For 80 years, the U.S. government and its industrial and utility partners have failed to understand the problem of the noxious and dangerous nuclear waste for war and peace and successfully respond. Kicking the can down the road, evident today with fiscal policy, applied in spades to nuclear waste in wartime and peacetime.

Wartime Waste

It began at Hanford during World War II’s Manhattan Project when little attention was paid to what was left behind when U-235 was stripped from U-238 to turn uranium into plutonium. Nuclear engineers considered it a simple problem that could be dealt with later, much later. The nasty brew of chemical and nuclear poisons was dumped into large, oil-field-derived stainless-steel tanks.

In 1947, pioneering Baltimore “sanitary engineer” Abel Wolman — who had standardized the use of chlorine to purify drinking water — joined the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory board.…