Untangling Best-Case Scenarios
These examples of mixing science with politics leave me with two thoughts, one about the future of nuclear waste disposal and another about the limitations of mission-directed science projects. The renowned hydrologist who developed the Hartman scenario has stated the case nicely and some of my own thoughts in the next paragraph were inspired by his report to the New Mexico Attorney General http://www.ago.state.nm.us/contact.html.
The original goal of nuclear waste disposal was to free society from the responsibility and expense of constantly watching and monitoring nuclear waste. It was the task of geologists and hydrologists to find places in the earth where hazardous wastes could be isolated from the biosphere until no threat existed. As scientists we failed in our task, not from lack of effort and intelligence, but from pressures to find a quick solution. One by one, the original criteria that had been established for safe disposal were set aside in favor of what appeared to be progress. The conflict at the WIPP site between disposal and natural resources, and with petroleum in particular, was hidden and the deception ultimately led to the threat of human intrusion and defeat of the goal of unmonitored disposal. Loss of other established criteria, such as overpressure in the repository and a long travel time in the aquifer, have compounded the problem.
In the long run, continuous administrative control is going to be an incredibly expensive solution. The prospects for maintaining successful control over a period of 10,000 years, or 240,000 years, are exceedingly remote. DOE still clings to the claim that WIPP can be cut loose, free of control, and hopes that concrete pillars on the surface will offer protection. The legacy of WIPP, however, is a need to guard nuclear waste for as long as society has memory.
At WIPP, once the project was funded, and once a staff of scientists and engineers was in place, a form of psychic inbreeding took over. Re-evaluating the project in the light of new evidence was never an option and the science selected data and chose assumptions that furthered the mission. When some members of the team came to believe that other facts and assumptions, harmful to the mission, were more plausible, and when they persisted in this view, they were no longer considered team members and left the project.
Credible scenarios of human intrusion and dismissal of important criteria for safe disposal demonstrate that peer review was inadequate. Once the project had momentum, political rather than scientific motives took over and the end result was a failure to reach the goal of unmonitored disposal. Nuclear waste is now going underground and WIPP has committed our descendants to eternal expense, vigilance, and the real possibility of exposure.
More about WIPP can be found in the Praedial Universe.