Stringent Criteria for a Highly Radioactive Waste Geologic Repository

Stringent Criteria for a Highly Radioactive Waste Geologic Repository

Prepared by Kevin Kamps (Beyond Nuclear radioactive waste specialist; Don't Waste Michigan board of directors member; Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination advisory board member)

May 26, 2020

The Earth's surface is such a volatile, fragile, and high-risk location, that our search for a deep geologic repository for permanent isolation of highly radioactive wastes is a critical imperative. (Just as critical is the need to stop the generation of highly radioactive wastes in the first place, since -- even 78 years after Enrico Fermi generated the first highly radioactive wastes during the Manhattan Project, and 63 years after the commencement of operations at the first U.S. "civilian" or commercial reactor, generating irradiated nuclear fuel -- we currently still have no safe, secure, sound, acceptable solution for their permanent disposition.) The basic but stringent criteria, however, which such a candidate geologic repository site would have to meet would include:  

(1) Legality (for example, a proposed site can't violate U.S. treaties with Native American Nations, like the Western Shoshone Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863; such treaties are the highest law of the land, equal in stature to the U.S. Constitution itself).

(2) Consent-based siting  (the Western Shoshone, and the State of Nevada, do not consent to the Yucca dump; legalized bribery of vulnerable communities also does not constitute "consent"; as Keith Lewis, environmental director of the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario, put it in the book This Is My Homeland: Stories of the effects of nuclear industries by people of the Serpent River First Nation and the north shore of Lake Huron (1998, published by Serpent River First Nation, edited by Serpent River First Nation Members Lorraine Rekmans and Keith Lewis, as well as by Anabel Dwyer), "There is nothing moral about bribing a starving man with money."

(3) Scientific suitability  (that is, isolation of hazardous radioactivity from the living environment for at least a million years -- Yucca can't meet this criteria either, by a long shot! If the Yucca dump were opened, serious leakage to the environment could begin within centuries, but would become large-scale after 11,000 years, this according to DOE's own computer modeling! The leakage would just worsen over longer time periods. It would continue to present a hazard for a million years or more).

(4) Environmental justice  (Newe Sogobia and Nevada can't be targeted again, after decades of nuclear weapons testing fallout, "low" level radioactive waste dumping, etc.).

(5)   Regional equity (no East dumps on West, especially when 90% of the highly radioactive wastes are in the eastern half of the U.S., and 75% is east of the Mississippi River).

(6) Mitigation of transport risks (closely related to regional equity, immediately above).

(7) Inter-generational equity (related to scientific suitability, above -- no double standards, as at the proposed Yucca dump, where the first 10,000 years' "allowable" or "permissible" dose standard is 15 milli-Rem per year, which then is "allowed" or "permitted" to go up to 100 mR/yr after 10,000 years out to a million years -- meaning future generations would face 6.66 times more "allowable"/"permissible" exposure to hazardous radioactivity than current generations!).

(8) Non-proliferation (the risk of the weapons-grade plutonium in the irradiated nuclear fuel being exploited for weapons manufacture is a major reason that perpetual surface storage is not acceptable, and permanent irreversible "disposal" is needed).

(9) Pre-"disposal" reprocessing is unacceptable (given the weapons proliferation risk, the environmental ruination and health damage that would result from large-scale hazardous radioactivity releases, not to mention the astronomical expense, which the public would be forced to pay for).

(10) This list of required strict siting criteria could well expand, as additional concerns come to light.