Voters Close Rancho Seco Plant: ‘The Nuclear Energy Quandary’

Your editorial correctly asserted the nuclear power industry must learn some lessons from the voters’ decision to turn off the Rancho Seco nuclear plant. Here’s another lesson for the list: nuclear waste.

The industry went full-bore into nuclear power production before finding a safe way to dispose of deadly radioactive wastes or decommission the plants. Furthermore, nuclear power does pollute. Each year, the average 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor produces 25 metric tons of highly radioactive wastes. All these wastes are being stored on site at each reactor.

A National Academy of Sciences study prepared for the Department of Energy states that we do not know if current technology can safely isolate those wastes from the environment. Repeated failures at the Waste Isolation Project Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., where the DOE plans to store radioactive defense wastes, indicate that safe nuclear waste disposal is a contradiction in terms.

The commercial nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is flawed because it was a politically expedient choice, the bomb testing at the nearby Nevada Test Site and the potential for earthquakes. In the nuclear industry’s best-of-all-possible worlds, it won’t even begin to accept nuclear wastes until the early part of the next century. This is nothing but a hasty and ill-advised remedy to a dangerous, deadly problem.

MARY O’ DRISCOLL

National Press Coordinator

Safe Energy Communication Council

Washington, D.C.