Word: problems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...person to start the national battle over whose backyard should have which nuclear dump--especially in an election year. In the Northeast, which generates about 40 per cent of the nation's radioactive waste but has no disposal sites, state governments have followed the federal lead, skillfully avoiding the problem...
...history of the federal government's attempts to solve the waste disposal problem is a textbook case in agency buck-passing. In late 1977, the NRC urged the DOE to prepare a contingency plan in case the country's three commercial disposal sites had to be shut down. The NRC identified a "Clear potential for disruption," and suggested--as Illinois Gov. James Thompson recommended last week--opening the government's 14 existing sites to commercial waste generators. Nothing was done...
...inter-agency panel held a very long and very scary set of hearings which considered the radioactive waste disposal problem in some depth. When the panel finished its hearings, it unanimously recommended that the DOE set up regional low-level waste storage sites. The greatest problem, the panel found, is the risk taken when wastes are shipped clear across the country for burial. About eight months ago, the recommendation was sent to the White House for review. In keeping with a growing tradition, nothing has been done about the DOE study either--President Carter, his aides say, is still making...
...Massachusetts, which a 1976 government study indicates is one of the 12 largest state producers of waste, the legislature is considering a bill to regulate hazardous waste disposal. But the legislature's session ended just this week--and it never brought up the problem. "Every state has dragged its heels and neglected its responsibilities," says one Harvard safety official. And the feds are trying to dump the problem on the states. Says Goetz Oertal, the DOE's director of waste products, "It's a choice each state is going to have to make...
...PROBLEM, IN A WORK, is political. As usual, it's taken a crisis of sorts to prompt any action. With Three Mile Island fresh in their minds, people in the United States cringe at anything labelled 'nuclear' or 'radioactive.' "When you mention radioactivity," explains Dr. Warren E. C. Wacker, director of University Health Services, "everybody goes into orbit." As City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci's election eve hysteria in Cambridge indicates, waste disposal is a political hot potato. "Nuclear hysteria," volunteers Dr. Ralph R. DiSibio, Nevada director of human resources, "is spreading...