Nuclear-waste disposal

In his important article (“A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004), Matthew Wald proposes waiting until we can develop a waste package that would keep radionuclides out of the environment for a few thousand years. Well, we don’t have to wait; we already have that technology. If we were to encase the spent fuel in copper and place it in a repository below the water table (a reducing environment), we could be assured that neither the waste package nor the spent fuel itself would react with water and release radionuclides. Sweden is planning to do just this. The problem with Yucca Mountain is that it’s dry—an oxidizing environment. Furthermore, Wald advocates a single centralized facility to store waste in the interim. But he does not consider the cost of transporting the spent fuel to this facility or the security risks that transportation entails. It is arguably safer, and cheaper, to keep the spent fuel at reactor sites in dry casks than on the nation’s highways, subject to sabotage.

Allison Macfarlane
MIT Security Studies Program
Cambridge, MA