The Nuclear Power Debate
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BY DOUGLAS G. BROOKINS Doug Brookins is Professor of Geology at the University of New Mexico. He has long been a leading figure in the Materials Research Society's organization of topical symposia on the subject of radioactive-waste disposal. In 1982 he was Chairman of the Sixth International Symposium on the Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management, and he chaired the session on research relevant to salt as a radwaste geomedium at the Seventh Symposium in Boston last November. In this essay. Prof. Brookins speaks from his professional perspective to document the safety of present radwaste disposal technology, and argues that nuclear power is especially attractive when compared with the prevailing alternative —energy generated by burning coal. Recently the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a California moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants. While the reasons given were supposedly based on economic concerns and, in large part, on the lack of approved repositories for radioactive waste, the decision seems yet another example of the successful campaign of anti-nuclear advocates to thwart nuclear power development in this country. The paranoia surrounding nuclear energy is revealed strikingly in this instance, as Justices Harry A. Blackmun and John P. Stevens write that, even had the moratorium been based on fears of core meltdown or some other catastrophe, it would still have been valid. In the State of California, therefore, the development of nuclear power has been blocked still further. This is unfortunate and unwarranted. Certainly on the issue of radwaste disposal, the evidence clearly supports nuclear power development. Moreover, the unenviable environmental record of coal, the power-generation alternative, compares quite unfavorably. In this regard, I find it interesting that, while much is made of the fact there have been some 90 or so nuclear power plant cancellations in recent years, one rarely hears of the similar cancellations of coal-fired plants in the same period. The answer to these mass cancellations lies largely with the fact that estimates made in the early 1970s of a seven percent to nine percent annual increase over a 20-year span in electric energy consumption have proved to be wrong. Due to a great many reasons, electrical consumption slumped to around a one percent rate of growth in the early 1980s, and is now projected to grow no more than about three percent a year for the next several years.
Radioactive Storage in Rocks There seems to be a public perception that radioactive substances are so destructive they can't be stored in rocks. Nature has been doing it for billions of years. Perhaps the best example is the Oklo Natural Reactor in Gabon which, some two billion years ago, acted as a nuclear reactor and, subsequently, a radioactive waste repository. There, copious amounts of fission products—uranium, transuranics, and actinide daughter elements—either remained where they were formed or migrated no more DOUGLAS BROOKINS than a few meters. All of this occurred at a depth
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