Intro

Most people know next to nothing about radioactive wastes because the corporate media wants it that way. Questioning the nuclear status quo is difficult to do when the national media routinely fails to address the issue honestly just as most other issues are always given the beltway spin. There is a reason for this. It might not be what you think.

This society has yet to deal with the radioactive wastes it produced during the Cold War. The Department of Energy has estimated that it will cost at between $270-330 Billion to clean up these wastes. These numbers do not include the cleanup of non-military wastes. Nor do they include the past cost of creating them, let alone the human and environmental impacts here and in other nuclear cultures like Russia, France or the United Kingdom.

This is a description of the radioactive waste big picture. If you spend the time to dig into this issue you will begin to see why this country should not be pushing to expand its nuclear program when it has yet to figure out how to truly deal with radioactive waste. Contrary to all the pro-nuclear hype you hear in the media, a closer look should give anyone 2nd thoughts about supporting this failed technology. It is the waste issue and how wastes are generated across the nuclear fuel cycle that represents a clear danger to the world today. Neither the USA or any other country has an economically viable solution to radioative wastes.

What Is it?

Lets start out by redefining radioactive wastes in the context of what has transpired since the dawn of the nuclear era when the USA dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. This redefinition will take two specific directions in terms of building a working definition of what constitutes radioactive wastes today.

There are no viable solutions of safely dealing with radiation other than letting the various isotopes that can last from a few seconds to millenia decay down to safe levels. The entire stretch of civilized history as we know it barely encompasses a few thousand years, yet we have created wastes that will continue to be toxic to all life for millions of years.

It is quite clear that western civilization as we know it today could unwind, leaving future generations exposed to radioactive materials that we can neither see, smell nor sense. The public needs far more education than the poorly done B movies that might imply some kind of "Night of the Living Dead" where glow in the dark Hollywood stunts do injustice to the pain and suffering that radiation can inflict on living tissue.

Thus the first redefinition of radioactive waste constitutes a wholistic point of view that all manmade radiation created, which includes the materials deemed valuable as well as those currently defined as wastes by the nuclear elite should both be considered as radioactive waste as is the entire nuclear fission experiment.

Just as the west became extremely concerned about the nuclear materials held by the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990's, who would be there to protect the world from a global economic downturn that could clearly result in large quantities of radioactive materials becoming left unsecured or worse, the hundreds of nuclear facilities worldwide could all end up causing Chernobyl scale releases as our ability to run these facilities safely collapsed.

Imagine the dilema that we are all confronted with right now. Billions of dollars have been invested in the construction of a single major nuclear facility. Economic pressures currently trump all other values in this society and will continue. What pressures could be brought to bear upon system that has yet to look at just how ensnared we have become in a system that offers no alternatives?

Who would have the authority to order the closure of these units whether it was here or anywhere else in the world, if society was clearly starting to fail to keep up with the costs of maintaining such a facility? In the Soviet Union, when things got very rough large numbers of nuclear powered submarines were simply skuttled in a harbor. Radiation poisoning soon hit the local citizens with cancers and health effects going offscale. No science fiction fantasy here but a horrible nightmare that has been kept from the public.

Let us all hope that the recent 2008 economic downturn doesn't have a second more troubling phase that could cripple the planet, leaving us vulnerable to exposure from nuclear and other toxic techologies.

Restating the immense moral question posed above. Do you think the current structure of our society, where private economic interests have direct control over this technology, would be able to come to terms with such a moment across the country and around the world? Anyone with eyes today can see how private capital is doing everything in its power to subvert the kind of paradigm changes needed to deal with our long standing dependence on fossil fuels. What response could we expect to see at such a juncture!*

This society has never faced the difficult question that it might one day become economically unviable. As the horrible consequences of climate destabilization and resource depletion issues continue to put ever increasing strains on economic resources, will we be able to not just let go of this technology, but safely find the resources to close it down without further jepardizing our overall survival? We have all literally been given a Faustian nuclear bargain that dictates that the present economically driven culture will have to find a way to safely dispose of the deadly wastes we have created so far or hope that this culture becomes the first to truly sustain itself for literally thousands of years into the future.

As we have all come to know too well, most of the world is now caught up in a global economy, with a large number of entities being labeled "Too Big To Fail". Imagine the fact that we have over 400 nuclear facilities in the world that should also be stamped "Too Dangerous To Fail".

The 2nd redefinition of radioactive wastes

This redefinition is based on a historic perspective of how we have handled the various waste streams to date and what can be expected with our the current state of affairs.

Most Americans don't have the slightest idea about the scale of the nuclear infrastructure within this country. Much as the Papal annunciates during the dark ages looked down upon those who could neither read nor write, so it was at the dawn of the nuclear era as a self ordained nuclear papacy has used national security to ram home a trillion dollar nuclear "too deadly to fail" empire that is playing god with this planets biological future.

Whether we like it or not, we have all been ensnared in a dangerous nuclear game that forces us all to seek some sort of safe solution. When looking at how our brightest scientific minds who have been given billions of dollars and decades to find a solution, we know that they have failed to find a viable solution for the most deadly wastes. Over ten billion dollars and several decades of lost time took place, resulting in a country that has long run out of space to store the wastes being produced.

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But what of reality today and what must the average person come to terms with around the concept of the nuclear era? Such dire predictions have yet to take place, and lets all hope that humanity will be able to weather the current storms that have set us all in one hell of a bigger than life science fiction movie.

Thus, it behoves anyone who has a sense of hope, or a wish to survive an urgent duty to demand a dramatic change in how the skeletons of the nuclear era have been removed from public awareness solely to protect the nuclear agenda from being closed down.

What follows is an attempt to create a full spectrum image of what has happened historically within the US and to a lesser extent elsewhere, in an attempt to help organize the kind of mindset that anyone concerned about the nuclear era should be aware of.

To start with, the most important part of the equation that must be understood about the issue is just how little we truly know at present time about the nature of the universe and the role radiation has played in the long term. Few of us would dare think that we could survive in the kind of radioactive soup that existed during the first billion years or so it took for background radiation levels to drop down low enough for any kind of advanced life to actually be able to exist as we know it today. During the century plus relationship we have had to date with radioactive elements, about every 20 years authorities were forced to change increase the safety standards that slowly evolved, and is still doing so to this day.

Probably the best example of this is the global human experiment around the use of cell phones. As anyone who has spent a brief time investigating the dangers of radiation can attest, the latency times from the onset of original exposures can be anywher from 10-35 years. With the recent warnings about brain cancers emerging after only 20 years of public use, a number of countries like Germany and Israel should be a cautionary note on what could be around the corner.

Thus, here is a brief summary of the radioactive world we have been drawn into.

consider the prop 1 map...

The initial development of radioactive materials for human use is rather new and was limited in use throughout the first half of the 20th century. However, this would change as a result of the cold war, but not just from nuclear weapons. Extensive awareness of radioactive sourcespoints has yet to be honestly presented to the public and how exposure levels vary. Nuclear proponents would like to claim that the general background level of radiation has dropped dramatically since the days when the country tested nuclear weapons atmospherically. However, what they might not want to share is a more detailed explanation of the current inventory of radiation and where it its coming from.

A wonderful example of just one of the major areas never mentioned to the public. Some 30 years ago a scientist took note of the fact that Americans were being exposed to large amounts of polonium-210 from the commercial cigarette industry. Just any attempt to extract minerals or fossile fuels has unleashed subsurface radiation that had previously been held within rocks, American technologists discovered the idea of phosphate fertilizers. As fertilizers costs continue to mount within the agricultural community the state of Illinois recently started allowing phosphates to be used that had dramatically higher levels of radiation. With cigarettes, as discussed in 1980 in the country's leading health journal, the cigarette plant appeared to have an major appetite for Polunium 210, drawing it from the fertilizer and into its leaves, to be unleashed into the lungs and as second

 

Most of America has never fully confronted the the full scale impacts of the nuclear era simply because they have been purposely kept from the public as a matter of national security, or more to the point, as a matter of national disgrace and shame. Attempts to document the scale of the nuclear nightmare and its impacts can be found here.

The Faustian bargain that appears to be such a great deal for civilization has created a vast dilema that no culture could ever claim to attain: immortality and perfection. As a result of decisions most of humanity never had a chance to participate in, all humanity has been trapped protecting life and the environment from further exposure to wastes that will remain deadly for eons. now exist that could do irrerepairable harm to all life if we fail to deal with the techonological challenges now before us. In essence the entire nuclear era could end up failing, making the entire experiment in nuclear fission a complete devastating waste.

The zealotry of the cold war and its highest endeavor to construct and build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons has left a legacy that will be with earth for millenia to come. At the end of the recently completed Nuclear Proliferation conference hosted by the United Nations in May of 2010, the 189 nations in attendance pushed for a timeline to end the development of all nuclear weapons worldwide. The five nuclear powers including the U.S. fought to stop this campaign and suceeded.

When Obam took office he made public the idea of ending the use of nuclear weapons. For that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year later, he was calling for giving away billions of dollars for new nuclear power and proposed spending at least $180 billion to renovate the country's nuclear weapons infrastructure just days before the conference began. People around the world have spent decades working to end the development of nuclear weapons only to watch as America and its media used the Gulf oil spill to hide from the dramatic global debate with thousands of atomic survivors who came to the United Nations to speak out were all but ignorred.

Yet, the wastes from the old Department of Energy weapons operation will cost taxpayers between $270-330 billion to contain or cleanup. The republicans making the nuclear issue their top priority are demanding far more public money be spent.

All the major technological claims made over 50 years ago have failed, and there is serious concerns that a new generation of weapons and power will continue to have many of the same problems, but would be dramatically increased if large numbers of reactors were to be built in poorer areas of the world. With the world facing a very unstable future the very last thing people need is more money spent on more nuclear development of any kind.

From the above assumption a clear definition could be stated that literally all the byproducts of nuclear fission represents a direct threat to all life The term radioactive waste doesn't properly describe the knd of terminology or realities that have been forced upon all humanity by these materials introduction into the world.

The drive to develop of these long lived radioactive materials represents a direct threat to the biosphere for millions of years to come because they have the capacity to destroy the very building blocks of all advance life forms on this planet. Any place that these deadly long lived materials exist if lost track of could endanger whole regions simply because of how hard it is for these materials be detected, especially if substantial parts of the planet are forced to reduce their economic activities due forced beyond the control of societies as we know them today.

In 1984 Forbes Magazine called the nuclear electric experiment the largest financial failure in U.S. History. We have witnessed events far bigger in the last decade with Enron, Katrina, 911 and 2008. Yet, our culture and much of the world could very well be on the precipice of another dark age like Europe experienced over a thousand years ago. We came a hair from that happening during the last great depression during the 1930's. Serious economic downturns anywhere nuclear development has taken place could lead tragic contamination or accident potentials that could as Chernobyl or 911 demonstrated could spread far and wide.

It could very well become the end of any advanced biological life on this planet for millions of years. From the Chernobyl to BP disaster, humanity has always been shocked into confronting manmade disasters that were never supposed to happen but did. However, it is absolutely critical for lay people who don't normally think about such disasters to start becoming aware of even larger scale events. This is not an exercise in scare tactics, cynicism or hystreonics, but a precautionary vision of how cultural crisis' like the the BP oil spill demonstrates the blowback when human technologies fail.

Accidents in the past have been individual events. However, as the collapse of the Soviet empire demonstrated, the chances on far worse scenarios could take place when societies are no longer able to maintain complex systems due to more pressing priorities.

When Bill Joy, the cofounder of one of the most powerful computer companies (Sun Microsystems) wrote his "Why the future doesn't need us" article he spoke of the human community's failure to reverse the nuclear weapons race, but went far beyond that in discussing our failure to regulate economic and technological exploitation. Scientists have gone on to explore the historic collapses of cultures, along with modern ones like the end of the Soviet Union. With the 2008 financial collapse more people than ever can now see beyond the machismo of human arrogance that it might never happen to us or the fact that the country is clearly in decline. In 2000 at the peak of the dot.com bubble public statements could be heard from the media that society was well on the way to an economic golden age lasting for thousands of years. A decade later this country is facing depression era jobless levels and devastating cutbacks in many parts of the economy that have yet to recover.

Today the nuclear industries of the world are clamoring for immense public monies to relaunch a massive expansion of nuclear energy. The claims that nuclear could solve the climate crisis went out worldwide with claims that the former US administration just days before the dramatic 2008 economic collapse that America would help finance the construction of new reactors around the world. Yet, the major nuclear powers in the world have yet to cleanup or dare even talk about the costs of the past and the massive mistakes made much of which has to do with radioactive wastes and what to do with them.

 

 

. The forces in play that are wreaking financial havoc on society as we know it have yet to play out. Some question the capacity of the current society to evalute the core crisis and get a concensus on what direction the country should go in. The best example of this is the battle of energy legislation that was meant to deal with the climate crisis introduced by democrats during President Obama's first two years in office. The private companies that have long gotten their way have little interest in the kind of solutions environmentalists want. Because there wasn't an attempt to have a public debate about just what our energy future might be, meant that the growing differences between the two opposing visions left democrats scrambling to compromise in ways that now threatens to leave behind the original concerns of the issue.

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In 1992 the world was warned that we only had a few decades left to make dramatic changes in dealing with growing propulation levels and the pressures on the world's limited resources. The nuclear fission industry has stepped forward making the claim that it represents the best solution to resolve the coming end of oil and coal as exponential use of these resources now threaten the current global economic model. And as the BP accident so clearly points out, the wealthiest industrial sector in the world wasn't ready or prepared to deal with the unexpected. The damages unleashed by the spill will play out in the Gulf and the waters of the planet for decades to come, but will we in the name of modernity let another industry with an even more deadly payload be given unlimited access to large quantities of money to build reactors around the world that could do far more damages than the oil spill!

In 1992 During the International conference in Rio concerning the envrionment, most of the world's Nobel laureates signed a petition warning the western world that it had 20 years to deal with the growing problems of fossile fuel misuse and over population pressures on non-renewable resources. The 2005 and 2008 oil crisis where prices rose to threaten much of working America brought out the far greater concerns about depletion issues and role of oil and our dependence on the growing hostility towards extractive industries worldwide. Europe took the 1992 conference warnings seriously starting a process to reduce its dependence on fossile fuels. That struggle has resulted in many cities large and small shifting strategies away from the global private car culture. Will we be able to design communities that are not trapped into transportation systems that clearly represents a luxury the planet will soon be unable to sustain as billions of Asians attempt to duplicate the west's lifestyles that will continue to put dramatic new pressures on oil supplies and environmental fallout that made the smog era of 1960's in the U.S. look mild. With the acknowledgement that the country's growing health care costs will bankrupt society within decades if left on its present path, attempts to solve that crisis were initiated but once again, left up to private companies that have no incentive to reduce real costs. Thus with the major sectors of this society being hit over and over again with warning signs, the private response has been to push on with the same agenda of lessening oversight but not presenting rationales on how said industries would reign in the greed and power that eminates from the top. When we finally see billionaires begging for a bowl of soup will we finally consider the current mass insatiable greed

 

It is not easy for anyone to come to terms with their own mortality, so imagine how hard it is for a culture like the USA or any other culture to conceive of such a thing as cultural collapse. Whether or not parts of America could end up looking like the worst back streets of Calcutta or many other 3rd world ghettos has clearly not happened and hopefully won't. However, the concerns about such popular topics like the Mayan prophecy of the world ending in 2012 have been ciruclating for several years and gotten substantial airplay due to the growing number of major global disasters. Imagine China being completely ensnared in US economic existance in ways that were not even imagined a decade ago. Then imagine as we all must that the world is now interlinked and no part of the modern world has the ability to isolate itself from major economic crisis anywhere in the world.

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Most of humanity doesn't begin to have the capacity to understand the nature of what the nuclear era has unleashed upon the planet. The recent media images of the massive oil spill in the Gulf region shows the visible damages from what was a valuable commidity that is now killing palagic and coastal life of all kinds. Yet, because we cannot see, smell or sense radiation a similar deadly product of nuclear fission is being promoted as the way of the future.

 

 

We are all caught up in one of the largest propaganda operations the world has ever known. The machine responsible for doing this the post cold war scientific industrial complex has used the tools of government, corporations and the media to shape our perceptions about these deadly materials and what they are. Just as an Eskimo will have several dozen words defining various kinds of snow, our technological strategy to label the byproducts fission from what happens when an unstable element breaks down has been used simplify an event that happens that we can neither see, smell or nor most of us even comprehend. What is it that truly differentiates between radioactive materials that our society defines as wastes and those that are not? This presentation is an attempt to redefine the way you see this issue and why it is urgent that you do so.

 

Find out Radioactive Wastes

History

The history of radiation and its radioactive byproducts (waste) is essentially a modern phenomena. Traditional people in North America and elsewhere had an awareness of radiation and its dangers, but not until the 20th century was there any real interaction with radiation beyond naturally occuring forms.

The planet spent at least 2 billion years reducing the levels of radiation to the point where more complex life could begin to exist. Today, scientists believe that the inner core or mantel of the planet is highly radioactive. The planet's surface is also mixed with low levels of radon and other naturally ocurring elements, but in most areas of the world, as long as the underlying soils or rocks weren't heavily disturbed represented moderate to little dangers. The Sun's light is also a major source of radiation which our atmosphere tradionally protects from. The last commonly known source of radiation in the environment is called the background level, which represents one of the most manipulated aspects of radiation which has been defined as all the radiation currently active in any particular area. This background level now includes all of the manmade radiation that has been released into the environment by our modern culture. It includes a massive quantity of all the minerals we have extracted. Whether it be oil, coal or fertilizers, these minerals when burned or spread across the soils for agricultural purposes have spread ever larger concentrations of radiation that was once trapped underground into the environment.

The real history of radioactive materials has yet to be truly written. From the earliest contamination from radium that was used for watch dials to the latest use sterilizing food, or bombarding plastics there are now many different primary sources of contamination taking place. Americans have been told that the use of radiation is under control and that any material that representing a danger to human health has been carefully monitored, ending up in special dumping areas that take precautions to protect us and the environment. However, these claims is far from reality.

During the cold war there were literally thousands of places large and small across the U.S. that were involved in handling radioactive materials. These government and private operations are slowly coming to light as the process of investigation and cleanup of the cold war nightmare slowly take shape. Estimates range as high as 400,000 American workers being contaminated while working with radiation. This number excludes the half million men who were purposely exposed closeup to nuclear weapons tests as well as the rest of the American public between 1948 and 1963. Every place radiation was handled became contaminated. These industrial operations in turn dumped both radioactive materials as well as heavy chemicals onsite or at nearby dumps resulting in further contamination. These places have been labeled by current laws as only having low-levels of contamination. Yet, the levels of contamination are capable of killing or sickening humans and in many cases will remain deadly for millenia to come.

The country is full of ignorance about the dangers of radiation and how it was abused in the past. From the routine but highly inappropriate x-raying of people's feet at shoe stores, the women who painted radium on watches are traditionally mentioned. But there are far more dangerous uses today that are being completely ignored. Fortunately, one of the most prominent problems the use of radioactive fertilizers on tobacco is now starting to recede as one of the most deadly health problems of the 20th century. However, the country has yet to confront the impacts of burning coal and oil products that also release radiation into the environment. Additionally, the capacity to dig down into the soils, disturbing radon gases, making homes or any building a potential source of radiation continues to be a problem as well.

If we follow the evolution of the use of radiation, it would start with the investigations of pitchblend that killed Madam Curie, the radium production contamination in Pennsylvania then explode across the country at hundreds if not thousands of locations with the advent of the nuclear bomb.

Only the very largest facilities attempted to deal with the contamination in an organized fashion. The big picture would start at the source where uranium ore was mined, the facilities that enriched the uranium for various military or scientific investigation would spread the contamination.

After the introduction of the Atoms for Peace program in 1954, a whole new wave of contamination began to spread as the medical and commercial uses started to expand. Byproducts of the weapons project included the use of flouride, and over time the growing push to use ever more quantities of radioactive materials in some kind of commercial venture. Many of these ventures like the overuse of x-rays has had many cyclic patterns of overuse if not outright abuse leading to a pattern of growing regulatory oversight. For example, during the highly public radiation concerns caused by the Three Mile Island accident the entire field of x-ray use came under scrutiny and was reformed to protect medical personel who were routinely being over-exposed. Hospitals would routinely toss radioactive materials into an onsight incinerator releasing the radiation into the air or just dump the materials into the commercial garbage.

Uranium ore wastes

The act of uranium mining is the very first step in what is called the nuclear fuel cycle. It is also the place where the very largest quantities of radioactive wastes by volume are produced. The first major uranium mining took place in Canada which was used to produce the first nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan. (see waste types for more details on uranium ore and tailings wastes)

The cold war would launch an expanded search across the western U.S for uranium and its extraction. From the days when Americans watched I love Lucy, they heard about the new uranium gold rush where anyone with a geiger counter could take advantage the 1872 Mining Act to strike it rich. Yes, a few people did strike it rich, but mostly we are talking companies that had the financial or government backing to do so. The only buyer of uranium was the secretive Atomic Energy Commission (today known as the Department of Energy). The first (romaticized) step of finding the uranium ore with a pick and a geiger counter hardly details what would happen in terms of actually digging the original hard rock, underground mines using the exact same methods used to dig for any other underground mineral. Since much of the uranium found was on Tribal lands of Navajo and other communities the men who were offered the jobs to extract the uranium ore were never protected. Nor were there communities that would soon be home to millions of tons of uranium tailings wastes that were left to blow around in vast piles.

.Nuclear proponents openly lied to the public about their agenda and its impacts. Whether it was the military industrial complex's nuclear weapons race and how they framed the cold war to the outrageous claims of a nuclear era that would outstrip the industrial era in technological achievements, Americans were spoon fed promises that had nothing to do with reality.

From nuclear cars, planes, travel to other worlds, or electricity too cheap to meter one of the early PR claims would be where a science guy would hold out single uranium pellet and then claim that it contained more power than 120 gallons of oil or a ton of coal. They never once told the public that there was a huge industrial process that would create massive quanties of long lived radioactive wastes that were being left behind on tribal lands that still haven't been cleaned up 60 years later.

In one case the entire city in Colorado had its streets, houses, schools and commercial buildings all made out of the radioactive tailings debris. Later, it would cost well over $1 billion to remove the tailings. Today, the original tailings pile site was converted into a working class neighborhood.

The EPA has an inventory over 15,000 uranium mining operations across the west. In a 2007 hearings Senator Henry Waxman stated that the attempt to clean up abandoned mines located on Navaho lands since plans were put in place in the 1970's to do so had failed completely. Navajo (Dine) people had used the tailings to build homes, and were drinking water from wells that were and still are contaminated. The government recently okayed new uranium mining to take place that would further contaminate their wells.

The process of uranium extraction whether it will be used to make a nuclear bomb, power a commercial power plant or produce exotic isotopes for medical purposes like x-rays all begin the same way. From the first step of uranium mining where workers around the world, primarily indigenous people.

In the mid 1970's uranium from other countries began to flood the global market as commercial nuclear power began to expand. There are scandalous stories from Africa, Eastern Europe, Australia, Canada and Kahzahkstan continue to destroy people's lives and the environment. Uranium mining worldwide represents one of the largest examples of environmental racism in the world. From the use of South African slaves to mine uranium to stories yet to break the cold ward censorship, the full impacts from uranium mining have yet to be codified.

Yet, as mentioned there are radioactive wastes that are produced across the rest of the massive fuel cycle, that as the process continues to concentrate the purity of the uranium, it also produces ever more deadly byproducts. Not to mention are there unusable radioactive byproducts, many other contaminants also come into play. During the early decades of enrichment the process of gasseous diffusion, where the largest industrial operations ever undertaken took place at massive mile long facilities in 3 locations, would use vast quantities of water that would then be contaminated, as well as being the single largest user of electricity in the country (over 1% of the entire electricity in the country was used just at these 3 facilities).

Military wastes

The military control over the uranium enrichment process or the nuclear fuel cycle would create the most contaminated places on the planet that will stay that way for millions of years. The largest most contaminated region is the 1,300 square mile Nuclear Testing Site (NTS) in Nevada where hundreds of nuclear weappons were tested above and below ground. The next most contaminated area is the 500 square mile Hanford Reservation in Washington (usually considered the most contaminated place in North America) It does containt the most deadly wastes the military has created, but there are active attempts to deal with these, while there is absolutely no way to clean up the NTS contamination. Until recently, the contamination generated by the production of nuclear weapons represented the largest part of this country's contaminants.

In the 1970's as part of their innovative recycling of nuclear contaminants. The military started exploring the use of depleted uranium (DU) as a form of battleground ammunition that was used to pierce heavily armed targets. The development of as ammunition created a whole new industrial complex that spread conamination to workers, the environment and then to military battlegrounds. To date, just as the US military claimed that Agent Orange had no effect on the hundreds' of thousands of American military personel exposed to it, not to mention the environmental damages it created in Vietnam, there is complete official denial that it endangers the environment where it is deployed. Today, there is global outrage in its use as well as an epidemic of birth defects being covered outside of the U.S. media that continues a blanket military driven censorship of what has happened in Iraq and other places it has been used.

One of the most controversial misuses of radioactive materials took place primarily on the west coast during the atmospheric tests in the pacific ocean. A large number of older naval vessels were deployed within very short distances of the nuclear blasts and then evaluated for damages. Of the vessels not sunk, they were hauled back to San Francisco, had their exteriors sandblasted and then were sunk offshore north of the city near the Farallon Islands along with over 44,000 containers of wastes. Attempts to remove the badly erroded barrels in the early 1980's was blocked. The U.S. dumped wastes off the Atlantic coast as well. Around the world the routine dumping of nuclear wastes has taken place but was finally banned in 1987. Countries including France, the UK and Russia continue to dump deadly wastes into the oceans. Greenpeace Europe became famous for its protests of ocean dumping. Of greatest concern today are attempts to ascertain the scope of dumping done by the Soviet Union both off shore and on.

Commerical nuclear wastes

But with the advent of commercial nuclear power reactors this sector has slowly overtaken the military in both the volume and quantity of the most deadly materials.

As an example of just how skewed this country's priorities are when it comes to any kind of precautionary principle around the dangers of radiation, the country set up a series of rules of how to classify nuclear wastes in the early 1980's.

WORKING DRAFT STOPPING POINT

After the offering to take bake the most deadly wastes (spent nuclear fuel rods)

For a more detailed investigation of immense impacts of uranium mining please go here.

 

Go here for more on Rad waste History

Waste Types

The divide and conquer strategy of the nuclear industry wants the public not to think of the full spectrum of what they are doing when using fissionable materials. Probably a far better way to look at the process can be handed down from Walt Disney and his memorable movie masterpiece Fantasia where Mickey Mouse steals his master's wand and creates a monsterous mass of mindless brooms all doing his wishes, or even the parable of Pandora's Box. The U.S. government acknowledges that there are at least 600 types of radioactively unstable isotopes that can last from a few seconds to millions of years.

Whether these radioactive isotopes have been isolated for manmade use, or have been mixed with chemicals, biological wastes, heavy metals or contaminated (mixed) with other radioactive isotopes or radioactive garbage, they are all toxic to the biosphere. Our nuclear institutions have decided almost exclusively on the basis of economic interest to organize radiation products into a large array of sub-topics or waste types based on who produced them, how much there is and how long lasting they are.

From Naturally Occuring Radioactive Materials (NORM), to the deadly commerical nuclear spent fuel that contains plutonium and many other long lived wastes, there is a complex mix that exists and that are being handled by thousands of commercially private or institutionally licensed users.

The handling of wastes has been broken down in dramatically different ways depending on which country your are speaking of. For example, in post Soviet Russia as well as a few other countries, nuclear materials whether they were originally produced for nuclear weapons purposes have not been differentiated from commercial uses unlike the U.S. which did so based on poltical expediency.

In some European countries the concept of a Precautionary Priniciple has slowly replaced the American/UK ALARA (As Low as reasonably achievable) strategy for dealing with radioactive materials. Waste standards have been set in other countries that are substantially superior to the American standards, especially with how waste streams are monitored. In America, even plutonium can end up being dumped in shallow land dumps with few protective barriers to keep the wastes getting into the larger environment. To date, every single nuclear waste dump except one has started leaking and had to be cleaned up. As part of a plan to dramatically increase the country's use of radioactive materials in the 1980's congress ordered states to set up 13 compacts to start taking what the government defined as low-level wastes by 1993. Not single one of these facilities were ever opened due to local opposition. Then it forced the state of Nevada to become the home of this countries most deadly wastes called spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors. In 2009 that planned failed after over 20 years of opposition by Nevada citizens. Nuclear proponents have long claimed that opposition to nuclear dumps is purely hysterical. However, organized opponents no better. The details point to an industry that has used its political and economic power to create a fake regulatory front that it controls. Never has there been an opponent of the industry allowed to be on a single regulatory authority that governs the nuclear industry. A few whistleblowers have broken from this lock step nuclear culture to divulge its ugly agendas of the past that the government and the corporate media fail to ever speak of with the public. Imagine a former convicted killer being allowed to run around the country with glowing introductions! Would you trust a convicted killer to be honest? The nuclear agenda was and still is about create weapons of mass destruction and America is the only country in the world to ever have used them on humans or routinely threatens to use them against other countries.

Within the USA the first and largest source of radioactive waste contamination is created during the mineral extraction for uranium mining, coal, oil, gas or for fertilizers. Over 95 percent of radioactive materials all come from these extractive processes and they are not even mentioned when speaking of radioactive wastes by nuclear authorities.

For example, NORM wastes haven't even had safety standards set within the U.S. and thus its a breeze for a large international uranium mining company to get a license to mine within the U.S. because the NRC passes the buck onto the EPA when it comes to safety, and the EPA hasn't set any standards for NORM wastes whatsoever. Uranium extraction within the USA today is all but dead, having collapsed at the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980's. Much of the wastes from uranium mining called uranium tailings still exists today and have yet to be cleaned up. One estimate places the cleanup costs of these long lived tailings that still retain up to 85% of their original radiation was set at $40 billion to taxpayers. The EPA has a database of over 15,000 uranium mining operations from small to very large operations mostly located in the west. One of the largest most deadly cleanup operations is right along side the Colorado River, which is the water supply for much of southwesterners. The Moab Utah uranium tailings site contains millions of cubic meters of wastes that are now being moved to another less dangerous location than on the banks of the river.

After NORM wastes, the USA divides its wastes up into military and non-military wastes. Even though the process of creating ever more concentrated forms of uranium during the industrial process of the nuclear fuel cycle, creates all kinds of byproducts, from thermal polutions, chemical contaminants, mixed wastes and then other materials the industry claims are usable materials.

Originally the fuel cycle or process of uranium enrichment was merged into a single process, it has been isolated into the two streams for the sole purpose of propaganda. This started with the Atoms for Peace Plan in 1954 (codified into law as the 1954 Atomic Energy Act) as a growing number of civilians led by former nuclear weapons scientists called for the end of nuclear weapons development. Thus, the government initiated a massive public relations spin claiming that nuclear fission might be used for non-military purposes. Fantastic claims of nuclear powered cars, airplanes, and electricity too cheap to meter were promoted across the media spectrum claiming the world was entering a new post industrial nuclear age. For more on the nuclear weapons infrastructure or the Department of Energy as it is called today, please go here.

Through out the fuel cycle process that was overseen by the secret Atomic Energy Commission, large quantities of wastes were being produced. The newly formed division of wastes into commercial and military would mean that during the early part of the nuclear era nearly all of the wastes produced were being handled in secret as they were military wastes.

But with the advent of commercial nuclear reactors this would change with the creation of nuclear fuel rods that over time would become the most deadly material known.

With the maturation of the nuclear power industry a series of waste types evolved that created the first period of how wastes were handled, which is once again changing dramatically behind corporated doors again today.

From the 1980's up until the 2000 Commercial wastes were broken down into Classes:

A,B,C, Great than C and then spent nuclear fuel.

All wastes except spent fuel were categorized as low-level wastes, even Greater than C wastes contained deadly materials that could last for millions of years.

As ever more complex uses of radiation have come out like the irradiation of food to sterilize pathogens, so have they created new streams of radioactive wastes. One of the most complex of these being designated as Mixed Wastes where all kinds of chemicals, biological wastes (from humans to animal experimentation) to plastics and heavy metals being combined.

As a result of public opposition to the nuclear agenda, the government and its DOE science teams were forced to shift its strategy for dealing with all of these wastes. These shifts creating an ever greater hatred of anything environmental that can be found today within agencies that breed disdain for public input and have done everything in their power to remove obstacles, while on the surface making claims otherwise.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would soon attempt to deregulate whole waste stream calling them Below Regulatory Concern. As storage capacities at licensed dumps started to run short the industry was forced to pack wastes from spent fuel to the lowest grades into tighter configurations.

For decades the nuclear community claimed that it could vitrify the most deadly liquid military wastes into glass that would allow for its stable storage. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent building several vitrification facilities located in South Carolina and Washington. The Washington facility was forced to stop for years due to design flaws and massive cost overruns. In the meantime the DOE and commercial contractors have come up with a new alternative that is far cheaper than vitrification called THOR, that uses very high temperatures to incinerate liquid and biological wastes, converting the wastes into compact metalic blocks.

 

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Impacts

The Impacts from the use of radiation and byproducts have not been properly weighed by our society. The core question that has been refused to be publicly addressed is the difference between the modern concept known as the Precautionary Principle. vs nuclear industry's ALARA, which is an acronym for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. According to Roselle Bertell's research, the nuclear industry has legal fine print that always allows economic tradeoffs to be factored in when dealing with any radioactive contamination.

However, the worst impact is the broad social acceptance of radiation in the environment as some kind of random chance factor that has been portrayed as far less dangerous than say cigarette smoking, or death from car accidents.

If you fully read the above redefinition of what could be construed to be radioactive wastes, then you now know that we are talking about a broad spectrum of modern activities that come from naturally ocurring sources as well medical, energy and weapons sources. Recent media coverage has suggested that radiation exposures have gone up mostly due to dramatic increases in the use of medical diagnostics. Yet, the media dares not evaluate the dramatic combination of all radiation in the environment and how it impacts different segments of society in different ways.

One of the best examples of this issue is around the dramatic increase in the use of cell phones around the world over the last 15 years. In recent years country's that are starting to take the precautionary principle seriously like Germany have issued national warnings about overuse of cell phones and urge the public to not use wireless computer communications devices due to growing indications that radiation impacts are just starting to cause health problems from early heavy users.

In recent years, we are told that coal power plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants. Sadly, these kind of claims fail to take factor in the fuel cycle where most releases ocurr, unless with larger accidents. Attempting to make false tradeoffs about radiation sources are all coming from industry proponents, just as we have seen the same kind of tactics with climate change opponents. Comparing the deaths of people from radiation related deaths at nuclear reactors with the deaths from car accidents or even worker deaths from coal or other power sources is a false argument.

 

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Accidents

Usually when the general public talks about nuclear related accidents its done in terms of accidents like the meltdowns Three Mile Island or with the worst industrial accident in history at Chernobyl.

I this case though, we are talking about accidents regarding the mishandling of radioactive wastes. To be completely ethical all accidents regardless of whether they are caused at the reactor or elswhere are about radioactive accidents.

But to go along with the divide and conquer strategy of the nuclear elite, we will focus on waste accidents as they organize the issue.

In what was the largest release of environmental release of radiation as a result of an accident, we go back to 1979 when a massive tailing pond of uranium located on Navajo lands broke contaminating the Rio Puerco River in New Mexico.

But again, this accident was not intended to occur, thus the label. In a far greater accident, we point to the intentional burial of far greater amounts of deadly wastes in the state of Washington at the 500 plus square mile Hanford Reservation, the 2nd most deadly place on the earth next to a similarly contaminated place in Chelyabinsk Russia.

Here lies the wastes that have leaked out of manmade tanks and burial pits to contaminate the nearby Columbia River. These tanks and pits were once claimed to be man kinds most scientifically perfect barriers against the deadly liquid and metalic wastes that were deposited there starting in the 1950's. Over a hundred massive tanks that were to have protected the environment forever from the deadly liquid wastes would leak into the environment in less than 20 years.

Today, the Department of Energy estimates that it will costs between $270-300 billion to clean up the nuclear legacy left behind by our first nuclear renaissance. Any reason why opponents might not trust the scientific claims being made today about the safety of protecting the deadly wastes from the public and environment when they don't even have a way to clean up their past mess?

In terms of commercial levels of radioactive wastes. The biggest accidents were the to be found at the low level waste dumps that were built. Every dump ever built ended up leaking into the environment and then had to be cleaned up. The very worst were the secret dumping into the oceans off that took place around the world.

On the west coast, all of the Naval vessels that were used as nuclear targets during the pacific weapons testing era were taken to a dry dock in San Francisco, and then sand blasted, making part of the San Francisco Bay one of the most radioactively contaminated areas in the country. Then over 44,000 barrels of the waste as well as entire ships (one air craft carrier) were dumped offshore. A similar less documented dump took place in the Atlantic.

The cleanup of the SF Hunters' Point dry dock area has been a major environmental justice issue with the poor black community now living there that has long been hidden by the national media for well over a decade as attempts to properly clean up the disaster has locked up via military strategies...

Today, there can be no doubt that the entire nuclear fission agenda was a dreadful accident that should never have happened. There are now over 400 nuclear power reactors across the globe all of them producing radioactive wastes that if released would far surpass the damages done during the era of atmospheric testing. Over 90% of all the world's nuclear activities took place in either Russia or the USA. As mentioned, the DOE acknowledges that it will cost between $270-330 billion over the next fifty years to deal with. By deal with I mean more and restore the most deadly of these wastes so that they don't continue to contaminate whole regions of this country. Nevada for example was made a national sacrafice zone with over 1,000 square miles of underground weapons testing have permenantly contaminated those lands with radiation. Those lands were and still in dispute by the original Shoshone people who claim them, never having given the federal government the persmission to use as it did. Nearby was to have been the $100 billion spent fuel Yucca Mountain repository (YMP) that also was on Shoshone lands. The Shoshone people from the outset of YMP were opposed to its creation but were completely ignored. In fact attempts to pass legislation forcing the Shoshone to take money for the lands was put in place by the current Nevada political leadership.

 

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Politics

This section begins with a brief overview of the primary paradigm that governs the general public's perception of just not radioactive waste but the entire nuclear fission experiment. Only on very rare occassions like the recent Gulf Oil spill does the public appear to wake up to literally any issue like nuclear. There is a historic reason for this with nuclear that has been in place since the arrival of the nuclear era. Propaganda. The U.S. military's propaganda apparatus that promoted World War II also took control of how to promote their decision of expanding nuclear development even though some of the leading scientists involved in the Manhattan called for its closure after the war.

It would be the military and the nation's media that would concoct and promote the cold war and nuclear expansion even though some of this country's brighest minds felt the idea was a terrible mistake. Yet those who dared challenge the lockstep agenda would be mercilously attacked, in many cases having their lives destroyed by the vicious mood driven by right wing nuts who saw an open an exploited fear tactics that had long been anchored decades old class warfare between organized labor and the wealthiest that had lost control of the country during Roosevelt's New Deal era.

Most of Europe as well as the USA was a pitched political battle that FDR had championed, the modern world was recovering from the excesses of unbridled capital. It would be the terror tactics of the right that would foment the tragic global war that would follow, one that could have been dealt with far differently had the country not lost its head. There was far more behind Churchill's infamous Iron Curtain speech in 1946 that launched the Cold War. It would be Mahatma Ghandi's "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" comment that best summed up the tragedy of a world driven by fear rather then diplomacy and mediation. A country that had little international skills would be drawn into the British imperial mindset that to this day has been more about that country's historic economic elite than those who envisioned the promotion of the United Nations.

It would be this country's corporate media that had long been promoting the interests of republicans that would see the stategic tactic of using the "Your either with us or against us" strategy that would be used throughout the cold war era, implying that an alternative to a state of war was considered to be a traitorus act. It would be a corporate media strategy not to mention the very same tactics leading up to World War I (JP Morgan's Patriot Day Parade) that was actully funded to attack the working people's growing concern about involvement in Europe's royalist elite vs. working people's battles that were being played out with the same kind of divide and conquer strategies that would follow WWII. Following the war it would be a war weary populace that would dragged into the new nuclear warfare era by the same national media that hated FDR's New Deal. The same national network led by the British-US investor giant, JP Morgan that had set up General Electric, that in turn financed the formation of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), along with the Morgan protege Henry Luce who headed the Time media empire. Time led the campaign to oust FDR and the democrats for nearly 20 years.

To this day, nationalist tactics have been used to rationalize the secretive, undemocratic strategies of the nuclear security state we are forced to be part of today.

America's politicians have made a deadly mistake in supporting a new generation of nuclear weapons and commerical power. President Obama recently told the public that his Department of Energy wants him to spend $180 billion to design a new generation of nuclear weapons.There is no doubt that he made this offer in at attempt to gain republican support for his struggling energy plan that originally didn't include any support for nucleara power development. Yet, republicans and the nuclear industry have called for the country to spend upwards of a trillion dollars to shift the country away from fossile fuel production towards nuclear energy.

This is a result of a massive lobbying campaign starting with the election of W. Bush in 2000, the industry has spent over $600 million lobbying politicians and promoting nuclear in the media.

This is an industry that couldn't have been more disgraced. In February 1984, the prominent Forbes Magazine called the nuclear power experiment the greatest managerial failure in this country's history. A year later the accident at Chernobyl all but ended what once had been plans to build upwards of 1000 large nuclear power plants across the United States. At one point California's massive Pacific Gas & Electric Company (one the largest privately run electric utility country) boasted plans of building over 60 reactors in its service territory alone. Today they only have two operating reactors as a result of massive public opposition due to the state being riddled with deadly seismic faults that could trigger meltdowns.

The nuclear elite has always been at the forefront of poltical activity in the USA. With the pasage of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, it had a secret clause claiming that commerical nuclear power was to be developed as an act of national security. The secretive military controlled nuclear agenda of the US government, led by the Department of Energy, formerly called the Atomic Energy Commission was and still is the heart and soul of the nuclear culture. Much of this country's scientific and economic resources were diverted using the cold war rationale for the purpose of developing the massive nuclear infracture that some estimate has cost at least a trillion dollars.

Promises to the public to ignore the deadly dangers being toyed with by mostly ignorant egotists (Doctor Stranglove was modeled after the real live nuclear monster Edward Teller) who only saw an ever escalating agenda of creating larger more deadly weapons to the point the whole agenda was labeled as MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction. Where enough bombs and delivery devices were created to destroy the entire planet hundreds of times over. At the peak of the cold war essentially every major city in Europe and North America were targeted by bombs so big that a single blast would mean the end of and entire city of over a million inhabitants.

An era or secrecy where nuclear designs as well as the awesome details of accidents, human experiments and were all hidden from the general public so that the process could continue without opposition.

Only in the late 1980's as a result of over a decade of massive public opposition (which has all but disspeared from any and all media coverage) were many of the most agreggious stories released. Some still believe that there are still many secrets too horrendous to expose still being hidden. The government still retains the right to experiment on the public using national security grounds, yet claims that it no longer practices said events. Yet, today, there isn't a single radiation activists that doesn't believe this because of the massive use of depleted uranium weapons on civilian populations in Europe and the middle east where there are now epidemics of childhood leukemia.

With the nuclear issue there can be no greater dividing line between those who promote or oppose the use of nuclear fission for weapons or commerical forms of electricity.

The formation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1977 was about the growing distrust of a federal agency that both promoted as well as was supposed to regulate the nuclear agenda. No women were allowed, and those that dared to speak out would soon have their national security clearance removed, or be blacklisted like Robert Oppenheimer, the guy that coordinated the creation of the first bomb during the Manhattan project.

The regulatory bodies that oversee radiation protection standards as well as the licensing of commerical nuclear development have always been taken from the nuclear scientific priesthood. No other need apply. It is this subculture that the standards are set like ALARA that have led to a white washing of the public dangers of radiation.

The idea of creating a new European initiated Precautionary Principle rather than ALARA that has secret clauses that allow economic impacts to outweight health impacts to the general public.

Thus, when the Chernobyl fallout passed across the country in June of 1986, the American public was told that there was no need to be afraid, yet scientists on the west coast pointed to the fact that 2/3rds of the California coastal baby bird population died that year due to the fallout. People who knew better were calling for citizens not to eat any fresh produce or milk for the next month or until iodine 131 levels had dropped substantially.

Since radiation is neither visible or smells, nuclear releases can and have occurred regularly without public notification or awareness. The worst examples of these took place during the days of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. But there have been dozens of major nuclear accidents over the last 60 years where large quantities of radiation was released. Yet, there are also legal routine releases of radiation into the environment are allowed.

Does this sound absolutely alien, as if from some kind of science fiction movie? Sadly, this country still refuses to set and enforce radiation standards based on real science rather than economic forces. Standards that protect unborn babies, the weak or very old are neither enforced nor can because there is already so many allowed. Hell, we murder tens of thousands of year during routine hospital visits, dysfunctional families that kill mostly women and children, cars or for generations the miuse of alcohol or ciggarettes. Anyone who has studied the long history of radiation protection in this country will tell you its a clear tossup as to whether our massive cancer rates is truly caused by poor eating habbits or spurred on by every growing levels of carcinogins. What do you believe? In a culture that fails to protect the very weakest, most uneducated from the ever growing drive to promote food products with no real sustenance or the ever growing radiation in the environment that is just barely starting to be properly acknowledged for its long lasting dangers to our cell walls.

1980's vs. 2010

At the peak of the anti-nuclear movement over 30 years ago, opponents were helpless to watch and pro-nuclear politicians in congress passed law after law that has effected this country right up until the present. In 1982 these corporate lobbists received a shopping list of new dumps and horrible standards that left the public angry and helpless against laws that endangered us all. Imagine being able to dump small amounts of plutonium in a dump that would only be monitored for 50 years after becoming full. Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years and even the smallest spec if ingested could cause cancers. Yet this was exactly what commercial waste producers were being allowed to do. To top it off, the final responsibility for cleanup would be transferer from federal to states.

To this day, we have witnessed the growing crisis of nuclear proponents as their nuclear dump strategies failed forcing them to find every more sophisticated ways to dump or even deregulate wastes (if you hear the term downblending watch out).

One of the most insidious tactics used by the nuclear infrastructure is to hide the real waste sources from the public by outright lying about where most of the radiation is being created, claiming that most wastes produced represented were coming from medical usage rather than the military and nuclear power streams.

The failure to modernize waste handling meant that medical facilities could end up incinerating nuclear materials releasing them into the air near hospitals around the country. Much of this practice was stopped due to health concerns, but still exists today in Tennessee where the DOE operates a major incineration project. Opponents of the industry's methods pointed to the fact that rather than just dumping wastes, that a strategy called store for decay could be used. Many countries like Canada have Monitored Retrievable facilities where wastes are stored until the radiation is nearly gone, so that the garbage can then ben disposed of without danger of exposure.

On the international stage, during the 1990's even right up to the present, large quanties of nuclear wastes found their way to Africa or in the case of Russia, being dumped into the Arctic or even abandoned on the Pacific coast. One journalist who exposed the massive contamination from hundreds of abandoned nuclear submarines was hunted down and enprisoned. Other opponents killed or driven from the country. One Italian story about how the Mafia had been used to dump waste and bodies circulated not 20 years ago but in 2010!

Today, whether it was the recent scandal in India where medical wastes ended up killing or injurying unsuspecting garbage recyclers or the danger of socalled terrorists bringing dirty bombs (radioactive wastes) into the country the scandal of how we misuse radiation continue. Just two years ago the state of Tennessee was caught having deregulated wastes so that large quantities could end up in commercial landfills hit the media. In other stories not covered by the mainstream media, there are large numbers of cases where radioactive materials ended up being recycled into metal products from silverware, baby toys steel products and more.

With a nuclear industry intent on reviving itself, do you think the largest media companies that all have direct ties to the nuclear industry might want to cover the issue in a truly serious way? It smacks of the same kind of subterfuge by the rightwing that has long been the most supportive of the nuclear agenda to also claim that the media might actually be biased somehow, but how exactly is the key here? Liberal. Come on, they are biased toward their ideological corporate bottom line. OOPS!!! Can't say that here or be judged a traitor. Sadly, this kind of propanganda trap has been used for over 60 years to stop opponents of the nuclear nightmare.

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Resources

Here you can go to find other online resources about radioactive wastes.

Yes, folks this is the more than just the achilles heel of nuclear fission, its the achilles heal of all life on Earth today. Will we find a way to protect these deadly materials from the biosphere for the rest of time?

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