Jay Shelton
Santa Fe Prep School
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505 982 1829
jshelton@roadrunner.com
ABSTRACT
This paper is addressed primarily to concerned, non-technical citizens. In it, I attempt to put the alleged WIPP hazards into perspective.
Has WIPP been proven perfectly safe? No, but nothing is perfectly safe. Over 100 people die each year in their bathtubs; dozens of people die each year falling out of bed. Hence asking about perfect safely is the wrong question. How big a catastrophe is lurking in the WIPP project? The perception is that WIPP accidents and failures would have disastrous consequences with at least tens of thousands of deaths. But how dangerous is WIPP really, not just how dangerous do people think it is?
Studies cannot forecast the future, but all the quantitative studies of which I am aware predict only minor consequences, even for limiting or "worst-case" mishaps. Typical is the Draft SEIS-II (proposed action) which predicts an average of less than one death per year, with most of the deaths having nothing to do with radioactivity. Five-gallon buckets and drawstrings on children's garments (strangulation) each cause more deaths than this, but the public seems much less concerned.
Some of the public's fear comes from Pu's toxicity having been oversold, probably because the media know that scary stories sell better. It is true that the total amount of plutonium at WIPP "could" kill everyone on earth, but only if a powerful tyrant captured everyone and surgically implanted just the right amount and form of plutonium in each person's lungs. There is also enough water in a typical bucket to be lethal to everyone on the globe if you can arrange to have each citizen drown in it one at a time.
I am not for or against WIPP. I am concerned that we avoid any potential WIPP catastrophe, that we do something safer with the waste soon, and that we not waste billions of dollars. At the moment, available studies do not seem to indicate that WIPP poses much risk. If the studies are in fact reasonably correct and complete, then we should probably not spend more hundreds of millions of dollars each year for minor improvements in safety, nor would it seem prudent to scrap a multi-billion project which would vastly improve the safety of the waste compared to doing nothing. On the other hand, if these studies are in error, someone better quickly point out the errors by doing the studies correctly. Where is the catastrophe?
INTRODUCTION
Is WIPP perfectly safe? Have the TRUPACT shipping containers been proven plutonium-tight under all possible accident conditions? Have all the emergency personnel along the WIPP routes been trained on how to respond to a WIPP truck accident? Can anyone prove that waste placed in the salt beds near Carlsbad will stay there for a quarter of a million years? Can we be sure that sometime in the future prospectors looking for oil or minerals won't drill into the buried waste and bring it to the surface, especially if a pressurized brine pocket is penetrated? Can we be sure that thewaste cannot get up into an overlying aquifer through imperfectly sealed holes, through natural cracks, or through cracks created by pressure from gas generation in the waste? And do we know for sure how fast the aquifer's flow will move the waste to the Pecos river?
No, no, no, no.... The answer to all of these questions is no. That is why we as a society have been so concerned about WIPP - it cannot be proven safe.
Is it too much to ask that WIPP be safe? When dealing with a material as toxic as plutonium, isn't perfect safety what we should expect and demand?
Let's first look at whether perfect safety is achievable. What is absolutely safe? Certainly not driving. Interestingly, walking (on a per-mile basis) is even more dangerous than driving. Not health care; all treatments involve some risk. Not even health diagnostics - drawing blood for analysis carries some risk of infection, and just driving to a health care practitioner involves the risk of death in a traffic accident. Keeping ourselves clean is not safe; over 100 people die each year in their bathtubs. Even being in bed involves risk - dozens of people die each year falling out of bed. Even trying to be safer creates hazards. Having small children seat-belted in their own child safety seats on airplanes would likely save a few lives. But it would probably cost even more lives; the high cost of the extra ticket for the child to be in his/her own seat would probably shift some families from flying to driving, a much more dangerous way to travel. Generating electricity is not perfectly safe, regardless of the method, including all forms of solar electric power. Five-gallon plastic buckets are dangerous; approximately 20 small children drown in them every year. Soccer is not usually thought of as life-threatening, much less soccer equipment, but the tipping over of movable soccer goals kills 1 to 2 players per year.
So let's keep in mind that nothing is absolutely safe. The question should be, "Is WIPP reasonably safe?"
How does one define "reasonably safe?" One way is by comparison. How many people might die due to WIPP compared to other causes of death? Roughly 500,000 deaths each year are directly related to smoking, 100,000 deaths annually are caused by alcohol, and around 50,000 occur in traffic accidents (with some overlap with the alcohol deaths), and another roughly 50,000 in other types of accidents (fires, drownings, firearms, poisonings...). Other proven risky activities are eating too much and not exercising enough. Single transportation accidents involving chemicals, including fuels, can kill dozens and sometimes even hundreds of people. Acts of terrorism can kill hundreds in one event. Large floods and earthquakes can kill hundreds of thousands. Plagues have killed millions. A large meteor impact would kill most life on earth. These natural disasters are true catastrophes, deserving of all the efforts that go into their prevention and/or lessening their consequences.
How big a catastrophe is lurking in the WIPP project? The perception is that WIPP accidents and failures would have disastrous consequences. If Santa Feans were asked about the likely consequences of a WIPP-truck severe accident in Santa Fe, I would not be surprised by street estimates of thousands or tens of thousands of latent cancer deaths. Most Santa Feans probably expect that the future prospectors who drilled right through the underground WIPP waste, bringing it to the surface, would almost certainly die along with members of their families due to the contamination of their clothing. And most serious of all, if the site itself failed and its waste got into an overlying aquifer and ended up in the Pecos river, I think most New Mexicans would predict that there would be contaminated fish floating belly-up, no live plants along the banks, and only dead cattle and other animals for miles on either side of the river all the way down to the Gulf.
But how dangerous is WIPP really, not just how dangerous do people think it is? How does it compare to some other hazards in our lives? What are the catastrophes with thousands of deaths which would be consistent with the public's perception and concern about WIPP's safety?
Making estimates of this sort is not easy. Many assumptions must be made, and none can be defended as being absolutely right. For instance, in the case of a WIPP truck accident in Santa Fe, how much plutonium was on the truck, what fraction of this is released, in what chemical forms, with what distribution of particle sizes (the lungs more easily eject large than small particles), how much of the release becomes airborne, how does its concentration change with distance from the accident, how many people are there along its path, are they indoors or outdoors, are they quiet or exercising, how old are they, how much of the plutonium lands near or on edible plants, and what fraction of people's diets would involve consuming those plants both right away and for centuries to come....? All the assumptions above and many more are then put together mathematically to arrive at an estimate of the hazard.
Such studies have two important potential weaknesses. First, only the consequences of accidents and causes that have been thought of can be included in the calculations. If there is some unforeseen way for there to be much higher releases of waste in an accident, the studies of accident consequences may be incomplete (I say "may" because the "new" failure or accident mode may be so unlikely or of such small consequence that it adds negligibly to the overall risk). Second, there is bound to be a large uncertainty in the results of these studies because they are based on many quantitative assumptions. I personally would not be surprised if the best-intentioned studies were off by a factor of 10. How important this might be is discussed later.
I have sought and read many reports estimating the consequences of various WIPP failures, looking for the potential catastrophe which would explain our very very deep and almost universal fear of WIPP. I look for what in my judgement are technically competent reports or studies - reports which display the hard work mentioned above of making estimates and using math, and wherein all the assumptions and calculations are made clear, so we can all consider their reasonableness. There do not seem to be very many organizations which do such studies on WIPP. The primary sources seem to be the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) itself, The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Environmental Evaluation Group (EEG), New Mexico's watchdog group.
Here are some of the results of the studies I have seen, one of which is the recently released DRAFT WIPP SEIS-II. In a Severity Category VIII accident in Santa Fe - which might result from a major collision at high speed involving a fuel truck, the release of 10% of the radioactive material, and a fire to disperse plutonium in the air (an accident with such a low probability of occurring that it is almost irrelevant what the consequences might be) - it is estimated that there would consequently be a total of 2 to 3 cancer fatalities over all time, but most likely occurring over the subsequent few decades. (This and subsequent risk estimates are, I believe, based on the traditional linear, no-threshold, model. It is my understanding that the majority of health physicists now believe this overestimates the consequences of low dose-rate exposure by a large factor.) All loss of life is tragic, but this is not a catastrophe. To put this in perspective, roughly 10,000 Santa Feans will die from cancer over the next few decades. So even the most improbable accidents are not catastrophes. (Incidentally, Santa Fe's cancer fatality rate is below the national average, as is generally true in the high altitude western states.)
Taking into account all severity classes of accidents for all the trucks traveling in all the affected states for all of the anticipated 35 active years of the proposed project, the Draft SEIS-II estimates a total of 0.4 cancer deaths due to released radioactive material in accidents. (Fractional predicted cancer deaths such as .4 mean there is a 40% chance of one cancer fatality.) To put this in perspective, there will be roughly 20,000,000 cancer deaths in the nation over the same time period.
The Draft SEIS-II (proposed action) estimates about 3 non-accident radiological deaths from transportation for the whole nation during the 35 year period. This is due to the gamma radiation we are exposed to when close to the trucks either on the highway or at rest stops. Over the same period we can expect roughly two hundred thousand deaths from skin cancer due to the natural ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This particular WIPP risk can be largely avoided by individuals who are concerned, since it is mostly due to being right next to a WIPP truck, either in a traffic jam or at a rest stop. But even if one were stuck next to a WIPP truck for half an hour, the radiation dose would be 80 times less than we get from natural background radiation every year. (Table E-15 in the Draft SEIS-II report gives 5 mrem for the dose to a person one meter (about 3 feet) from a WIPP truck for 30 minutes. The average radiation dose due to natural background (cosmic, ground, radon, our own bodies) averages bout 400 mrem per year in Santa Fe.)
A member of a drilling crew who unknowingly bores down through the waste some time in the future searching for oil, gas or minerals is estimated to have one chance in 2700 of consequently getting cancer from radioactivity, according to the Draft SEIS-II.
Finally and most seriously, what if the site itself failed and its waste got into an overlying aquifer and ended up in the Pecos River? An EEG analysis using worst case assumptions estimates that drinking Pecos River water for an entire year would result in a one in 300,000 chance of fatal cancer! Basically this means no dead ranchers, no dead cattle, no bloated belly-up fish!
How could this be? How could the WIPP site itself, with all the contents of the tens of thousands of truck loads in it, leak (the ultimate failure of WIPP) and probably no one gets cancer or dies? This sounds absurd. But here are some of the reasons. Not all the plutonium that gets into the aquifer makes it to the Pecos River - some of it gets stuck on soil particles. The aquifer does not flow fast; thus the WIPP waste enters the river gradually. There the waste is enormously diluted by the much higher flow rate of the Pecos river. And finally, about 99.99% of ingested plutonium is quickly excreted; only a very small fraction stays in the body. (This is not true for inhaled plutonium.)
But this still does not sound right. We all "know" that plutonium is the most toxic and most radioactive substance on earth, and that just one atom will kill you!
Pu's toxicity has been oversold, probably because the media know that scary stories sell better. Plutonium is a very dangerous material, but it is by no means the most toxic, nor is it the most radioactive, nor does it last the longest. In fact in acute ingested doses, vitamin D and caffeine are about as toxic and in fact have killed many more people than has plutonium. As with any potential toxin, the dose matters. Alcohol is lethal if one drinks enough of it at one sitting (a few cups of pure alcohol - 200 proof). So are salt, arsenic, aspirin, lead, sugar, vitamin D and caffeine. But all these materials are also harmless small doses. Plutonium is also harmless in small amounts. We all had plutonium for breakfast, lunch and dinner today - about one billion atoms in each meal. We also breathe in an average of a few atoms of plutonium with every breath. Everyone in the world eats and breathes plutonium regularly. Where did it come from? Atmospheric weapons testing. A few thousand pounds of plutonium is now dispersed around the world. There is no evidence of any health effects, and none is expected based on laboratory studies. Atoms are very very very small compared to our bodies, and it takes huge numbers of them to have any health effects. The numbers matter! In fact it is likely that cancer develops only when the amount of plutonium in a person exceeds a certain threshold amount, which is much much much more than what we will get by eating ordinary food.
But can't just one atom of plutonium kill you? The proper question is not could, it is does one atom of plutonium kill you? There is real evidence on this issue. We are it. We keep living longer despite the addition of billions of plutonium atoms to our diets starting in the 1940's. The average body burden of plutonium is on the order of a billion atoms. If one atom were lethal, then we would all be dead a billion times over. We're not, so it's obviously not. One reasons is plutonium's long half life of 24,000 years; since it will take 24,000 years for half of the plutonium atoms in our bodies to send out their radiation, only a very small fraction (less than 1 percent) will do so during one's lifetime.
It is true that the total amount of plutonium at WIPP "could" kill everyone on earth, but only if a tyrant captured everyone and surgically implanted just the right amount and form of plutonium in each person's lungs. There is also enough water in a typical bucket to be lethal to everyone on the globe if you can arrange to have each citizen drown in it one at a time. Sewing pins can also be lethal if pricked into people walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. It is not helpful to talk about what might possibly happen without some consideration of what it would take to make it happen, and whether or not this is likely to happen. A pound of powdered plutonium let go over city is, in fact, likely to cause only a few dozen latent cancer deaths, contrary to public expectations of probably hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths.
So I've not found the potential catastrophe to explain why there is so much concern and fear about WIPP. I am continuing my quest. If you believe the assumptions in the studies I've cited are way off, I'd like to know. If you are aware of other technically competent studies that reach different conclusions, perhaps by considering other pathways for the waste to get to people, please tell me about them. I will change my views if there is convincing additional evidence.
The lack of any apparent catastrophes is of course based on the studies mentioned above. Should we trust them? How seriously in error might they be? I have sought opinions from anti-WIPP activists, from technical experts who work for DOE contractors, and from EEG. The DOE contractors say the individual assumptions range from being realistic to being very conservative; they expect the estimated deaths in the Draft SEIS-II study are roughly a factor of 10 to 100 too high. The antinuclear activists suspect underestimates but have no quantitative guesses about the errors. The people I spoke with from EEG have concerns, but I've not yet received contrary quantitative studies.
Studies with uncertainties of a factor of 10 can still be very useful. The Draft SEIS-II study predicts 0.4 radiological transportation-accident related deaths for the whole nation for the full 35 year active phase of WIPP. If this estimate could be off by as much as a factor of 10, the correct prediction would be somewhere between 0.04 or 4 deaths. Despite the uncertainty, this result is still useful: everything in the range of 0.04 to 4 is so small that the conclusion is still that the number of deaths are likely to be less than from virtually any other activity. Similarly if a study predicted 100,000 deaths per year due to WIPP, a factor of 10 uncertainty wouldn't matter; WIPP would be too dangerous even if there were 10,000 annual deaths. Studies such as these cannot and are not intended to give the "right" answer, but rather to tell us which projects and aspects of projects are deserving of further study or cancellation because of possible high risks, and which should proceed without further study because there seems to be no scenario involving serious consequences.
Even though no WIPP studies I have seen predict any potential catastrophes, the studies still predict some deaths. So why not make it even safer? Why not try to eliminate all WIPP risks? Come to think of it, why not just eliminate all risks associated with everything? Because we ourselves find this unreasonable. We do not require automobile passengers to wear helmets even though this would save lives. We don't require strong people to be ready and waiting next to every bed and bathtub to prevent fatal falls. We typically have medical checkups every year, even though if we had one every week this would prevent some premature deaths. We individually and as a society often make judgements about reasonableness of hazards and their prevention.
Sometimes our society's expenditures in the name of safety do not seem reasonable. We are in the process of spending billions of dollars to have an escape pod as part of the space station so that if a medical emergency should arise that could not be treated on the station, the patient could be brought down to earth quickly. Is it reasonable to spend billions on the very small chance that one life might be saved? Billions of dollars spent on banning 3-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, on childhood immunizations, on reducing smoking and alcohol abuse, and on better seat-belt and air-bag restraint systems would save huge numbers of lives. Some would argue that reducing the national debt by billions would be better than spending it on a very small chance of saving one life.
The Draft SEIS-II (proposed action) predicts an average of less than one death per year, with most of the deaths having nothing to do with radioactivity. Five-gallon buckets and drawstrings on children's garments (strangulation) each cause more deaths than this, but the public seems much less concerned. Broken or older-style cribs cause over 50 times more deaths per year than are predicted for WIPP; about 50 babies per year suffocate or are strangled when they become trapped between broken crib parts on in cribs with unsafe designs. The manufacturing, installation and use of solar energy equipment probably has a worse safety record, but there is no public outcry to banish the use of solar energy devices. The production and distribution of Bibles probably has a worse safety record than SEIS-II predicts for WIPP, but I've heard no objections to this industry. The operation of transfer stations and sanitary landfills is much more dangerous than WIPP is forecast to be, and also deals with waste disposal. I have not heard a call for stopping use of all sanitary landfills.
WIPP is forecast to be less dangerous than any of the above industries, but only WIPP encounters such vocal opposition. Thus it seems that either 1) all the WIPP studies I've seen are in error and seriously underestimate the actual hazard, or 2) the issue here really is not safety. Yet most of the issues raised against WIPP seem to address safety. Frankly, I'm confused. We fight WIPP tooth and nail, an activity with a hypothetical handful of deaths over 35 years, while apparently showing less concern about many other human activities and enterprises which are known to cause many more deaths! If safety and the saving of human lives is the motivation behind the opposition to WIPP, this does not make sense.
We had a WIPP debate a few years ago at our school with two invited speakers, one pro and one con. The last question was addressed to the anti-WIPP spokesperson. As I recall, the question was, in essence, "The public outcry about WIPP suggests there must be a potential catastrophe with thousands or tens of thousands of lives at risk. Do you know of any studies that say potential catastrophes exist? And if not, why are you opposed to WIPP?" The answer was, "No, I don't know of any such predicted catastrophes. I just don't like plutonium." Well, I don't like plutonium either, but I hope that there is some better justification for being against WIPP. Most taxpayers ask for more than personal likes and dislikes when billions of dollars are at stake.
There is a financial aspect to all this. I believe it costs nearly two hundred millions of dollars each year just to continue safety studies, prepare and monitor the waste, and to maintain WIPP without any waste shipments. We are all paying for this. So both the financial and safety stakes are very high. If WIPP is really a catastrophe waiting to happen, an extra half-billion dollars spent to convince the powers-that-be of the danger is well worth it. On the other hand, if a few more years of studies will reduce the expected number of fatalities from say 24 to 21, is this worth the extra billion dollars? How much safety do we want to buy? Normally we do not value life this highly; we certainly are not spending sums anything like this to reduce the known dangers of 5-gallon buckets, sweatshirts, bathing, soccer goals, falling out of bed and garbage collection and disposal.
I am not for or against WIPP. I am concerned that we avoid any potential WIPP catastrophe, that we do something safer with the waste soon, and that we not waste billions of dollars. I am influenced by data, studies, and ideas. At the moment, available studies do not seem to indicate that WIPP poses much risk at all. If the studies are in fact reasonably correct and complete, then we should probably not spend more hundreds of millions of dollars each year for minor improvements in safety, nor would it seem prudent to scrap a multi-billion project which would vastly improve the safety of the waste compared to doing nothing. On the other hand, if these studies are in error, someone better quickly point out the errors by doing the studies correctly. DOE and EPA are much more likely to be influenced by quantitative studies than heart-felt but non-quantitative concern. For better or worse, assessing risk is a quantitative activity. If WIPP is a catastrophe waiting to happen, we need to find or do the quantitative studies that show it. Just stating that WIPP is dangerous does not make it so or persuade DOE that it is so. Where is the catastrophe?
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