Letter: Nuclear industry has been wrong about safety before

Friday, Jan. 29, 1999 | 10:21 a.m.

Having been a construction worker and instrumentation field engineer at a nuclear plant during construction, I know the weak link in the chain is the tendency of people to resort to politics when science and engineering cannot provide sound answers. The history of science and technology is full of disasters caused by self-righteous experts.

No self-respecting scientist or engineer can guarantee anything into the future; anyone that does should be stripped of their credentials for lying. Yucca Mountain may be suitable for low-level wastes, but the high-level wastes should remain at their current sites. Fuel pools at nuclear plants were designed to have a storage capacity for 20 years.

Additional storage can be constructed on site to take the plants into the future until they are no longer operative. The existing sites already have radiation monitoring systems, health physics departments, security and other provisions.

Since these areas already exist research should be directed to technologies aimed at rebuilding plants on site that have a longer longevity and reprocessing the exhausted fuel on site, since most of the fuel is reusable for numerous reactor refuelings.

When fuel remains on site there is no risk of transportation accidents.

Mike Genco