NUCLEAR WASTE: The 10,000-Year Challenge

A sober look at a serious, growing problem: There's enough ""high-level nuclear waste"" (never mind the lower grades) in the US to cover a football field to a depth of three feet, an amount that will double in the next decade; this country's single permanent storage facility is still only in the planning stage, and will take longer to build than to fill Meanwhile, canisters of highly radioactive materials are being buried in shallow trenches, tossed into the ocean, or left underground in corrosive salt deposits. In a valiant but unconvincing effort to prove that the government has a handle on this menace, the authors describe in detail how the nuclear industry's ignorance and negligence are being challenged by legislation; how wastes are produced, handled, and transported; and how potential storage sites and containers are tested. A brief account of other countries' efforts to dispose of nuclear waste makes even more frightening reading. Except for a picture of Nagasaki survivors, the b&w photos and charts here are impersonal and routine, but the information is backed by extensive source notes and a large, current bibliography. A ""pronuke"" update to Hyde's Everyone's Trash Problem: Nuclear Waste (1979) and Bartlett's Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America (1985). Glossary; index.