Problems on the proper disposal of nuclear wastes have continued to haunt the world. And nuclear producing countries, including the United States, have failed to properly and effectively address the issue. As this developed, industry analysts are contending that renewed interests on how to dispose nuclear wastes without endangering the lives of those living around it and the environment as well, should resurface owing to the increasing volume of nuclear wastes now scattered in areas deemed unfit to hold such materials for a long period of time.
The Sierra Club National Nuclear Waste task Force pointed out that since Congress passed the Federal LLRW Act in 1980, following the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, which creasted large amount of unanticipated low-level radioactive wastes, wherein the nation has been dumping all of its commercial low-level radioactive wastes into commercial shallow land burial trenches, nothing much was done to secure them.
Dr. Judith Johnsrud of the Task Force said for half a century radioactive wastes have posed significant biological hazards to humans and to many other life forms and the ecosystems. In a statement posted in the Internet, she urged nuclear reactor operators to isolate them from the biosphere for the full duration of their hazardous lives.
What is happening right now is that many states do not want to entertain the idea of allowing these nuclear wastes into their backyards, considering their immediate impacts on the health of humans and the environment, thus the presence of nuclear wastes in identified disposal areas have piled up over a long period of time. "A major ethical responsibility for us all is, after all, to the future as well as present survival and well-being of our species, our descendants, and the other inhabitants of the planet," she said in a statement.
The Task Force, therefore, suggested by urging the U.S. government to: "Send it to a desert wasteland; keep it onsite where people must have wanted reactors and where they supposedly benefit from the electricity; or airlift it to Dagestan or West Africa or Mexico, where folks need the money: derive some economic benefit from it by recycling into consumer products; trade off one risk for another."
She lamented that members of Congress were made to believe that most low-level wastes were generated by medical and research facilities and did not originate from commercial nuclear power plants. "In fact, the opposite is true: in most states, more than 75 percent of the volume and more than 95 percent of the radioactivity of so-called lovel-level wastes are produced by nuclear reactors." On the contrary, the public was made also to believe that these low-level wastes are just harmless trash.
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