MR. GEORGE DIAL: I'll take a beaker of plutonium oxide mixed in water and drink it, if you will do the same with a beaker of pure caffeine.  Now one of us will be in very, very bad shape tomorrow and it won't be me. 

MR. ARJUN MAKHIJANI: I think these kinds of industry propaganda are irresponsible and misleading about the true nature of plutonium.

ADM EUGENE CARROLL, (USN Ret.) [Narrator]:  The world is overwhelmed by the toxic nuclear waste material left over from the production of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.  Ordinary wastes can be hauled to the dump, but no one has yet figured out what to do with the deadly residue of the world's thousands of nuclear reactors.

There are 437 commercial nuclear power plants in the world, 105 in the United States.  Nuclear reactors for research and in military ships and submarines create enormous quantities of dangerous nuclear material.  This material can only be stored -- no one knows how to get rid of it.

America's nuclear weapons plants built over 70,000 nuclear weapons to fight the Soviet Union.  Accourding to the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, the United States has created nuclear residues which would cover a football field four miles deep.  Shrouded by the urgent secrecy of the Cold War, few paid much attention to the mounting dangers posed by this accumulating nuclear waste.  Today, countries around the world are faced with a monumental military mess.

American scientists have proposed burying our nuclear material at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, an impressive name for what some claim is no more than a radioactive landfill.  Is WIPP the answer to our nuclear waste crisis or a potential nuclear nightmare?

MR. MAKHIJANI:  The nuclear waste problem in the world is pretty severe.

NARRATOR:  Arjun Makhijani is a leading expert on nuclear waste disposal.

MR. MAKHIJANI:  It comes from two broad categories mainly.  One is the nuclear waste problem arising from nuclear weapons production and the other is the nuclear waste problem arising from commercial nuclear power.

NARRATOR:  America has produced 150 million cubic meters of radioactive material which now need to be stored.  The known health risks of plutonium and other byproducts of nuclear weapons production include cancer and birth defects.  Some of these manmade substances, such as plutonium, have a half-life of 24,000 years.

Radioactive debris -- old fuel rods, reactor water and contaminated clothing -- will threaten life for hundreds of thousands of years.  We know that exposure to plutonium can result in several types of cancer.  Children are most at risk from nuclear contamination because they would come in contact more often with toxic soil and ground water.

Tom Udall is the attorney general of the state of New Mexico and a congressman-elect.

MR. UDALL: I think this is clearly a national issue.  It's a national concern -- I mean, how we dispose of nuclear waste in a safe way, how we deal with this incredible amount of nuclear waste that we've created over the years.

NARRATOR:  The effects of nuclear waste contamination are similar to radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion:  increased cancers, birth defects, and infertility.  The 1950s practice of storing radioactive material in open pools and dumping it into lakes and unlined pits was just fallout in another form.  How to handle our nuclear substances safely still challenges the best scientists in the world.  To date, proposed "solutions" to this dilemma do not inspire much hope.  Irresponsible disposal practices, as in Russia, make a bad situation worse.

MR. MAKHIJANI:  Russia injected a lot of its high-level waste directly into the -- underground, which is a very poor practice.

NARRATOR:  Russia is not the only nation with a nuclear disposal crisis and no clear idea of how to deal with it.  Radioactive fuel rods and reactor water are problems that affect nations worldwide.

MR. MAKHIJANI:  We've started from square one and gone in the wrong direction.  We need to come back to square one in order to be able to go in the right direction.

NARRATOR:  One of the proposed solutions is deep underground disposal -- away from people and their homes -- ideally in a place that doesn't leak.  Nobody knows which medium, if any -- hard rock, sand, clay, or salt -- will contain radioactive waste safely.  We have the next 24,000 years to find out.

Lokesh Chaturvedi is a highly regarded geologist with the Environmental Evaluation Group, an oversight body for the Department of Energy.

MR. CHATURVEDI: The French are looking at clay as a medium, so are the Belgians. The Swiss are looking at hard rock, igneous rock, as a repository.

NARRATOR:  No one knows if underground storage works, yet some countries already have such facilities.

MR. CHATURVEDI:  There are two sites in Germany, one in the ex-East Germany and one in the previous West Germany, where some waste has been put.  But it was sort of like thrown into the -- like a dump, not carefully emplaced, not for long-term disposal.

NARRATOR:  One of these sites, Gorleben, an underground facility located in a salt bed, was closed in September 1998.  Water is leaking into the site at a rate of over 4,500 gallons a day.

The United Kingdom recently stopped construction of their underground storage site at Sellafield.  Both the United Kingdom and Germany have delayed further construction of underground facilities.

The effects of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 have left no doubt about the dangers of radioactive contamination:  In Russia, citizens fled from entire cities.  Increased rates of cancer occurred thousands of miles from Chernobyl.

The United States recently finished an underground facility located in a salt bed a half-mile underground near Carlsbad, New Mexico.  The site was approved for permanent disposal of radioactive material in May 1998 by the Environmental Protection Agency.  Over the next 35 years, 38,000 truckloads of radioactive cargo are to be shipped to WIPP starting in 1999.

MR. McFADDEN:  The WIPP is there to take care of the legacy that's been generated from the Cold War and to clean up all our facilities out there throughout the country.

NARRATOR:  As other countries wait to see what happens with WIPP, the United States will spend $30 billion on its underground storage facility.

MR. UDALL:  I think it's even more important that we do it right, we do it carefully, and we do it in a way that if the rest of the world's going to look at it, we're not leading people down a path that we wouldn't want them to go.

MR. McFADDEN:  The US policy is deep geological disposal.  The reason for that is because the radioactive materials have a long half-life and you have to remove it from the environment.

NARRATOR:  Mike McFadden is the Department of Energy official in charge of WIPP.

MR. McFADDEN:  We had to demonstrate to our independent regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency, that we could dispose of the waste here for 10,000 years and we can do it safely.

We were able to demonstrate that using computer models and doing science and research on the environment and on our waste and putting it all together in a compliance application that we gave to the EPA.  They reviewed it for about a year and a half, did further analysis on their own and came to the same conclusion that it's a safe place to dispose of nuclear waste.

NARRATOR:  George Dials is a senior vice president with the Environment and Facilities Management Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a group that provides technical support for the Energy Department's environmental restoration projects.

MR. DIAL:  And I maintain that putting it a half a mile underground in a salt formation, which you've seen, that's 250 million years old and sealing it up in there is the right thing to do because, in effect, there are zero people at risk.

NARRATOR:  Located just 26 miles from Carlsbad, a city of almost 30,000, the government's underground storage site, with its stable geology and state of the art containment scheme, is touted as "failsafe."

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, WIPP is designed to store military nuclear wastes such as gloves, rags, equipment, tools, protective gear, and sludges that have been contaminated by plutonium.  These substances contaminated during weapons production represent only a tiny fraction of the total quantity of military nuclear material that must ultimately be dealt with safely.  Meanwhile, the material is in federally approved temporary storage at nuclear weapons plants.

Dallas Gudgell has been a board member of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability for four years.

MR. GUDGELL:  There are a 100,000 barrels with the word WIPP stenciled on the side that I've seen in storage facilities that are federally approved and they're safe.  They're safe where they're at and the citizens aren't worried about those.  What they're worried about is the waste that's in the ground.

NARRATOR:  Of the 150 million cubic meters of nuclear residues, only 175,000 cubic meters, are bound for the underground disposal site in New mexico.  The rest, over 149 million cubic meters, will remain at sites in 28 states around the country.

MR. DIAL:  WIPP is not the solution to the United States' nuclear waste disposal problem.  It is, however, the solution to the United States' defense transuranic waste problem.

MR. GUDGELL:  It's my estimation that it's actually a political answer to a scientific problem and really it doesn't do much for the clean-up.  And, in fact, it takes away money, valuable money that should be being spent on actual environmental remediation and environmental restoration, the clean-up.

NARRATOR:  Given the small fraction of nuclear matter that will go to the government storage site, some question the wisdom of moving so quickly.

MR. UDALL:  Almost from the first day that I took office, we had Secretary Watkins, Admiral Watkins, of the Department of Energy, saying to the state of New Mexico, basically, "We are going to open this site," and so he was very intent on doing that.  And I learned of his activities and I thought first it was just a bluff.  I thought he was trying to move it along in the Congress.

As I kept visiting with my lawyers, they said, "Well, he can't do it because if he does it administratively, it will probably be illegal and we're pretty sure that the courts will declare it illegal."  And I didn't think he would do anything that rash, but he did.  And a federal judge found that it was an improper administrative action and that he was acting illegally, and eventually a permanent injunction was put in place.

NARRATOR:  Citizens of New Mexico are leading a legal battle that will affect the lives of all Americans.  The Department of Energy believes WIPP is ready to open.  However, the state's review body, the Environmental Evaluation Group, raised serious concerns about the design and safety of the site.

MR. CHATURVEDI:  Our fear is that the decision might be made without considering all the uncertainties in the rate of input and so on, how much waste can be brought.  And since this is the first repository, it is best to take measures which will make it as safe as possible and not take any chances.

NARRATOR:  A lawsuit was filed in 1991 by the state of New Mexico and local and national groups seeking to stop nuclear shipments to the facility until the government proves the site will not leak.

MR. UDALL:  And it's basically a challenge to how they carried out the certification process.  We believe that the certification process hasn't worked out the way it should, that there hasn't been substantial evidence to support their certification.

NARRATOR:  Others believe that WIPP is little more than a handy underground nuclear dump site.

MR. GUDGELL:  It seems like the federal government is in a big hurry to solve this in a political way and not in a credible scientific way.  And we really don't need to be in a big hurry to find the one biggest, best hole in the ground for the waste.

NARRATOR:  The specifications for a safe underground storage facility, based on a 1957 report, require a site that is dry, geologically stable, away from natural resources and water, and has a salt creep which would slowly entomb the nuclear substance.  In addition, the waste should be retrievable.

The government's own General Accounting Office and the Environmental Evaluation Group, which is in charge of reviewing the certification process, have both published reports critical of WIPP.  Both question whether the facility is ready to receive nuclear waste and conclude more study needs to be done.

MR. CHATURVEDI:  EEG's concerns relate to a number of assumptions which have been made in projecting what may happen in the future.

NARRATOR:  Experts and citizen groups are also skeptical that all safety criteria have been met.

MR. MAKHIJANI:  I don't believe the waste safety and disposal issues have been adequately addressed.

MR. GUDGELL:  There's a number of problems with WIPP. First of all, the facility itself is flawed.  It isn't the best, biggest, one big hole in the ground for a lot of the waste.

MS. PYLE:  The proponents of WIPP would have you believe that the salt beds are so stable that nothing has disturbed them for millions of years and nothing will disturb them for millions of years.

NARRATOR:  Sasha Pyle is a native New Mexican and a prominent member of the board of directors of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a group which monitors the United States' nuclear activities.  She suspects that the storage site may already be unsafe.

MS. PYLE:  There's absolutely no documentation to support the fact that the beds, the anhydrite layers that compose the site have not been drastically fractured just by the intrusion that was required to build the facility.

NARRATOR:  George Dials disagrees.

MR. DIAL:  To say it's going to become unstable in the near term for some inexplicable reason, or some other catastrophe is going to make it destabilize, and some extraordinary thing happen is not very supportable from a scientific or technical basis.

NARRATOR:  The federal government claims that the natural movement of the ancient salt bed will isolate the lethal material from the nearby population.

MR. McFADDEN:  You excavate an area, you place your waste into this area, and the salt creeps in and totally encapsulates the waste, and the waste becomes one with the rock.

NARRATOR:  At issue is whether the salt will be enough to contain the radioactive material for the thousands of years it will continue to threaten people.  The ceilings are designed to collapse soon after WIPP is sealed, which will cause the canisters to break and release their radioactive contents.

MS. PYLE:  One of the worst parts of the design of WIPP is that the mess will be absolutely irretrievable.  The facility is designed to collapse.

MR. CHATURVEDI:  The drums will crush as soon as the repository starts closing and will most likely get breached in a matter of a few tens of years.  And after that, it is mainly reliance on the geology, the salt beds, to contain the waste.

NARRATOR:  An underground water system directly above the site flows into the Pecos and, ultimately, the Rio Grande Rivers.  Should this system become contaminated, it could take as little as 100 years to reach the rivers.

MR. DIAL:  You've been there.  You know there's no big salt brine inflow.  There's no aquifer flowing through the facility.  If it were, the salt wouldn't be there.

NARRATOR:  However, there is some evidence water is already seeping into the facility.

MS. PYLE:  I did see the big fans blowing to dry out the spots where the moisture is seeping in through the walls of the disposal rooms.

NARRATOR:  Water infiltration could do more than just let toxic radiation leak out.  When water mixes with plutonium, it can create plutonium hydride -- a substance that can ignite spontaneously.  Also, because the containment facility is located in an area rich in natural resources such as gas, oil, and potash, the possibility of accidental penetration by drilling activity exists.

MS. PYLE:  It just does not make sense to assume that that human intrusion will not release toxic chemical and radioactive components into the biosphere.

NARRATOR:  Hundreds of oil and gas wells betray the proximity of abundant natural resources near the site.

MR. UDALL:  Have they made judgments about human intrusion into the particular repository that they've designed?  And in this particular case, we believe they haven't looked at a number of scenarios.

NARRATOR:  The Department of Energy concedes there is a 100 percent chance WIPP will be penetrated.  This suggests that even experts are uncertain the trial facility will work.

MR. DIAL:  Even if all of the curies of radioactive material that were put in there were to get out over some period of time and be diluted in the, say, the Pecos River or the Rio Grande, or wherever people have proposed they would get to, that the risks are still very, very small for any exposure and damage to large segments of the population.

NARRATOR:  But any long-term exposure could result in widespread cancer and birth defects.  An accidental breach of radioactive waste could eventually affect people thousands of miles away.

MR. MAKHIJANI:  It has very serious radio-toxicity dangers and it is also a weapons-usable material.  And this combination makes plutonium extremely dangerous.

NARRATOR:  The last of EPA's criteria for a safe storage site requires that if radiation reaches the soil, it can be cleaned up.  Currently, the Department of Energy has no retrieval plan in the event of a catastrophe.  They believe the nuclear substance is retrievable simply because they know where it is.

MS. PYLE:  Once they decommission the above-ground buildings, and turn off the lights, and plug and seal the shafts and leave the site, there is no force of nature, human or otherwise, that's going to be able to get down there underground and clean up the mess.  It's very much like sweeping something under the rug.

NARRATOR:  The Environmental Protection Agency has certified WIPP even though the government's own oversight body, the Environmental Evaluation Group, has raised concerns about the salt brine and the presence of natural resources in the area.

Aside from these concerns, the centralized location of WIPP demands a transportation system that will truck in toxic material from every corner of the United States.

MR. GUDGELL:  The opening of the WIPP facility is not a local New Mexico question.  There are serious transportation questions that affect 22 states or more.  There are facilities all across the country.

NARRATOR:  Trucks with lethal nuclear waste will drive across 21 states along four separate routes.  The Department of Energy estimates 38,000 truckloads over a 35-year period.  One accident could contaminate hundreds of square miles.

The United States Department of Energy has tested the transportation canisters -- called "trupacks" -- that will be used to ship nuclear waste to WIPP.

MR. McFADDEN:  The package has been designed and built that is very safe.  We have gone to full-scale testing.  We dropped it, punctured it, burned it.  We just beat the heck out of this package trying to make it leak and we could not make it leak.  So, it's a very safe transportation package.

NARRATOR:  Despite extensive testing by the Energy Department, questions remain about the safety of the canisters. They are burn-tested only to 1,475 degrees.  However, many chemicals trucked on the highways today burn at much higher temperatures.  It's not certain whether a collision between a truck with radioactive cargo and a truckload of chemicals could not ignite the canisters.

Despite concerns the site may leak and the transportation canisters fail, trucks loaded with toxic cargo are now scheduled to arrive at the site in early 1999.

MR. GUDGELL:  The WIPP facility and the DOE's -- Department of Energy's plan for the WIPP facility appears to me to just be another sort of misguided boondoggle on cleaning up the waste.  Because one, it does not clean up the waste from the facilities and, two, the site itself has a lot of significant problems.

NARRATOR:  The controversy which surrounds WIPP boils down to two main issues:  Will the facility leak?  And are the transportation canisters for radioactive material safe?  The state of New Mexico has already made it clear that illegal or unsafe shipments will not be tolerated.

MR. UDALL:  This is clearly an issue of health and safety.  It's not an abstract principle of law.  It really comes down to whether or not the science is sound.

NARRATOR:  If people's worst fears are realized, the costs to our children and grandchildren's lives could be extremely high.

MR. UDALL:  We're leaving our grandchildren probably a trillion dollar waste bill right now if we don't do anything about it in the coming decades.  And that is an enormous problem for the entire country.

NARRATOR:  Even if WIPP measures up to all the promises, it will only solve a minute part of our nation's overall nuclear waste storage problem.
 

ADM CARROLL:  WIPP, the nuclear storage facility in New Mexico, is an attempt to take care of only a small portion of our military nuclear material, which may not succeed.  Perhaps the United States should leave this waste in federally approved temporary storage facilities where it is now and instead, bring together the best scientific authorities in America to develop a storage facility that is truly safe.

Until the next time, for "America's Defense Monitor," I'm Eugene Carroll.