidentally, I tend to agree with Dr. Lapp on the time frames. You have to look at this as a thousand to two thousand to five thousand year problem, not, certainly, a 200,000 or a 300,000 year problem.

MacNEIL: Mr. Montague, you are an environmentalist. Dr. Lapp accuses you as a species of being unqualified scientifically to determine these things and making claims that have no basis in fact.

MONTAGUE: That`s a very common attitude among technical people, particularly in New Mexico. We find that technical people seem to argue that the general public, the well-educated citizenry who care about these things, are not capable of making sensible decisions for themselves. I reject that view entirely.

MacNEIL: Dr. Lapp?

LAPP: Well, I would just ask what he got his Ph.D. in.

MacNEIL: What did you get your Ph.D. in?

MONTAGUE: I got my Ph.D. in American studies.

MacNEIL: But your argument is that an intelligent, well-educated American, whether he has technical training or not, is qualified to raise these objections.

MONTAGUE: I would say that anyone who studies the problem for a couple of years and really makes a serious effort to educate themselves is then qualified to vote yes or no: whether or not they think it`s a good idea.

LAPP: Peter, I would say as an example of one who`s attempted to do that -- and I assume you`ve done it seriously -- you`ve made so many errors of technology tonight that I think you`re a living example of what is wrong with the environmentalists.

MONTAGUE: Well, I`m sorry to hear you say that, Dr. Lapp.

MaCNEIL: Dr. Lapp, we just have a minute or so left and I`d like to ask all of you, starting with you, how long has the nuclear industry and the government and whoever else is interested got to make some determination on the storage of this waste material before the failure to do so seriously interferes with the nuclear program? How long have we got?

LAPP: Well, actually, we can go on at the utilities; we`re forced to take our spent fuel pools, our water ponds, which were meant to contain spent fuel for only a year or so, we have reracked those with high density racks so that we can take ten years` supply at many of the utilities. So in that sense it is not that pressing a problem, but we just don`t want to see this problem kicked around politically any longer.

MacNEIL: How long do you think there is, Mr. Secretary?

O`LEARY: We`re now in a situation where the lack of an answer to this is seriously influencing licensing in a number of states. California says no more until there`s a resolution of it; Oregon has said very much the same sort of thing; just recently we`ve heard the same message from Wisconsin; Governor Carey said very much the same sort of thing just last week for New York. So I think it`s a very serious problem, not from the standpoint of our capacity to handle this waste -- I think we can; I think we can put it in what we call away-from-reactor storage and handle it for many years. It`s from a political perception.

MacNEIL: What urgency do you see in this problem?

MONTAGUE: I see it as a very urgent problem, but we have a solution currently, which is to keep the wastes where they are while we figure out what really should be done with them. What I fear is that we will go ahead with this mistaken program in New Mexico, ship a lot of wastes there and then discover in ten or fifteen years that it was a mistake and that the wastes will then have to be pulled up and shipped somewhere else. And it looks to me as if the shipping part of the operation is probably the most dangerous part and the part that should be avoided.

MacNEIL: We have to end it there, I`m afraid. Thank you, Dr. Lapp and Mr. Secretary, for joining us tonight. Good night. Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: Thanks, Mr. Montague. That`s all for tonight. We`ll be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.