ARTICLE - "AMERICA'S CHANGING NUCLEAR POLICY"

By Miles Nelson, MD

There is a concerted effort underway to alter America's nuclear policy. This change in policy carries grave long-term ramifications to public health and should be debated at the national level. Instead, insidiously, policy makers are intercalating these new strategies into the fabric of our lives without our full knowledge or consent. You have a right to know about this and a responsibility to participate because this shift of paradigms will affect future generations to a much larger degree then it affects us.

In the past America's nuclear policy reflected the basic values of our society. At a time when we feared for our freedom we amassed huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This resulted in tremendous accumulation of radioactive waste across the country. This waste accumulation was not extensively debated but was felt to be an unavoidable side effect of the cold war. At a time when nuclear energy was felt to be a clean, safe and unlimited resource commercial nuclear power plants were developed en masse. The waste stream generated by these reactors was hardly considered.

However, we learned that nuclear reactors create a category of high-level radioactive waste for which no solution had been exists. Currently this waste piles up at the facility that creates it awaiting some as yet unrealized remediation. With this knowledge the shine on the promise of safe unlimited nuclear power faded and the nation halted the construction of new nuclear power plants.

As the insanity of cold war nuclear proliferation was realized weapons production slowed, reflecting the nation's new found consciousness. Along with this the realization of the magnitude of the contamination we had created in the arms race set in. Department of Energy (DOE) facilities across the nation are neck deep in radioactive debris. Much of this debris is buried in shallow unlined earthen dumps. This incredibly long-lived debris has already contaminated the ground water at many facilities and threatens to do so elsewhere.

Reflecting the nation's evolving concern for the environment and public safety the DOE was directed to clean up these decades of waste. But the contamination is too huge and the price tag is too great and the DOE cannot do the job. Aware of the nation's concern about the safety of the radioactive waste that litters our country the DOE and other policy makers have embarked on a long-term scheme to alter the public's perception of this hazard. This is a multi-pronged approach that seeks to change the safety standards for radioactivity, develop a public relations campaign to reassure people that unremediated radioactive contamination is safe and seeks to "educate" school kids on the benefits of the nuclear industry.

Over the decades that our country has been working with radioactivity the safety standards for exposure have tightened reflecting improvement in the understanding of the deleterious effects of ionizing radiation on the human body. These standards reflect the prudent concept of a "linear no threshold model" for the health effects of radiation. What this means is that while it is well known that large doses of radiation cause disease and death it is assumed that small doses may be harmful too. This cautious approach reflects the value that human health is precious and that as knowledge advances definitive new health risks may be discovered. This concept should be engendered in the policies of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to which industry and government look to set safety standards. The NAS through their expert panel, the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) panel is suppose to protect the public interest but is biased and skewed and is working to undermine the cautious approach advocated by more thoughtful groups. Currently the BEIR panel is working to dismantle the linear no threshold model. Some members of the panel even subscribe to the lunatic theory of "hormesis" which holds that a little radiation is good for you, a theory routinely rejected by reputable scientists. If the BEIR panel is successful in it's efforts to undermine the safety standards that protect all of us then the nuclear industry, both military and commercial, will stand to benefit at our expense.

Since the DOE has realized that the ultimate cost for cleaning up their nuclear mess will approach 1 trillion dollars nationally they have developed the concept of "stewardship" to justify leaving the waste were it is. This is a euphemism designed in a public relations ploy to co-opt the hearts and energies of good people in the community to buy into the concept of inadequate clean up. An example from our own community is the Mixed Waste Landfill located at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia's budget for environmental restoration is about 20 million dollars a year. With this money they have cleaned up a variety of contaminated sites, but the Mixed Waste Landfill will cost over 30 million dollars to clean up. Therefore, instead of redistributing the necessary funds away from weapons development they have decided to leave this dangerous radioactive dump right where it is just a few miles from Albuquerque and Isleta Pueblo. Sandia is currently holding a series of meetings to develop their "stewardship" policy for this landfill. In a stewardship handbook printed by the DOE they suggest that these unremediated landfills be used as environmental experiments to see if the risk to human health and the environment from leaving this waste in our communities is "acceptable." This is ingenious; if they get away with this then they will have justification to continue dumping their ongoing radioactive waste stream in numerous dump sites around the country. This solves several problems for the DOE. They won't have to spend the money to clean up current contamination, and they can rid themselves of the bottleneck of ongoing waste disposal allowing them to accelerate their nuclear agendas.

Finally, in an effort to win the hearts and souls of our youth, to avoid all of this nasty dissent in the future, the DOE is going into our schools and creating a new curriculum. This is a pro-nuclear curriculum designed to mold the thoughts of future generations of Americans. This is occurring across the nation as well as right here in the Albuquerque Public School system. This strategy is referred to in the DOE's publications on stewardship.

These efforts on the part of the DOE and other policy makers are subtlety changing our nation's nuclear policy. The people of this country are not being given the opportunity to debate this and participate in a meaningful way. These efforts are both diabolical and ingenious. If we don't speak now and help to shape the direction of our future our children and grandchildren may be surprised and dismayed at where our apathy has lead them.