Nuclear Energy

Plutonium cxi
Named after Pluto, the Greek God of Hell, it is supposed to be one of the most dangerous
substances on earth. An alpha emitter, it is so toxic and carcinogenic that less than one-millionth of
a gram if inhaled will cause lung cancer. The half ton of plutonium released from the Chernobyl
meltdown is theoretically enough to kill everyone on earth with lung cancer 1,100 times if it were to
be uniformly distributed into the lung of every human being.
On being transported to the liver, Plutonium causes liver cancer. Because it is like iron, on
inhalation, it eventually finds its way to the bone marrow to be incorporated into the hemoglobin
molecule in the red blood cells. Here it irradiates bone cells to cause bone cancer and white blood
cells made in the bone marrow to cause leukemia.
Plutonium is also stored in the testicles, and causes mutations in reproductive genes and
increases the incidence of genetic disease in future generations. The half-life of plutonium 239 is
24,400 years, so it remains radioactive for half a million years. Therefore, once created, it is going
to live on and enter reproductive organs and cause genetic mutations for the rest of time.
As we see below, such horrendously radioactive elements are bound to find their way into
the environment from wherever this nuclear waste is stored.
Storing the waste
Spent fuel is highly radioactive and chemically active, and intensely hot – the waste
repository will be at temperatures above boiling point for 1250 years, with temperatures inside the
canister holding the waste touching 662 degrees Fahrenheit. cxii There is no way of guaranteeing that
any storage system designed for such waste will not corrode and leak a few hundred years from
now. All attempts to build even medium term storage systems for this waste have ended in complete
disasters. We look at the attempts in the US and Germany below.
• The Yucca Mountain disaster
All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive
waste a year – and most of it ends up sitting on-site because there is nowhere else to put it. As of
2008, more than 64,000 tons of dangerously radioactive waste from nuclear power reactors had
accumulated in the United States. cxiii
The private nuclear industry in the US has never taken responsibility of disposing off the
massive quantities of radioactive waste produced by it. Obligingly, the US government passed the
Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982, promising to take responsibility for it, and in 1987, designated
the Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the primary repository for this waste. The project was envisaged
as a complex of tunnels deep inside deep inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las
Vegas, where at least 77,000 tons of spent fuel from commercial plants, and government-generated
nuclear waste, would be stored and ultimately buried. The site soon ran into huge problems; it also
became clear that the site’s geology was inappropriate to contain the waste. But the DOE was
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