Q: When you were with WIPP, can you give me a brief idea of what the U.S. policy was in regards to solving the Nuclear waste cleanup policy. Or Nuclear cleanup issue.

A: Well, the the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was created as a result of the formalization of national policy. Articulated by the congress in the legislation that was passed to in fact, create a facility to demonstrate the appropriate disposal methodologies for a category of waste that we call transuranic waste. That it is the defense complex generated waste that is contaminated with small quantities of plutonium or plutonium donor products. So in other words a specific defined objective in terms of a national policy decision that was to be solved by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Q: What, do you have any idea of what the other options were? Before WIPP came about what were they thinking of doing with the waste?

A: Well, for years in the operational activities from the conception of the Manhattan Project when we really created the programs to create nuclear weapons there were various methodologies or techniques to deal with the wastes that were generated in these facilities. And you ended up doing what the scientists and the engineers and the managers thought the responsible thing at the time - isolating the waste in some form. It could be in some shallow trenches, burial in trenches. Could have been putting it in drums and putting it in buildings and then managing the buildings to prevent exposure to either the workers or to the public. So there were various things done to deal with the problem on a real time or short term basis. Really early on it was determined uh, that the long term solution for nuclear waste of all types was to isolate it from the biosphere. And that is a fairly rational approach when you think that you think the real risk to living things, living uh, entities, animals, plants humans is through some proximity to the radiation generating materials. So if you remember from the biosphere isolated for the lifetime of the risk uh, then you eliminate the problem from uh, from the environment. So in as early as 1957 the national academy of sciences articulated an approach that did in fact, support the concept for repositories. In some geologic structure that was stable, that would isolate the material from the environment for tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years. That's the path that we have been on in this country and that's the path uh, the international community, all the countries that have nuclear programs be it civilian nuclear programs or nuclear weapons programs, have followed similar paths. And the policy decisions have been articulated through both national and international policy statements. For example the international atomic agency has published a number of uh, documents that articulate the consensus among the scientific and technical community and the policy makers in that the right thing to do is to remove nuclear waste from the biosphere. In some sort of structure, some sort of repository design specifically for that purpose.

Q: I know that you've said that it is more dangerous to leave the nuclear waste on site. You've said that to me on the phone. Can you explain a little bit why that is?

A: Well, yes. Again, the real risk to the public, and this is sort of the involuntary risk, they don't volunteer to be exposed to the radiation, is to have the radiation producing materials in the biosphere. And the biosphere, broadly speaking is in the air in the accessible environment where we can come in contact with it either directly or through some indirect exposure pathways like through water or through inhalation through airborne ways, uh, as long as we leave the material on the surface in proximity to population centers, which is the case we find today, I think the statistics that within a 50 mile radius of the 23 temporary storage facilities where we have transuranic waste in storage today, we already have over 50 million U.S. citizens. Now that's a substantial proportion of the population. Uh, it isn't environmentally acceptable to leave the material there. For example, Rocky Flats, when Rocky Flats was first created, Denver was a very small cow town there wasn't much population there. Well, now the population is over 2, about 2 and ½ million in a 50 miles radius of Rocky Flats. You don't want to leave those people exposed to some potential risk for a long period of time. The problem is the radiation risk, particularly when it is plutonium because of it's very long half life, last for a very, very long time. And if you can remove that risk from the accessible environment through some rational method, that would be the right thing to do. We can safely manage it for the time being. We have managed the transuranic waste in storage and all the nuclear waste in storage very successfully for years. There have been very limited exposures to the public from all this material. Uh, But none of us have the ability to predict over the tens of thousands of years or the hundreds of thousands years in the case of plutonium, that that situation would continue. Uh, so it just isn't rational to say it's OK to leave it there. We need to deal with the problem. We need remove the risk from the biosphere and the way to do that is to put it into some stable geologic formation that has been stable for millions years where we can engineer a solution and isolate it from the environment. And demonstrate that in fact we can do that for ten thousand year period or whatever period becomes the regulatory standard. In the case of WIPP we've actually done that, or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant we've done that, in regards to the Environmental Protection Agency established environmental protection standards for that facility. We should get on with that job. The risk to the public will not be diminished just through the passage of time by leaving the material on the surface.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about exactly how dangerous plutonium. I mean, I've heard that - I mean you said on the phone that people will say that it's the most dangerous thing out there, but you've said that you don't think that's true. So, um, maybe just a little bit about -

A: Well, it's not that I don't think it's true, I know it's not true. From the scientific technical basis, the statement that plutonium is the most toxic substance known to man are absolutely patently false. And it's not true. There have been some analogies given that have been given as examples. And I used one once and people got very interested that I, it had been before. That is somebody would say well I'll take a beakers 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, it won't be me. Or a beaker of botulism or a beaker of some other sort of deadly toxin. Uh, what happens when you give those statements like plutonium is the most toxic substance known to man and one gram is enough to kill every living creature, we know that's patently false, we know it's not true, but it's very emotional and it scares the dickens out of the public and therefore it impedes our ability to deal rationally with the problem. Plutonium in terms of it's radiation uh, risk, is an alpha emitter. Alpha radiation is a very low energy form of radiation that will not penetrate your skin. So, all you need to shield yourself from plutonium is having your skin intact. Or a piece of paper or a piece of plastic or something. The risk from plutonium is that you get it in your body someway. That is it is ingested. Or it is inhaled . The real risk from all the research, and there is a great deal of research and there is a great deal of scientific documentation of the phenomenonalagy and the risk of plutonium's interaction with living matter. The risk is, the greatest risk is inhalation because plutonium can, particles of respirable size can lodge in the lungs and once there, they're there forever. It's like having silicone, you know, like the coal mining families. My family were all coal miners, so the coal mining people dealt with black lung, that's getting black carbon particles in the lungs. Uh, if you get the plutonium in your lungs, it generates alpha particles which can penetrate the lung tissue because it's very soft tissue. Uh the interesting thing about that is, however, it doesn't spread in some sort of network like a cancer. The plutonium kills cells in the vicinity of where the particles is. The alpha particles do. But you get scar tissue that form around that particle. And the interesting that is after a certain thickness of scar tissue forms, the alpha particles can not penetrate that scar tissue. So what they found with plutonium workers where they have done the research and done the X-rays is that they will have spots of damaged lung tissue but they will be sealed into some scar tissue. And that's the limit of it. Of course there is some level, if you breath in a great deal of the dust that would permeate the lungs, and would eventually cause some cancer. That's the risk from plutonium. If you ingest it, uh, it has been found that plutonium passes through the body very quickly. It isn't taken up in other organs. So it passes through your body in some cases, it's been documented, it passes through faster than alcohol would pass through if you had a drink. So, that's why I say it's fairly well documented from a scientific technical basis that these statements that it's the most toxic substance known to man are untrue. It does, however, um, that mythology, does however, cause some very difficult when you deal with the public on these issues. Uh, a particular problem it creates is when you deal with the public when transporting the material. Trying to get it from where it is, say on the surface, and to where you want to dispose of it generates quite a bit of fear in the public because of these myths of it being so dangerous. Uh, and those are sort of the issues that really, those sort of campaigns and sort of things that some of the opposition groups have used, make it difficult to engage the public in meaningful dialog on this issue and to come up with rational decision making and national policy that represents the public well fare. Not the special interest group well fare. And uh, that is somewhat frustrating but, you know, it's the sort of environment that we are living in and the social interactions. We need a bit more education about that in the public but we're not, we're not getting, their education on education on nuclear issues has been difficult for years. And I don't think we're going to make any progress in the near term. On that we need to keep pushing the sort of the fundamental uh, practical approach to the problem. That is, we can leave all this stuff where it is and leave over 50 million people with some potential risk, whatever that risk is. You can view it as a low risk or a high risk. In the near term it's a low risk and we leave it there forever and we loose institutional control of this material as some propose we will loose institution control of the repository at some point. Then it, the risk goes up substantially. The risk can be viewed as very high to you right now. In any case, the risk is real, it' high, it's multiplied by 50 million people. The alternative is move it and take on the low risk, the transportation risk, and I would argue they are low, move it to a spot where you can demonstrate where you can control it or dispose of it and contain it for over 10 thousand years. Where you greatly diminish or decrease the risk and uh, the population that is potentially at risk. And I maintain that putting it a ½ 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 0 people at risk versus 50 million people at risk when you do that. To me that makes a lot of sense but you have to buy in that the technology is there where we can actually dispose of it and maintain it there. The, if you look at the other pieces of it, well what happens if some of it is to get out in some way? And there have been some calculations been done by reputable scientists and engineers that shows that even if all the curies of radioactive material that were put in there where to get out over some period of time and be diluted in the say the Pecos River or the Rio Grande or wherever they, people have proposed it will get to, that the risk are still very, very small for any exposure and damage to large segments of population. So, that's where we have it, that's the balance. 50 million people at risk, very few or no people at risk with the disposal alternative. It's worth going for the solution in my view. That's why I was pleased to be involved in the uh, project for over five years. That's a very long answer to your question.

Q: Yeah, I was just think that too. How many questions did he just hit on? Um, OK. I think the answer to this, you've hit on it already, but maybe just a short sound bite um, Do you think WIPP is going to help solve our waste storage problem?

A: I think that WIPP is absolutely key to a rational solution to the nuclear waste management problem in this country. It focuses on a fairly small volume of the totality of the nuclear waste problem. And that is the defense generated transuranic waste category. But it is the longest lived part of the problem. That is it is the concentration of the plutonium waste and that's the part, that's the waste that, the radiation that lasts you know, ten half lives is the rule of thumb when something decays to a background level or a harmless level. With plutonium that is over, that's nearly 25,000 years so it is 250, 000 year part of the problem. The spent fuel and other parts of the problem are shorter half life 30 - 60 years so it's a 300-600 or 10,000 part of the problem if you really want to stretch it. So, you're dealing with the longest lived part of the problem. You're dealing with the part of the problem that frightens the public the most because of this mythology that has grown about plutonium being the most toxic substance known to man. And we have addressed that, it's not true but that's the perception. So dealing with that part of the problem, in the near term I thing will enable us to deal with the very difficult shorter, uh, term part of the problem. That is what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel that's at the various power plants and the, and DoE facilities around the country. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant's ready to go, it's certified by the Environmental Protection Agency as meeting the Environmental Protection Standards, it should be opened as soon as possible to begin disposing of the plutonium contaminated waste that exists at these 23 sites around the country.

Q: Will WIPP handle all transuranic waste?

A: Well, actually WIPP can take all of the waste that fits that definitional category of defense generated transuranic waste. Ok, we do get caught up in semantics here. Because defense generated transuranic waste means, and that's what the legislation covered, that's what, that's the policy that congress set, thereby, the people's representative set, that that's what WIPP is for. WIPP can take all of the waste that fits that category. OK? Actually, there is enough capacity that WIPP could take a lot more stuff. But it's not planed to do that because the law is very specific about what it can take. So it can take all those. And I've hear the activists or the folks who oppose WIPP or any solution to the problem say well, you can't solve all the problem so don't solve any of it. That's like saying we can't cure, we can't solve all, we can't cure all the cancer that's in the world, so don't cure any of it. Well that's not a very sensible approach. 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. And there are a large number of sites, for example the, of the 23 sites I mentioned it, when WIPP opens and if the transportation system is uh, really engaged and they start producing it, within a 10 year period thereabouts, 10 or 15 years, we could close down about 15 or 16 of those sites and reduce the population at risk from 50, I think it was 53 million to 4 million. Now doesn't it make sense to reduce the risk from transuranic waste potential exposures to 49 million people? And to say well, you can't solve all the problem don't solve that part is not sensible. It's a beginning to solve all of the problem. The next piece that has to happen to solve the nuclear waste management problem in this country is, you have to get WIPP open and then we have to come to resolution on a repository like the Yuca mountain facility or some alternative for the spent fuel and the other categories of nuclear waste. But to say that just because WIPP doesn't solve it all we shouldn't solve any of it is non-sensical and irrational and uh, I, the public will see through that sort of argument very quickly.

Q: Um K. Do you think that the safety concerns have been adequately addressed?

A: I am absolutely convinced of it. If I weren't I wouldn't been there to help try to get the facility open for five years. I did my thesis on uh, high level waste disposal in 1973 in MIT. I was convinced then it was the right thing to do. The safety has been demonstrated. We're in a salt formation that's been documented to be 250,000 years. 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. The salt has been there for 250 million years which is a 170 million years since the great meteor hit the Yucatan peninsula which many folks postulate had something to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs. That salt formation had been there 100 and some mi- 70 million years before that. To say it is going to become unstable in the near term for some inexplicable reason or some other catastrophe is going to make it destabilize and uh, some extraordinary thing is going to happen, is not very supportable from a scientific or technical basis. The modeling that we did in the last five years uh, in terms in getting the compliance application the EPA demonstrated authoritatively that it will be able to contain the material in all kinds of happen stance sort of things. Human intrusion, uh, we even postulated an increased rainfall when the water table rising all the way to the surface. Uh lots of things that were put in there demonstrated conclusively and that's why the EPA certified it that it can contain this material for the required 10,000 year period. There are many ways that you can postulate failure for the system that can not be substantiate through any scientific or technical modeling of that repository. So, I'm convinced, I think the EPA was convinced, that's why they, they certified it and uh, I think it would be a true disservice to the American public not to open this facility and solve this problem.

Q: This is the last question. How does the safety of WIPP compare to the shallow pit burial?

A: Well you know for years before we had the articulation of policy and chang - change the criteria both in terms of allowable radiation exposure for workers and then the radiation exposure that might be acceptable to the public. There has been tremendous changes in that down. The amount of radiation that is acceptable. So when the nuclear era began the scientists, engineers, and managers did what they thought was the rational thing to protect the workers and the public. And some of those things now we view as not being very acceptable. But that's similar what we did in terms of air and water pollution. You know when we had the industrial revolution what was acceptable at that time? And we keep rationing the standards down. We've done that with radiation exposure and now we have acceptable levels of radiation exposure that are extraordinarily low uh, that are really unnecessary in many ways. You just increase your radiation exposure substantially coming to Santa Fe from Carlsbad because you came up 4000 feet in elevation so you get more natural radiation. Not only that you came up near some granite formations and in a uranium producing area, Grants and Gallup and so forth. So it's gone up by over 20% probably. So when you talk about rationing it down and we've changed the standards it makes it appear as if some of the things that the scientists and engineers did in the early days were not very safety minded and they really didn't care much about public safety. And I argue that case because they did what they thought was necessary to meet the standards at the time. We've changed those. So burying this material in shallow trenches, putting it in drums and putting buildings, or leaving it in old reactor buildings and things, was not, those were not just sort of random acts of unsafe or unthinking managers. They were appropriate for the time the standards - some of them are appropriate to leave where they are. For example we do have in the DoE complex at some of the sites waste that has been buried and we have some at Los Alamos for example, we have some in Idaho, we have some at Hanford, we have some at Oak Ridge, Savannah River that should be left there. It is low level radiation uh, activity. It should be left, not excavated, and not treated, and not moved. And we need to make those determinations bases on what the standards are today and what we know about the material. Because the people who've become exposed to that stuff when you start digging it up are the workers. So do you trade off worker safety for some perceived minute increase in public safety? As a person who has been in operations in the mining industry and others for a long time I'm reluctant to do that. There are other categories, however, where we need to do something. There may be categories where there is a fairly high radiation activity level and we should excavate that and treat it and do something safe with it. So you do the trade off's between the worker exposure and short term risk and the long term risk to the public. So there are sites like in Idaho and in Rocky Flats and at Los Alamos where there will be some excavation, some DoD facilities and some clean up of that material. But you still need a place to send the material when you do that. You can not clean up Rocky Flats and close it down, which is the plan, and then remove the, any risk to the population up there, without having a place to send it. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and there are some stuff that can't go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant from Rocky Flats so it goes to some other sites. We need to look at those sites where we have material buried. We need to make those determinations in the context of the standards that exist today. And either leave it there and safe guard it in some way or remove it, treat it and ship it some place. Some of the opposition groups seem to want it both ways. They want to eliminate the problem in their backyard but they don't want to solve the problem any where. You can't just take all this stuff and ship it to Savannah River and say well we solved the problem. You've just moved the problem, you haven't solved it. The same thing with the waste, so we need to focus in -
 

END INTERVIEW