So, what should be done about nuclear waste?
First, says Kamps, "we should stop making it." He calls for the closure of every one of the 92 nuclear power plants now in the United States, the building of no more and a push for safe, clean, green energy sources led by solar and wind energy. Nuclear power plants in the U.S. have since 1957 generated nearly 100,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste, he says. Second, the "best option is hardened onsite storage."
Currently, most nuclear waste, he says, is at reactor sites in pools of water which must be kept circulating. If there is a "loss of water" accident, the nuclear waste in the pools can go "up in flames."
Kamps and Beyond Nuclear, with other environmental and safe-energy groups, is now challenging"along with the state governments of Texas and New Mexico"the present U.S. government plan involving "so-called interim" nuclear waste sites in Texas and New Mexico.
They would be amid largely Latino communities, and on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the U.S. It extends north to South Dakota, encompassing eight states, and is a main source of water for drinking and irrigation.
Also, the U.S. Department of Energy has, he says, "restarted its federal consolidated interim storage facility scheme, last attempted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A whole new crop of nuclear waste dump fights can be expected, especially ones targeting Native American reservations to agree to host the most deadly poison our society has ever generated."
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Oyster Creek, among the oldest nuclear power plants
in the U.S."it began operation in 1969"is in the midst of being demolished after its closure in 2018. There's been a "a series of worrisome accidents" in the tearing down process reported The Washington Post last month. And then there is the decommissioned Oyster Creek plant's nuclear waste.
Oyster Creek was manufactured by General Electric and was a Mark I nuclear power plant"the same model of those that blew up at the Fukushima nuclear plant site in Japan.
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