Nuclear waste&#8212the ultimate NIMBY

Five or ten years ago it looked as if nuclear power was a dead issue. The bright promise of “energy too cheap to meter” had never been realized, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl dramatically demonstrated the dangerous side of the technology, and by the mid-1990s the aging plants were generally regarded as headed for the scrap heap.

Today it’s another story, and the Bush administration is committed to reviving nuclear power. This is not surprising, says Barry Rabe, University of Michigan professor of environmental policy and interim dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment. “Nuclear plants now provide about 21 percent of the electricity in the United States. and Canada. There’s no way they can or will be mothballed any time soon,” Rabe says.

But quite apart from the controversial question of whether or not to re-license and upgrade the nation’s nuclear power plants is the even more difficult problem of finding a way to safely store high-level nuclear waste (the kind that will take 50,000 to 100,000 years to disappear). Currently, all North American waste of this type must be stored near the site that generates it, while we await the outcome of the proposal to create a national repository in Nevada. It is essential to move that waste somewhere safe&#8212but where? How do you define “safe”? And exactly how do you physically transport this highly dangerous material over thousands of miles to the new storage site?

For more information about the complex policy aspects of this issue in both the United States and Canada, contact Rabe at (734) 763-2220, (734) 764-2550, or brabe@umich.edu.

Barry Rabebrabe@umich.edu