Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 10, Number 11, 1 November 1993 — Send your waste elsewhere [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Send your waste elsewhere

by Rowena Akana Trustee-at-large Pearl Harbor has joined the undistinguished list of sites where the U.S. government will be "temporarily storing" radioac-

tive nuclear waste. Apparently the government and ecology of Idaho have tired from almost a half century of temporary storage duties. No wonder. This spent nuclear fuel, from Navy vessels, Depart-ment of Energy reactors and

assorted private power plants, has a half-life of perhaps 25,000 years. For the past 40 years, spent nuclear fuel generated by Navy warships has been shipped by rail to a sprawling Department of

Energy (DOE) complex in eastern Idaho. The complex reprocessed the spent fuel into a solid form so it could be stored permanently. The problem is the DOE has no plan in plaee for the removal or disposal of the solidified waste. Idaho became the Navy's de facto dumping ground, until . Idaho sued the DOE. Now the DOE must find alternatives. It thinks Pearl Harbor could be one of them. Unless you say otherwise. Pearl Harbor is the least suitable shipyard to receive and process spent nuclear fuel. The harbor spills into the waters surrounding the island's most popular tourist destination, Waikīkī. The nearshore waters sustain a !

fragile ecosystem that sustains the diets of many Hawaiians. The harbor itself abuts the 1 1 th largest population center in the U.S. The Pearl Harbor naval ship-

| yard already holds 9 two large casks of I high-level radioacI tive waste, in a i fenced area I between drydocks I 2 and 3. Pearl Harbor's share of unclassified radioactive solid waste, not counting this reac-

tor waste, eame to 2,792 cubic feet. Before 1970, these wastes were dumped at sea. Now the waste is not dumped, iyIn 1983, an "inadvertent release" of radioactive water

occurred at Pearl Harbor, apparently while the submarine U.S.S. Sargo was being serviced at the shipyard. As of 1991, about 18 submarines have been based at Pearl Harbor. When the Navy stopped dumping their waste, the waste didn't go away. It just piled up. This is why the government is looking for a permanent site to store it. Under the agreement with the state of Idaho and the Department of Energy, the Navy will prepare an environmental assessment — to be released in June 1994 — for its storage of high-level radioactive waste at Pearl Harbor. We should consider whether the price of naūonal security is worth the costs of accepting nuclear waste. Protection by a nuclear-propelled fleet now seems less important than protec-

tion from that fleet. In Russia, defunct submarines now impeiil the health of shipyard eommunities with ill-maintained reactor cores and storage facilities. The U.S. Navy maintains U.S. and Hawaiian soil is relatively safe from Russian-sized ecologieal disasters. But they are happening, if on a more limited, less visible scale. In all likelihood, the vast desert plains near Idaho Falls, Idaho and Hanford, Washington will never be available for human use. The aquifer underlying the Idaho facility is already tainted with radioactivity. Communities miles away from

Hanford learned from loeal newspapers how levels of several radioactive elements skyrocketed in their aquifer stores. Efforts to elean up these and a score of other nuclear waste dumps across America will siphon billions of dollars from the federal budget for decades. With all the eeonomie woes of Hawai'i, the last thing our eeonomy needs is an accident waiting to happen. A permanent or even temporary storage site for spent nuclear fuel is just that sort of accident.