HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday gave over much of its 30-minute broadcast time to the threat posed to the United States by its growing stockpile of nuclear waste.
Using data from sources including the Nuclear Energy Institute and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, host John Oliver called attention to more than 71,000 tons of spent fuel from commercial reactors and over 100 million gallons of liquid waste from U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing.
“You may live closer to nuclear waste than you think,” Oliver warned. “One out of three Americans live within 50 miles of high-level nuclear waste, some of which, like plutonium, is lethally dangerous and will be around for an incredibly long time.”
Congress in 1982 demanded that the Department of Energy build a permanent repository for U.S. spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste, and five years later directed that the facility be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Subsequent presidential administrations have alternately advanced or halted that project, with the Trump administration most recently requesting funding for licensing the facility. In any event, it remains years away from realization – a point “Last Week Tonight” emphasized by airing a clip from a 1990 television news report on the lack of agreement on where to store radioactive waste.
Disposal measures over the decades have included sealing radioactive waste in barrels dumped off the East Coast (per the Tampa Bay Times’ “The Atomic Sailors”) and considering sending it into space (a dismissed idea illustrated by video of a rocket spectacularly coming apart after launch), Oliver said.
Leaks of waste from locations such as DOE’s Savannah River and Hanford sites create their own environmental danger, Oliver noted – for example, two radioactive alligators in South Carolina. And spent fuel rods in wet storage pose another risk in the event of a disaster akin to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi
House Energy and Commerce Committee senior adviser Jordan Davis highlighted the segment via Twitter to call attention to legislation intended to finally force Yucca Mountain into being – Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017.