Radioactive Waste Disposal and Geology. Konrad B. Krauskopf. Chapman and Hall, 29 West 35th St., New York, NY 10001-2291. 1988, 120 pages. $29.95, cloth. Reviewed by Alvin L. Young and George P Dir, Committee for Radiation Research and Policy CoordiMtion, W c e of Science and Technology Policy, Executive @ce of the Presidenr, Washington, DC 20036.
In Radioactive Waste Disposal and Geology, Krauskopf provides national and international perspectives on radioactive waste disposal problems. He carefully dissects each issue, treating its pros and cons equally. Moreover, Krauskopf is careful to distinguish between the various types of wastes and the respective strategies for their management and disposal. Krauskopf describes geologists aptly: “Geologists are accustomed to making accurate reconstructions of the past, but not to forecasting the future in any detail.” The author implies that geologists are a unique breed of scientists who look at the Earth’s behavior in terms of thousands or millions of years and who consider the time needed for waste isolation to be “elastic.” On the other hand, politicians tend to think in terms of their tenure in office, and the average individual tends to think in terms of his or her life span. This wms to have motivated the author to raise the issue of “intergenerational equity,’’ the concern that the nuclear waste burden will be passed on to other generations if we do not apply our scientific and technological knowledge appropriately. Conversely, Krauskopf cites the possibility that future generations may need to retrieve high-level nuclear waste to recover its strategic metal and energy values. The author provides a refreshingly lucid view of the politician’s dilemma: whether to store high-level waste in an engineered surface facility or dispose of it immediately in a deep geologic re272 Environ. Sci. Technoi., M i . 23. No. 3, 1989
pository. “[Politicians are] pulled one way by technical experts counseling delay, another way by members of his or her constituency eager for action . . . and still a third way by the unfortunates who feel themselves threatened by having either a storage facility or a deep repository constructed near their homes.” Krauskopf takes pains to balance good science, public perception, and “matters of emotional import.” He also characterizes “the uncertainty in technical knowledge and disagreement among the technical experts themselves” as confounding the public and politicians and prolonging constant debates on the subject. The heart of the book is an excellent, well-presented treatise on the nature and types of radioactive wastes, disposal alternatives and strategies, radionuclide release and disposal models, geologic repositories, natural analogues, subsea-bed options, and lowlevel wastes. Krauskopf muses over the billions of dollars to be spent on uranium mill tailings, the “endless political debate” associated with them, and the difficulty of
balancing their risks and benefits. The most recent salient example of this is the imbalance between resources expended on the issues of natural radon, with millions of persons at risk, and resources spent on outdoor radon from tailings, with few persons at risk. The author also discusses the merits of surface waste protective structures that would require little or no human attention for a very long time. Yet at the same time he states that there is “widespread agreement that mined geological repositories are the best solution to the problem of waste disposal.” This state ment presumes that the national accumulation of radioactive waste can be collected or disinterred, packaged, transported, and placed in a remote repository in the West as now set forth in national plans. Krauskopf poses the questions: “Is all this research [on radioactive waste management] really necessary? Are the added details important enough to be worth the expense?” He adds that many believe that “the waste research enterprise is developing a life of its own which will be hard to stop.” Indeed, radioactive waste manage mnt, including research, already is a multibillion-dollargrowth industry R e cent estimates indicate that under the current national waste program plan, $100 billion could be spent in the United States during the next few decades. In Krauskopf‘s view, this is an inducement to terminate the debate of the last two decades and get on with the solution to the problem of radioactive waste disposal, which he considers “difficult but manageable.” One problem with Radioactive W t e Disposul and Geology is that it is painfully neutral; the reader expects learned conclusions and recommendations that are never presented. Despite this difficulty, the book is a remarkably broad, baland, and objective discourse on the interactions between two disciplines and is recommended reading for the engineer, scientist, politician, and layperson alike.
W15936x1891G9230272$01.5010
B 1989 American Chemical Society
