News of President Bush’s corporate governance speech and Jesse Ventura’s blood clot drove Tuesday’s Senate vote on nuclear waste storage to the fringes of public discussion. But in the long run, how we manage nuclear materials will be one of the most important issues faced by our society.
Nuclear storage is an issue where uncertainty — the bane of rational decision-making — is likely to predominate for decades to come. Not only does no one really know the probable costs or risks associated with different storage alternatives, but these risks essentially will be unknowable for centuries.
Frank Knight, who helped turn the economics department at the University of Chicago into a powerhouse, made a famous distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risky situations are those in which we are not sure what will happen, but where we have some basis for estimating the likelihood of different alternatives.
I don’t know if my house will burn down or be blown away, but there is enough historical information on how frequently this happens in my neighborhood for myriad insurance companies to feel confident in insuring this risk for a stated fee.
We do not know, however, how likely it is that the geologic conditions at Yucca Mountain, which the Senate approved as a storage site, will change so as to allow the release of dangerous radioactivity. Nor do we have any historical data to analyze to compute the probability of this happening. Nor can we compute the probability that a storage cask at Prairie Island or spent fuel pool at Monticello will be affected by an earthquake, meteorite, jumbo jet crash or terrorist raid.
We have lived with nuclear technology for six decades. Proponents point to the safety record of dozens of nuclear-powered U.S. Navy subs and surface ships and the overall safety record at nuclear plants in the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Critics point to Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, several Soviet sub mishaps and various waste leaks at the Hanford, Savanna and Oak Ridge nuclear materials plants.
Much of the waste produced in the last 60 years still will be dangerous in 10,000 years. It will only take us 500 or 1,000 of those years to accumulate the track record necessary to determine the probability of occurrence of various harmful events.
But this is no help right now.
As has been said so often, the nuclear genie is out of the bottle. We are not in a position of deciding to embark on nuclear power generation or not.
We made that decision, for good or bad, when I was a child and we now have waste at well over 100 different locations in the U.S.
It is not going to magically disappear. The question is, what alternatives represent the least risk.
I am very comfortable with the outcome of Tuesday’s vote. As a layperson who reads the newspapers, I think that the risks of transportation and storage at Yucca Mountain are less than with continued storage at 138 different sites. Other well-informed, well-intentioned citizens disagree with me, as do both of Minnesota’s senators. No one can say for sure who is right, and perhaps we will never know.
That is the core of uncertainty. Individuals, households and societies face uncertainty every day and ultimately make decisions on some subjective basis. That is what the Senate did Tuesday, and now we will have to live with that decision.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.