Radioactive waste

[Bernard Cohen <blc+@PITT.EDU>]

The following is an abstract of a paper I recently submitted for 

publication. I can send copies of the full paper to requestors.



Understanding the Toxicity of Buried Radioactive Waste and Its Impacts



Abstract



          The oral ingestion toxicities of buried high level radioactive 

waste from nuclear power plants and of the natural radioactivity in the 

ground are calculated and expressed as cancer doses (CD), the number of 

fatal cancers predicted by the linear-no threshold theory if all of the 

material were fed to people. Unless the size of the U.S. nuclear power 

industry is greatly expanded, there will probably never be more than 2 

trillion CD in U.S. repositories, as compared with 31 trillion CD in the 

ground  above them. Measurements of the U, Th, and Ra in human bodies 

indicate that the latter cause 500 deaths per year in U.S. The great 

majority of this material is derived from the top few meters of soil 

that are penetrated by plant roots. It is concluded that the annual 

number of U.S. deaths from buried nuclear wastes will be in the single 

digits (or less), orders of magnitude less than the number from coal 

burning electricity generation, the principal competitor of nuclear power.