MY TURN
Greenfield Recorder, August 5, 2021
By ANN DARLING
What does Frankenstein have to do with nuclear power? Frankenstein is an iconic monster, a legend of “grade B” movies, with great appeal to audiences, but Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a warning — if man was consumed by ambition and sought endless progress, man’s desire to gain dominion over the world would eventually destroy him.
We did not take Shelley’s warning to heart. In pursuit of endless progress and a better life, we have indeed created monsters that are now beyond our control and threaten to destroy us and the planet that gives us life.
One of these monsters is nuclear power, which relies on extremely dangerous radioactive fuel and leaves us with waste containing billions of curies of lethal radiation that could contaminate entire communities — or regions, or countries, or continents — for millennia. Even small amounts of radioactivity can cause birth defects, mutations, and cancer.
The creation of the atomic bomb was “justified” by the ending of World War II. Then, to secure America’s top-dog position in the world, we “needed” nuclear weapons and an endless supply of weapons-grade radioactive material, which is only created in the type of chain reactions that generate electricity. So the civilian use of nuclear power began.
We believed, wrongly, that we could reprocess the waste from reactors and use it again and again. However, the only reprocessing facility shuttered after five years, and it remains a Superfund site.
When India tested a nuclear bomb in the 1980s, the U.S. government decided the potential for bad actors or rogue countries to get their hands on weapons-grade radioactive material was too great a threat. President Carter ended the use of reprocessing and empaneled a group of scientists to explore ways of managing the ever-expanding radioactive waste throughout the country. Now there was an acknowledged waste problem.
We have yet to create a “solution,” but communities hosting reactors — like Plymouth and Rowe, Mass., and Vernon, Vermont, just over the Massachusetts border — want the waste gone. It’s a PR nightmare for the nuclear industry.
The one possibility scientists agreed on was deep geological burial of the waste. Work was started at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, against the treaty rights of the Western Shoshone. But Yucca is not geologically and hydrologically stable enough, nor does the state want a repository there. Work has been suspended.
Now the nuclear industry and the federal government are talking about developing interim storage sites that would consolidate the waste from all reactors to make it easier to manage before a final repository is found. These “parking lot dumps” would be out in the open and vulnerable to attack and leakage from casks designed to last for decades, not the millennia it will take for the radiation to dissipate.
This is a gambit to make the waste in reactor communities “disappear” and concentrate the toxic material in sacrifice zones with little political clout — working class, rural, Latino and/or Native American areas in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. There’s no informed consent process to allow communities to opt in or opt out.
And while they’re at it, the industry is trying to rebrand nuclear power as a “green bridge” away from fossil fuels, even though the nuclear fuel chain is a net producer of greenhouse gasses, creates toxic waste, and sucks precious resources away from development of sustainable energy solutions.
Nuclear waste is truly our Frankenstein.
We have created a monster. How do we stop it? The first step is to educate ourselves and acknowledge there is a problem. We also need serious investment in science to figure out how to isolate this waste while doing the least harm.
While that process evolves, do we just let the industry move the waste over our crumbling roads and railroads — a lethal accident just waiting to happen? Do we let them take the radioactive waste from energy production that benefited us in New England and dump it on our Native and Latino neighbors?
No! We need to call for the research needed to isolate the waste. Meanwhile, leave it where it is, harden it against attack, monitor it closely, and make sure it doesn’t leak. And we need to fight for clean energy standards that have meaning and teeth and make nuclear power generation irrelevant in meeting our energy needs.
Your voice is important, and your legislators need to hear from you. Check out the Citizens Awareness Network website at nukebusters.org to learn more about the issues and the National Radioactive Waste Coalition. You will find information about how to contact your senators and representatives as well as some ideas about what you can say.
Ann Darling lives in Easthampton.