[New post] If we bury today the repulsive nuclear wastes, why do we pass it on to others to deal with?
Christina Macpherson posted: " At the recent local elections three of the five candidates for the WestCaithness ward listed on their leaflets building more nuclear reactors atDounreay alongside complaints about potholes in the roads as theirpriorities. They all got in. None of the" nuclear-news
At the recent local elections three of the five candidates for the West Caithness ward listed on their leaflets building more nuclear reactors at Dounreay alongside complaints about potholes in the roads as their priorities. They all got in. None of them took up my suggestion that they could fill all the potholes in Caithness with nuclear waste.
I suspect none of them had given much thought to nuclear waste at all, which is something they had in common with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority when they built Dounreay in the 1950's.
Unfortunately the waste problem is now critical, in more ways than one. The Dounreay dome, the reactor protective casing structure, also known as the sphere and the golf ball, has been a feature of the north Caithness coast for almost 60 years. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has recommended that the DFR be decontaminated by 2022 (the schedule has slipped) so it can then be demolished.
In 2007, Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL), the company that manages the site, released the results of public consultation on future uses for the dome. Suggestions included turning it into a hotel, museum and even a nightclub.
However, because the structure is contaminated with worrying levels of radioactivity and due to high maintenance costs, it was decided to demolish it. So, sadly, no glowing raves or very long radioactive sleeps or trips back into a memory that begins in 1955 and will never end as the nuclear waste, dome and all, will be buried at a nuclear dump site at nearby Buldoo.
What language, I wonder, will they put on the steel door of this addition to the ancient burial mound culture of Caithness? At an underground facility, a bit like Buldoo, assuringly called "The Waste Isolation Plant", the US government buries all kinds of nasty waste from its nuclear weapons production 600 metres below the rocks of New Mexico. In 20 years time, when the dump has been stuffed to the gunnels with nuclear crap, the US government will have to seal the steel and concrete entrances and place signs saying "Danger Zone!" all around them.
The problem, as Serhii Plokhy, the author of "Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima", has pointed out, is that the underground store will still be contaminated in 300,000 years, and no one can predict what language our descendants will read or speak at that time, or what messages might convince them not to dig into the New Mexico rocks. In the 1990s nuclear security experts proposed symbols, earthworks and mounds of rubble designed to convey an appropriate sense of menace to anyone stumbling on the area.
The intended message the US government wanted to broadcast was: "This place is not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger." The hard question Serhii Plokhy, who is also a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University where he also serves as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, asks is, "If what we bury today in the New Mexico desert – the waste created by our nuclear ambitions – is so repulsive to us, why do we pass it on to others to deal with?"
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