University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, August 20, 1975
7
Nuclear waste feared
From page 6
was spotted by visual checks, which had been caused by earlier pipe cracks at the reporter.
Spokesmen for Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, the utility that operates the reactor, said the shutdown illustrated once again that the elaborate inspection procedures occurring nuclear plants will be made nuclear electric power safe and reliable.
"The safety systems found these cracks long before they became severe," a utility spokesman said. "We were a long way from an accident."
BUT DAVID COMEY, director of environmental research for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a Chicago group critical of nuclear energy, said the shutdown calls into question not only the nature, but also the reliability of nuclear power.
"We're lucky these defects are appearing when shutting down all the nation's boiling water reactors will only reduce the country of Canada," Commey said. "The earlier the public is able to make decisions about the future of nuclear power, the less chance that at a later date we will have to choose between a gas or turning off half the electrical supply."
Keeping contaminated water where it's
apposed to be kept in a plant is but one
way to prevent it.
The uranium fuel used in reactors produces many waste products. Among them is plutonium, the deadliest poison known to man.
THE TOXICITY of plutonium has been estimated at as low as one billionth of a gram.
And the Wolf Creek plant will produce pounds of plutonium every year, according to Paul Johnson, suppleman for a Topeka Lawrence group opposing nuclear power.
Spokesmen for KCPL and Kansas Gas and Electric Co. (KGE) don't readily know how much plutonium by weight the plant will produce.
A KCPL spokesman says the plant's production of low-level waste, which can be treated and disposed of, will be about as a garage every year as would fill a two-car garage.
He says production of high-level waste, which must be stored, will be about as much during the 40-year life of the plant as would fill a two-car garage.
A KGE SPOKESMAN estimates the amount of high-level waste at three per cent of the plant's total waste, and says the high-level waste is about the high-level waste, not it's volume.
The KGE public relations department suggests using the word "byproducts" when referring to nuclear plants about the connotations of words have suggested that nuclear power plants be referred to as uranium-fuelled plants. The opponents suggest referring to them as "nuclear."
The high-level waste is plutonium, and is highly radioactive. Plutonium's half-life, the time required for half of any given quantity of plutonium to decay, is 24,700 years. It must be isolated from the environment for several half-lives—effectively, forever.
The stickler is to find containers that will
Red scare didn't scare KU...
From page 4
members of the Communist party but banded together to study communism. Seventeen out of 4,600 students is not a dangerous proportion."
Students then, like students at KU today,
will learn about the future and
about the state of the economy.
In spite of their occasional treks in nightshirts or rallies on the Hill, students understood the serious nature of the Depression and realized that to conquer the mysterious forces that ran their lives they would have to understand them.
Seeing their families and friends lose "the work of a lifetime," Lindley wrote to a friend in Wichita, "thoughtful students recognize the fact that our lives are governed by forces we do not thoroughly understand."
LINDELE OBSERVED that students were studying with deepened interest history, economics and the social sciences. "This trend," he concluded, "noted in many parts of the country, is to many a most hopeful augury."
Coogan, who found work with the United Press in Denver after he was forced to leave school, said, "Job prospects were very, very grim. But somehow most people were able to do well. Kansas wam't as bad off as the industrialized states."
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hold the plutonium long enough, and to find a place to store the containers.
Although storage of the waste of all the plants projected to be working by the year 2000 won't require a significant land area, there will be a need in line to have the waste stored nearby.
--that transportation and storage raises
another problem: security.
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ORIGINAL VALUE
LIQUID WASTE for storage from the Wolf Creek plant will first come out of the plant in 1983. It will be shipped to plutonium reprocessing centers in Buffalo, N.Y., and Barnwell, S.C., where it will be turned over to the government.
Liquid waste buried in what was supposed to be a watertight cavern in Montana atleth through its containers recently and escaped from the cavern. At latest report, the government said philodon hadn't entered the city yet and it didn't yet pose a threat to the environment.
After five years of storage at the reprocessing centers, the liquid waste will be solidified, assuming the technology is developed by then, so it won't eat through its containers and leak into the environment.
SO THE NATION will need a security force to guard transportation and storage of the plutonium against theft. The Nuclear Industry must already taking steps to form such a force.
The nuclear opponents say a national defense law would require our civil liberties. The regulatory compaign says the force will restrict the liberty of only certain Americans to graze some unauthorized lands for themselves.
AFTER FIVE MORE years of storage at the reprocessing centers, the solid waste will be shipped somewhere for permanent storage, or it can be recycled yet, but the government is working on a plan to bury the waste in salt mines in New Mexico. Once it reaches its permanent home, the waste will be checked before it be sure it doesn't get out of its containers.
With about 10 pounds of plutonium, some readily available technological knowledge and some moderately expensive hardware, a terrorist group could make an atomic bomb using plutonium that was attached to a kilogram of plutonium would make a very serviceable bomb.
Most of the problems with plutonium waste, as well as problems with dwindling uranium reserves, are related to this.
The reprocessing plants are supposed to transform plutonium waste into nuclear fuel, which could be sent back to reactors for use.
platanium reprocessing plants work as they are expected to.
KCPL EXPECTS to run the Wolf Creek plant for only a few years before reprocessing technology is developed. Even if it isn't developed, a KCPL spokesman says, the Wolf Creek plant will be able to stav open and run on uranium.
But nuclear opponents say rep-communication technology won't work. They say General Electric's attempt to build a reprocessing plant, on which it spent its years and millions of dollars, would have to be scraped completely. The problem, according to the nuclear opponents, was that equipment that under normal operating conditions would be so radioactive it could never be turned out to be remainable only by human hands.
Plutonium reprocessing won't work, so it isn't going to solve the problem of what to do with it. It looks like a waste material.
SO THERE THEY stand, nuclear proponents and nuclear opponents, glaring at each other from opposite sides of a ring formed by the feet of some of the fights of the century. Each side weighs in with a full load of expectations and interpretations based on facts and figures. Sometimes the facts and figures are interpreted as interpretations and interpretations rarely do.
Whatever is decided in that ring will have a profound effect on the United States for years to come. The scoring of the fight shows the nuclear proponents clearly in the lead. But the nuclear opponents are coming with more and more of their punches.
In nine cases over the past few years, citizens who stepped in the ring with their gloves tied on tight were able to defeat or deflect reactors scheduled for their areas.
OF THE GROWING statewide effort to stop construction of the Wolf Creek plant, a KGE spokesman says, "They have an opportunity to speak their minds, and they can delay a plant. The question is whether they're performing a service."
Of the nuclear opponents' chances for stopping, not just delaying, the plant, a spokesman for the People's Energy Project Lawrence and Topeka says, "We've got to."
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