Nuclear Waste
by James Glaser
August 7, 2008

Yesterday I wrote about John McCain's idea of installing 45 new nuclear power plants in the United States. Several people e-mailed me asking about what we are doing with the nuclear waste we have now. For decades, the United States, along with every other country with nuclear power plants, was dumping nuclear waste in the ocean.

Between 1946 and 1970, approximately 47,800 large barrels and other containers of radioactive waste were dumped in the ocean west of San Francisco. The containers were to be dumped at three designated sites, but they litter a sea floor area of at least 1,400 km2 known as the Farallon Island Radioactive Waste Dump.

That report comes from the US Geological Survey, and it tells us that we haven't been careful with the nuclear waste our country produces. We also dumped nuclear barrels of waste in the Atlantic.

CBS News says that the Department of Energy will require between one and six shipments every day for 24 years to move all the nuclear waste that has been produced to date to a storage facility. That is what it will take to move the nuclear waste we have stored around the country today. It does not include the nuclear waste we will create in those 24 years.

The Department of Energy reports:

As of April 2008, the United States accumulated about 56,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository.

It sounds to me like we have a lot of nuclear waste, and right now we don't know for sure what we are going to do with it. One thing we do know however that nuclear waste is dangerous for about 10,000 years.

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