Nuclear Weapons: Pay Up to Cleanup
Dateline: 05/07/00
In an April 14, 2000 press release, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that from $151 billion to $195 billion will be needed through the year 2070 for cleanup and closure of America's nuclear weapons facilities. In other words, in each of the next 70 years, the U.S. federal budget will include from $2.1 billion to $2.7 billion on cleaning up our nuclear past.
What has to be cleaned up?
What is America's Cold War legacy? The need to clear the environment of large
volumes of nuclear materials, spent nuclear fuel, radioactive waste, and
hazardous waste, resulting in contaminated facilities, soil, and groundwater at
113 locations around the country.
In its 1998 report Paths to Closure, DOE projects a timeline and cost estimates for:
- remediating 1.7 trillion gallons of contaminated ground water, an amount equal to approximately four times the daily U.S. water consumption;
- remediating 40 million cubic meters of contaminated soil and debris, enough to fill approximately 17 professional sports stadiums;
- safely storing and guarding more than 18 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium, enough for thousands of nuclear weapons;
- managing over 2,000 tons of intensely radioactive spent nuclear fuel, some of which is corroding;
- storing, treating, and disposing of radioactive and hazardous waste, including over 160,000 cubic meters that are currently in storage and over 100 million gallons of liquid, high-level radioactive waste;
- deactivating and/or decommissioning about 4,000 facilities that are no longer needed to support active DOE missions;
- implementing critical nuclear non-proliferation programs for accepting and safely managing spent nuclear fuel from foreign research reactors that contains weapons-usable highly enriched uranium; and
- providing long-term care and monitoring or stewardship for potentially hundreds of years at an estimated 109 sites following cleanup.
Next page Major Nuclear Cleanup Sites - Details and Costs >Page 1, 2
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