Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Radioactive waste and pollution
Natural radon emissions can damage human health; production of uranium, plutonium
and other (unnatural) radioactive materials has contaminated miners, enrichment
plant workers and the global environment, especially through atomic weapons testing,
military and civil nuclear power plant accidents, and contamination from industrial
and medical isotope sources. Between 1945 and 1978 there were at least 1,165 nuclear
test explosions (ca. 130 above-ground in the atmosphere, the rest mainly
underground). The 1963 Limited (or Partial) Test Ban Treaty ended test explosions
in the atmosphere, under water and in space, by its signatories. However, tests
continued below ground. The 1967 Nuclear Weapons Test Ban (‘Test Ban Treaty’)
much reduced above-ground testing although some non-signatory nations still do it.
Some underground test sites are failing to offer complete containment of
radioactivity which seeps into groundwater and thence to rivers or the sea. There are
a number of weapons test-contaminated areas: in the deserts of southern USA, in the
Soviet Arctic around Nova Zemlya, in what was Soviet Central Asia, the Gobi Desert
(PRC), near Muroroa Atol (French Pacific), Montebello Is. (Indian Ocean), Maralinga
(South Australia), in Pakistan and India. Accidents have led to the loss of several
nuclear submarine reactors at sea, and there have been at least 54 re-entries of nuclear
isotope-powered satellites, some of which scattered radioactive debris above or upon
the Earth’s surface. Nuclear weapons have been lost at sea, and a few have broken
open on land. Gourlay (1992:62–64) has estimated that there have been at least 50
such accidents.
Radioactive wastes can be highly hazardous and very long-lived (with half-
lives of thousands of years). Stored high-level wastes generate heat and gas pressure
that damage their containment and radiation may also corrode containers. There
must also be adequate radiation shielding and protection against hazards like
earthquakes. Radioactive materials are also attractive to terrorists, so their management
is expensive, difficult and a very long-term demand.
Nuclear waste can be stored in shallow or deep repositories, landfilled,
discharged into rivers or the sea, pumped down deep boreholes, dumped in containers
in deep ocean, or reprocessed (Berkhout, 1991). Most of these options are imperfect,
and some are now felt to be inadvisable or illegal. Low-level waste is generally
disposed of by shallow landfill. World-wide nuclear installations hold huge quantities
of often high-level waste in temporary storage awaiting long-term disposal. For ten
years there has been a moratorium on dumping nuclear waste at sea (Japan, the UK,
the USSR, France and some other nations failed to observe this fully up to 1993), so
managers of high-level waste are tending to focus on underground storage or
reprocessing. Underground storage demands thick, non-fissured, impermeable rocks
which are not prone to earthquakes—even where the geology is suitable there is
likely to be NIMBY resistance, and the costs are high.

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POLLUTION AND WASTE MANAGEMENT
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There is still a lot to be learnt about safe levels of exposure to gamma, beta and
alpha radiation. Concern has been voiced about alpha-particle-emitting tritium (often
released from atomic power stations and other nuclear installations in the belief that
it poses little hazard), because research suggests it might be a risk to health, and is
difficult to keep in containment (Fairlie, 1992). Low-level waste containing caesium,
strontium and plutonium has in the past been pumped into the sea, and in some
countries there are now signs of hot spots or contaminated wildlife.
Obsolete or failed nuclear power stations, weapons production plants and
military reactors pose problems. Disassembly of nuclear facilities using robot
equipment will probably be needed, and when completed much of the waste still has
to be disposed of. Like Chernobyl, which suffered a meltdown of one of its reactors
and release of radioactivity in 1986, it seems likely that many contaminated sites
will be buried under a mound of concrete, clay or pumped sand to save money.
Whether such containment is effective for long enough remains to be seen,
Chernobyl’s concrete sarcophagus is already breaking up.
Decommissioning the UK’s obsolete nuclear stations may cost £30 billion
(Pasqualetti, 1990; The Times, 3 May 1993:5) and the country will also have to dispose
often nuclear sumbmarines by AD 2000. In late 1989 there were at least 356 nuclear
power-generation reactors in 31 countries, operating or under construction. By late
1988 world-wide 239 units had been shut down and 100 were being decommissioned.
Japan, South Korea, the PRC and the USA were still building atomic power stations
in 1993. Sweden will cease to use atomic power, no easy decision, given that 52 per
cent of Swedish electricity came from nuclear generation in 1992. Other countries
will continue to depend a great deal upon it for decades: in 1989 the former USSR
got roughly 14 per cent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, France 73 per cent,
Japan 27 per cent, Belgium 59 per cent, the UK 23 per cent, Germany 28 per cent,
Switzerland 40 per cent, Spain 40 per cent—overall, roughly 17 per cent of the
world’s electricity is generated by nuclear reactors (Gourlay, 1992:59).
There are dangers in nuclear generation, but burning natural gas oil and coal is
a waste of valuable industrial feedstock and a source of greenhouse gas emissions—
until good alternatives are developed the true costs of various energy sources need to
be weighed before nuclear power is blindly opposed (North, 1995).