fusion

working with others on the Energy Research and Production
Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology
Committee to pass an amendment on waste management
to the House Appropriations Committee, which is currently
marking up its budget recommendations for existing
programs. This amendment would authorize $177 million
to immediately begin the waste disposal plan.
The proposed amendment passed in a vote of the full
House committee, and congressional sources feel that it
is likely to pass both the House and the Senate—if the
necessary constituency support is generated (see box).
A Viable Nuclear Waste Program
In general, nuclear waste programs here and internationally
are converging on the same solution—a solution
proposed 20 years ago during the nuclear industry's infancy.
The United States, in fact, was committed to this
program until President Carter's decision in April 1977 to
halt commercial reprocessing of nuclear fuel and to stop
the construction of the Barnwell, S.C. reprocessing plant,
then 75 percent complete.
There are three basic parts to a nuclear waste management
program: separating the radioactive fission product
wastes from the spent fuel, recycling the unused uranium
and plutonium fuel included in the spent fuel back into
nuclear power reactors, and routing the wastes through
a waste storage process. As described in more detail
below, the process consists of storing the waste in concentrated
liquid form in holding tanks for a period of
approximately 10 years, solidifying this waste into a very
stable glassified form, and sealing it into a metal container
to be transported to an underground depository for permanent
long-term storage. To cover all possibilities, the
depository should be designed so that during the first 100
years of storage, the wastes could be retrieved, in case it
were decided later to make productive use of the valuable
waste products or to dispose of them by new, more
advanced technologies.
The point is that we are not dealing with developing a
new technology, such as nuclear fusion reactors, magnetohydrodynamic
energy conversion systems, or advanced
fission reactors. We are talking about permanently burying
something for a long time, using technologies that exist
now and are known to work. The tasks at hand are to plan
and design this waste disposal program; to engineer it; to
build and operate the facilities; and, finally, to monitor
and collect data after the start of operations so that any
necessary improvements can be made in this facility and
in future waste disposal facilities as new things are learned.
In short, all that remains to solving the nation's nuclear
waste problem is to engineer and construct the appropriate
storage systems.
What Are Nuclear Wastes
Before the president's April 1977 directive, nuclear
wastes in the United States were generally classified as
high-level wastes (HLW), transuranic wastes (TRU), lowlevel
wastes (LLW), uranium mine and mill tailings, and
gaseous effluents from operating reactors or reprocessing
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