Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. The Unit #4 Reactor exploded that day, killing thirty-one people. The fallout from the explosion was estimated to be 200 times more potent than the radiation released in the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. Since this disaster many people in the Ukraine and Belarus, as well as other nearby nations, have died due to radiation sickness or cancer. After the blast, over 300,000 people were evacuated from the affected area as well as from areas in the path of the radiation cloud. One city had a population of over fifty thousand people. It remains a ghost town to this day. Thousands of people were never able to return to their homes.
Twenty-five years later, the clean-up has long since been accomplished, right? Wrong! There is a permanent evacuation zone around the areas most affected. And we (the US) are part of a multi-national effort to contain (yes, contain!) the damage to Unit #4. Millions of dollars have been spent in the ongoing containment and cleanup effort. The Ukraine alone spent $180 millions dollars during the first ten years after the disaster. So far I have found no accurate count of the millions of dollars contributed by other nations to contain the radiation and help with decontamination. Also, other millions have gone to pay for benefits to the people either sickened by the radiation or who lost their homes in the disaster.
Currently the Ukraine has received money or pledges for money totaling over $600 million dollars since 2005. This money will be used to build a "containment shell" around Unit #4. This shell will hopefully contain the radiation that is STILL leaking from the crippled reactor. Like I said, I have not been able to locate precise estimates of the monetary cost of this disaster, but some sources speculate that well over TEN BILLION DOLLARS have been spent since the accident occurred. This figure includes all the dollars spent to contain the radiation, decontaminate the land, treat or bury people, and provide medical or relocation benefits to the survivors. By the way, the damaged fuel rods are still there as scientists continue to try to come up with a satisfactory method of disposing of the fuel rods. So at least $10,000,000,000 have been spent, more millions are needed each year, and no solution to the problem, other than time, is in sight.
I bring the Chernobyl accident to mind because it helps me make a point. The Waste Control Specialist facility near Andrews is a facility that will store radioactive waste. Just as the scientists and engineers have not found a way to clean up the Chernobyl disaster, I do not believe the WCS people have a plan to clean up the Andrews facility should an accident happen there. Further, there is no provision, to my knowledge, in the WCS license that would require that corporation to maintain the WCS facility. There is, however, a provision in the license that allows WCS to abandon the Andrews facility, leaving it to the state (read YOU and ME) to maintain the integrity of the radioactive waste stored there.
Now, I realize that the Chernobyl disaster was, and continues to be, a great tragedy, and the WCS facility in now way compares to the Chernobyl situation, but there are lessons we should have learned from Chernobyl. First, unforeseeable accidents can happen. In the case of WCS, the accidents could involve truck and train accidents resulting in radioactive contamination of areas all across the United States, including across Texas. Second the WCS facility could leak (and in fact already is, according to state regulatory agencies) causing untold damage to the Ogallala Aquifer. In either scenario, WCS is limited to a $500,000 liability for accidents occurring on Texas soil. And they have no liability for cleaning and maintenance should the corporation abandon the Andrews facility. That leads to the final lesson: Cleaning up any accident or the WCS facility itself will cost untold millions of dollars, if not billions. But, as I write this, the WCS facility continues to take in more radioactive waste, and other states are gearing up to send their waste to Texas.
Yes, there were lessons to be learned on this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chernobyl, but so far, those lessons have fallen on deaf ears. We continue using nuclear energy though we have no workable means of controlling nuclear accidents, no practical means of remediating damage caused by nuclear accidents, and no safe means of disposing of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive wastes. Maybe there will be no accidents involving radioactive waste. Hopefully the WCS facility can be brought into compliance. But it only takes one accident to contaminate an area for thousands of years. It only takes one uncontrolled leak to render the Ogallala Aquifer lethal for generations to come.
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