Editorial

Radioactive Waste: No Place To Hide It Anymore

“My state knows better than any other what a folly the federal government has perpetrated with its failure to comply with environmental laws and properly manage nuclear waste,” Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus recently told the U.S. Senate. “We have begun to believe that when the Department of Energy says ‘temporary storage,’ it means a nuclear half life of perhaps 25,000 years.”

And so, now, Pearl Harbor joins the dismal but growing list of sites where the U.S. government is going to be “temporarily storing” high-level nuclear waste. People of Hawai’i can expect in the next few months to begin hearing some of the same tales from the government that Idaho has been hearing for the last forty years and more: That the U.S. Navy’s safety record is the best in the world; that if Hawai’i doesn’t want the jobs, another state can be found to take the work; that national security permits no alternative.

The claims are serious, but in light of the even graver problems that Americans – along with virtually every industrial nation around the entire globe – are having coming up with ways to protect the environment from the damaging effects of material that will be poisonous for millennia, those claims demand close scrutiny.

Safer That What?

The U.S. Navy may have compiled the best record in the world for management of its nuclear propulsion program. But consider the competition. There has been only one other submarine fleet of comparable size- that of the former Soviet Union, whose nuclear litter is scattered across the seafloor, whose now-surfacing history is blemished with countless deaths of civilians who had the misfortune to live near naval installations, whose sunken ships pose a growing menace to Scandinavian countries, and whose no longer-serviceable nuclear-powered ships are moored catastrophes waiting to happen. To say the U.S. Navy is safer than the now dispersed Soviet fleet is to damn with faint praise indeed.

The Navy can utter pronouncements about its safety record only if one buys into the idea that moral responsibility for the production of toxic waste ends the moment that that waste is delivered into the hands of some other party. In the case of naval nuclear waste, the Department of Energy becomes the convenient scapegoat. The DOE’s failure to do the impossible – to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle, as Governor Andrus states – has nothing to do with the Navy’s generation of that waste, the Navy would have us believe. The problem is one of DOE incompetence rather than any lack of scrupulousness on the part of the Navy, this argument goes.

Federal law, however, has gone down a different track, at least with respect to private waste generators. More and more, the generators of hazardous waste are being held accountable for “cradle-to-grave” management of the problems that they generate. The Navy and all other federal agencies should be held to no less stringent standard.

Nowhere is this more true than in the production of nuclear waste. Since the first atom was split and the first radioactive waste generated, no one has yet found a satisfactory means of making sure that that waste will be isolated from the environment until such time as it is rendered innocuous. Managing for the seventh generation a notion that has gained acceptance recently as the standard by which actions affecting the environment are to be judged – is nothing when compared with the kind of approach needed for handling radioactive waste. Managing for the seventieth generation comes closer to the mark, although even this falls short. The longevity of nuclear waste, in fact, has led scientists, philosophers and linguists on a merry chase in search of symbols that will convey radioactivity’s life-threatening dangers long after humankind, should it still exist, may be presumed to have lost its ability to communicate in the languages of our time.

In light of this, claims to deal “safely” with radioactive waste are simply ludicrous. And until such time as a responsible means of managing nuclear waste is developed, the generation of even more such waste cannot be undertaken in good conscience by any nation, for any purpose.

National Security?

As of 1991, the U.S Navy had 140 nuclear powered vessels plying the seas (125 submarines and 15 surface ships). About 18 of those submarines are based at Pearl Harbor.

Since the close of World War II, the Soviet Union has been the bogey man whose existence was used to rationalize all manner of activities – including the development of a huge nuclear submarine fleet- in the name of national security. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union, however, comes the opportunity for reductions in our own defensive and offensive forces.

The order of judge Ryan may be used as the occasion for rethinking the Navy’s reliance on nuclear-powered ships altogether. If we need submarines at all, they can be powered, as they were in the past, by diesel fuel. Recent advances in diesel engine technology hold the promise of making long stays underwater possible, thus taking that advantage away from nuclear fueled submarines. In addition, diesel-fueled submarines have always been quieter running than their nuclear counterparts. Finally, when it comes to cost, top-of-the-line diesel boats can be picked up for a fraction of what the most bare-bones nuclear submarine costs.

So far, the Navy seems unwilling or unable to use Judge Ryan’s order as the occasion to rethink its nuclear fleet. While it has planned a gradual reduction in the number of submarines, independently of the court order, it has not entertained any thought of abandoning nuclear reactors as the power source for the remaining fleet. Instead, its spokesmen continue to regard the generation of high-level nuclear waste (such as that barred now from Idaho) as vital to “national security requirements.”

Not in Any Back Yard

The Navy’s claims notwithstanding, the nuclear work at the Pearl Harbor shipyard is inherently dangerous. The storage of highly radioactive waste is no less a peril. Understandably, the first reaction of many people will be to demand that the waste – and, perhaps, the nuclear operations as well – be taken elsewhere.

Other places may be better suited to the work. For reasons of efficiency alone (for example, in submarine defueling), sites other than Pearl Harbor seem to hold the edge.

But that’s not the point. The fact is, no government should place its citizens in the position of having to accept nuclear waste as the price of national security. As the case of the defunct Russian fleet shows, the same people who were supposedly being protected by nuclear powered vessels now see their very lives imperiled by those same vessels. The interests of national security have switched, from being protected by a nuclear-propelled fleet to being protected from that same fleet.

The U.S. Navy has said it cannot happen on U.S. soil. Actually, it already is happening, but so far on a more limited, less visible scale. In all likelihood, the vast desert plains near Hanford, Washington, and Idaho Falls, Idaho, will never be available for any human use. The aquifer underlying the Idaho facility is already tainted with radioactivity. Efforts to clean up these and scores of other nuclear waste dumps across the country will be siphoning off billions of dollars from the federal budget for decades to come. This, moreover, is to say nothing of the incredible threats to international security posed by nation after nation generating waste that, in the wrong hands, can be turned into bombs.

Opportunity Knocks

Under the agreement worked out with the state of Idaho and the Department of Energy the Navy should prepare an environmental assessment for its storage of high level radioactive waste at Pearl Harbor in the next few months.

The preparation of this EA gives the people of Hawai’i an extraordinary opportunity to let the federal government know their concerns and wishes on the matter of radioactive waste and, further, the nuclear propulsion program that generates it in the first place.

No Value Placed On Natural Resources

Out review of the Army Corps of Engineers’ planning for Ma’alaea Harbor discloses a serious omission in its criteria for selecting among various design alternatives. While the relative economic benefits of the alternatives are to be weighed, the standard for judging those benefits is restricted solely to commercial activity. Environmental cost is not a matter with which the Corps concerns itself.

It is difficult to believe that in 1993, the Corps’ rules and regulations prohibit it from considering the economic value of natural resources. Admittedly, it is difficult to assign precise dollar values to such things as reef ecosystems and habitat for endangered and threatened species. Some measure of their worth might be derived, however, by imagining how much commercial activity would be lost if the natural resources were to perish.

Imagine Maui without whales or turtles. Imagine its reefs devastated by silt if they were lucky enough to survive dredging. The fishing boats and tour boats whose owners now clamor for more berths would pack up and move elsewhere.

The idea that the loss or retention of natural resources has no role to play in economic analysis is antiquated, to say the kindest that may be said of such a notion. Federal rules or no, the Corps and the state should be challenged on this.

Volume 4, Number 3 September 1993