Nuclear waste a hazard forever
While I do not doubt the information he provided regarding current global energy consumption and demand, I feel that several important points were not mentioned.
While the generation of energy by nuclear means does not directly produce any of the greenhouse gases that we hear so much of today, the process does leave us with another problem in the form of hazardous nuclear waste. As yet there are no technological means safely to dispose of this waste. The current ‘solution’ to this problem is simply to bury it.
In the US, for example, two enormous repositories have been built deep under the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico to store the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste resulting from the production of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It has been estimated that this waste will take up to 250,000 years to decompose, which is significantly longer than any of the other forms of refuse that we are being encouraged to recycle in recent years.
To help put this nuclear waste timeframe in perspective, if it was being produced in the days of Christ and was being disposed of the way it is today, its highly toxic, cancer-causing nature would have diminished hardly at all at the dawn of 2006.
These repositories are inaccessible once sealed, but given that irradiated containers will corrode relatively rapidly, that soil and geological formations move and subside, and that groundwater seeps through rock, it is very likely only a question of time before nuclear particles begin to show up in the environment and the human food chain.
One need only think of the sick and dying children of Chernobyl to imagine the potential suffering of future generations, victims of our selfishness.
Nuclear energy is not our only option. There are alternatives, but these alone are not sufficient without a new moral approach and the abandonment of our excessively materialistic lifestyles.
Eoin O’Callaghan
4 Ashbourne Court
Carrigaline
Co Cork
