What does Frankenstein have to do with nuclear power?
Frankenstein is an iconic monster, a legend of “Class B” films, with great appeal to audiences, but Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a warning – when man is consumed by ambition and striving for endless progress, man’s desire would gain control of the world will eventually destroy him.
We didn’t take Shelley’s warning to heart. In the pursuit of endless progress and a better life, we have indeed created monsters that are beyond our control and threaten to destroy us and the planet that gives us life.
One of those monsters is nuclear power, which relies on extremely dangerous radioactive fuel, leaving us with waste containing billions of curies of deadly radiation that could contaminate entire communities – or regions, countries or continents – for millennia. Even small amounts of radioactivity can cause birth defects, mutations and cancer.
The creation of the atomic bomb was “justified” with the end of World War II. Then, to secure America’s top position in the world, we “needed” nuclear weapons and an endless supply of weapon-grade radioactive material that only arises in chain reactions that generate electricity. This is how the civil use of nuclear power began.
We mistakenly believed that we could recycle the waste from reactors and use it over and over again. However, the only reprocessing facility closed after five years and remains a superfund site.
When India tested an atomic bomb in the 1980s, the US government decided that the potential for bad actors or rogue countries to gain access to weapons-grade radioactive material was too great a threat. President Carter completed the reprocessing and appointed a group of scientists to explore ways to dispose of the ever-expanding radioactive waste across the country. Now there was a recognized waste problem.
We have yet to find a “solution”, but communities that house reactors – like Plymouth and Rowe, Mass., And Vernon, Vermont, just across the Massachusetts border – want the waste to be disposed of. It’s a PR nightmare for the nuclear industry.
The only option the scientists agreed on was the deep geological spillage of the waste. At Yucca Mountain, Nevada, work began against the Western Shoshone’s contractual rights. But yucca is geologically and hydrologically not stable enough, and the state does not want a repository there. The work has been suspended.
The nuclear industry and the federal government are now talking about the development of interim storage facilities that are intended to bundle the waste from all reactors in order to facilitate management before a repository is found. These “parking lot dumps” would be open and susceptible to attack and leakage from barrels designed for decades, not the millennia it will take for the radiation to dissipate.
This is a move to “disappear” the waste in the reactor communities and concentrate the toxic material in sacrificial zones with little political influence – working class, rural, Latin American, and / or Native American areas in western Texas and eastern New Mexico. There is no informed consent process that allows communities to opt in or out.
And while they’re at it, the industry is trying to rename nuclear power as the “green bridge” away from fossil fuels, even though the nuclear fuel chain is a net producer of greenhouse gases, generating toxic waste and sucking away valuable resources from developing sustainable energy solutions.
Nuclear waste is really our Frankenstein.
We made a monster. How do we stop it? The first step is to educate ourselves and acknowledge that there is a problem. We also need serious investment in science to find out how we can isolate this waste while doing the least amount of damage.
As this process evolves, do we let the industry just let the waste go via our crumbling roads and railways – a fatal accident just waiting to happen? Do we let them take the radioactive waste from energy production that benefited us in New England and dump it with our native and Latin American neighbors?
No! We have to ask for the research that is needed to isolate the waste. In the meantime, leave it where it is, harden it against attack, monitor it closely and make sure it doesn’t leak. And we must fight for clean energy standards that matter and that make nuclear power generation irrelevant to meeting our energy needs.
Your voice matters and your lawmakers need to hear from you. Visit the Citizens Awareness Network website at nukebusters.org to learn more about the issues and the National Radioactive Waste Coalition. Here is information on how to contact your senators and representatives, as well as some suggestions on what to say.
Ann Darling lives in Easthampton.
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