Leo Holland describes the 1955 Geneva Conference reactor to President Dwight Eisenhower.
Photo Source: DOE

We are a sophisticated society, spending billions upon billions of dollars, every year, to develop nuclear weapons and advanced aircraft along with advanced ships. Why we will even spend billions of dollars to develop conventional weapons, but there is one thing, that eventually will become more important than all of these things and we are not spending very much on. That is finding a solution to a certain problem. The problem I am talking about is the disposal of nuclear waste. I have talked about this before and it doesn't seem that we have made much, or in fact any progress in this field. As the reactors that generate our electricity keep going, they churn out nuclear waste in record amounts and what do we do with all this waste? We store it in a swimming pool type environment. Yeah, much of the time we keep it in holding tanks that look exactly like swimming pools and the waste is stored under the water.

Now I ask you, would any sensible person think that this is some kind of solution? If you had a reactor in your home that was putting out nuclear waste and it began to pile up, wouldn't you begin to get worried? I know that I would. When you consider the fact that this stuff stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, you better worry. What we do now might have an effect on future generations that are far, far removed from us today. Oh the government has this plan, but it is essentially a plan to move the place of storage. Instead of a swimming pool being used for storage, we will move the deadly stuff out west to salt mines because it is thought that salt mines are more stable. Over the extremely long periods of time we are talking about for this stuff to cool off and become non radioactive, nothing can be considered stable. Not only that, but as I have said before, how do you mark something so that someone 150,000 years down the road will be able to see a danger sign and even if you could, would they understand it?

The only solution to the problem is to find a way to breakdown the radioactive waste so that it is non radioactive. If you had some sort of device that could suck out the radiation, filter it and make it harmless, you could make millions upon millions of dollars. I am surprised that some company like GE (General Electric) hasn't figured out a way to do this yet. Nuclear waste from fuel rods for reactors is not the only nuclear waste that we have. We have medical waste and waste that comes from contamination. While these are not quite as bad and some will actually have a half life of about 10,000 years, they are still dangerous. If you read what Oak Ridge National Laboratory says about radioactivity, you will understand what I am talking about. Here is a statement from a waste disposal paper of theirs:

"One of the startling factors in dealing with radioactivity is that it cannot be destroyed. No degree of heat or cold, no chemical reaction, can speed up or slow down the emanation of particles and rays from radioactive atoms. This fact presents the large quantity producer of radioactive waste with two alternatives for disposing of it:
1. He can render the radioactive waste harmless by diluting it and dispersing it until the concentration of the radioactive components is too low to damage animal tissue.
2. He can separate the radioactive components from the waste, concentrate them to a convenient volume, and store them until time can destroy them by natural decay."

The first option that is talked about is not very attractive, but has been used. Would you want to live on a piece of land that was only a little radioactive? The second option, is the one that is used most often, I call it piling it up. Could there be another method or methods that actually destroy radioactivity? There is something called the Keller Catalytic Process and the Baker Effect. The experiments took place in 1993 and it is claimed that radioactivity can be destroyed by Electrical and Chemical means. From what I can gather, Baker believes that he could destroy radiation using currents up to 500,000 volts. It seems that he might have found some way to speed up decay. Keller, on the other hand, claims that he can destroy radioactivity using very high temperatures and creating a reaction from a secret chemical process. Here is the question I have. If the experiments took place in 1993 and were successful, why haven't we used this process in the last 13 years?

There are nuclear plants that don't even bother to filter out the radioactivity properly from any discharges into the air. According to Greenpeace, the most contaminated place on Earth is Mayak in the Southern Ural Mountains. It is the home of the Mayak Chemical Combine and is the world's largest nuclear complex. Here is what Greenpeace has to say about it," Over the last five decades Mayak has discharged frightening quantities of radioactivity into the surrounding land and waterways. Until recently it was deleted from every map of Russia. Mayak now holds the inauspicious title of the most nuclear contaminated place on the planet. Mayak's operation has been plagued with nuclear disasters, environmental contamination and public health scandals."

I only point this out to show that with all the problems we have with nuclear plants and the storage of nuclear waste, maybe we should close down all these plants. I also realize that some places have no other sources of power, or at least they don't think that they do. Many people today believe that non nuclear power generation can be accomplished anywhere, using a combination of different technologies. For example, in some place you could combine wind power, solar power, geothermal and even wave power and soon to come, efficient fuel cells.

What we have to do is get our priorities straight. We poured oodles of money into the Human Genome Project and now it is time to attack the problem of nuclear waste disposal the same way. We need full cooperation from all the world's scientists. Why haven't we done this yet? We have dangerously high stockpiles of nuclear waste already and we have to get rid of it, not just store it. I would hope that some government, somewhere, would take notice of this dangerous situation and decide to approach a world body, like the U.N. , with a proposal to start this project. It would be nice if the Russians would do this, because it would be a symbolic commitment to clean up their reactors, but any country making this gesture would be appreciated. Well we can only hope.