by Patrick Boniface

Created on: May 26, 2010   Last Updated: May 27, 2010

Nuclear waste is dangerously toxic, its environmental impact if released would be devastating, as was witnessed during both the Chernobyl explosion, the American Three Mile Island scare and the Windscale fire of 1957.

In these cases radioactive material was released into the atmosphere. With the Windscale fire some 15,000 terabequerels (TBq) of radioactive material (notably Iodine-131) were released (3).

A report compiled by Crick & Linsley in 1983 estimated that 260 people would eventually die from dieases, such as thyroid cancers, related to the release of the material during the fire, (4).

Other aspects that environmentalist’s voice concerns over include the storage of spent nuclear fuels, from commercial nuclear reactors and increasingly from redundant nuclear warships such as submarines.

In particular in the former Soviet Union around the submarine base of Arkangel in Northern Russia there are around sixty nuclear submarines that are rotting away but still with large amounts of nuclear material contained within their hulls.

The Russian economy is unable to afford the costs of de-commissioning these submarines. The cost of decommissioning is between $100-300 million per submarine (5).

The cost of decontaminating the area after a nuclear explosion would in comparison be astronomical. Similar numbers of submarines exist within the American, French fleets whilst in the UK, the Royal Navy is trying to dispose of eleven redundant nuclear submarines (5).

Spent nuclear fuel is also causing concerns for residents that border the Irish Sea. The fuel is reprocessed at Sellafield in Cumbria and, although, flatly denied by the press department, the Irish Sea is one of the most radioactive in the world from discharges into the sea from the site in Cumbria.

Allan in 1983 indicated that ‘levels of caesium and plutonium above the tide line were only a few per cent of those below, although very long lived radioactive substances…were unevenly distributed across the salt marsh’. (4)

Increasingly, after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 on New York and Washington, the threat posed to such reprocessing sites and static nuclear reactors around the globe have finally been recognised.

Efforts to improve the environmental impact of nuclear energy have had limited results at present. The use of waste materials in the extraction process of uranium ore to refill bore holes in New Mexico have had some interesting results as has the Australian government’s

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