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The public, obviously, cannot accept the 'say-so' of the nuclear industry about reactor safety. Objective scientific evidence relating to reactor safety must be provided. It is most noteworthy that all of the technical reviews of ECCS effectiveness by groups such as ours, who are independent of the nuclear industry, have reached the same conclusion. (We have listed above all of the independent reviews of the ECCS issue that have been made public.) The existence of such strong doubts of ECCS effectiveness among scientists who have investigated this issue should warn the public that AEC safety assurances are open to serious question.

Radioactive Waste Storage and Other Problems

In addition to major reactor accidents, the reactor program is beset by other difficulties. One of the most important of these problems involves the storage and disposal of radioactive wastes. The radioactive wastes created in nuclear power plants are extremely toxic and persistent poisons. These radioactive wastes will have to be stored

somewhere, somehow for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They can never be allowed to return to the environment. Nuclear power plants are expected to have a service life of no more than about 40 years. Yet the wastes each one creates will become a legacy from this transient existence to future

generations for nearly geological periods of time.

According to the AEC, no technically or economically

feasible method for long-term storage or disposal of radioactive

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*/

wastes is yet available. All proposed techniques for

storing these wastes are in a research and development stage. Many people have come to believe that present nuclear power plant construction plans, which imply accumulation of more radioactive wastes, should be halted until a proven method for safely storing radioactive wastes is available.

The AEC has already experienced major difficulties in storing the wastes accumulated from the nuclear weapons production program. For example, in June of this year it was discovered that 115,000 gallons of high level radioactive waste had leaked from a tank at the AEC's waste storage

facility in Hanford, Washington.

**

The official investi

gation revealed that the tank had been leaking for several weeks, that no automatic alarm system alerted anyone to the leak, that the management in charge of the storage facility did not review monitoring reports that would have shown the leak, that there was no preventive maintenance applied to the

*/ F. K. Pittman, Management of Commercial High-Level Radio active Waste, a paper presented at a summer course on Nuclear Fuel and Power Management, Mass. Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., July 25, 1972.

**

*/ Union of Concenred Scientists letter to AEC, June 23, 1973.

USAEC, Report on the Investigation of the 106 T Tank Leak at the Hanford Reservation, Richland, Washington, July

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monitoring equipment, and that persons with responsibilities for overseeing the storage of these waste materials had no formal training to assist them in the execution of these important responsibilities.

All in all, we are profoundly ·

disturbed by the prospects of accumulating radioactive wastes that the country does not have the secure technology to cope with and which the AEC is today dealing with in a supremely careless manner.

Another public safety and national security issue associated with nuclear power plants is the theft of special nuclear materials. This class of materials, which includes

certain types of uranium and plutonium, may be used to construct nuclear weapons. As more and more reactors come into operation, the quantity of these materials present in the nation will increase. The theft of these materials, as they are transported routinely through the notoriously insecure commercial transportation network, can be used as the basis for blackmail and terrorism. The principal obstacle that a terrorist group would face in the fabrication of a nuclear weapon is the acquisition of the special material from the reactor program. It is within the capability of sub-national groups (e.g., "Black September") to construct a nuclear weapon from such materials that are available in the commercial nuclear power program. Moreover, given the

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hazards of plutonium, it would not be necessary to turn this material into a weapon in order to undertake a terrorist campaign. The threat simply to disperse this immensely toxic material, among the most potent of cancer-causing agents, would be adequate for the terrorist purposes. (A quantity of plutonium the size of a grain of pollen is sufficient to cause lung cancer in mammals.)

A host of subsidiary problems

cancer among uranium

miners, the public safety hazards from residues from uranium mining, emissions of radioactive materials for nuclear fuel reprocessing plants would complete the list of public safety considerations which must be entertained in connection */ with a review of the risks associated with nuclear power plants.

Implications

The public safety problems associated with nuclear power constitute, in our view, ample justification for a curtailment in this country's nuclear power plant construction program; these problems must be resolved prior to continued construction. It is clear that no public airing of these important safety issues was made prior to the start of the present reactor construction boom. Indeed, the magnitude of present hazards was not even fully identified. Instead, the

*The public safety problems associated with the nuclear program, summarized here, are discussed in a major report, entitled The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, The Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge, Mass., October 1973.

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AEC quietly worked with U.S. reactor manufacturers and utility companies to promote a dream that they mutually shared: cheap, abundant, safe electric power. We, and others who have made detailed scientific and technical investigations of the nuclear power program and who, because of our position outside the nuclear industry, are able to speak freely, have come no longer to regard nuclear power as desirable but as a technology that it is now wise to deemphasize and to avoid.