The Nuclear Energy Controversy: Finding a Place for the Nuclear Waste

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Recommended: Innovative waste management techniques

Nuclear waste has a reputation for making law makers and the public uneasy, thus it is difficult to find a site for nuclear waste disposal units. However, creating such sites is necessary to allow nuclear energy to the electricity production forefront in America. In the search for a waste disposal location, companies have been turning toward Native American reservations as the final resting places of the radioactive waste. Multiple tribes have quickly denied companies access to their land, but others have taken advantage of the potentially prosperous opportunity. One of the first tribes to decline a waste site was the Navajos, for the nuclear industry’s destruction of their land was still fresh in their minds. It is true that nuclear waste disposal is a theoretically dangerous venture, yet it also contains many potential benefits. Siting a nuclear waste unit on the Navajo reservation would benefit the country and the Navajos, but the idea is meet with reluctance because of the suspected costs to the Navajo people, the environment as a whole, and the Navajo’s land.
The public perception of nuclear energy and nuclear waste disposal controls a region’s acceptance of a nuclear waste site. As environmentalism becomes the center of the debate about nuclear waste unit siting, multiple suspected costs are brought the forefront. The first, and often the most influential, is the suspected cost of waste sites to the people that surround it.
The health effects from uranium and radioactive run off is well known on the Navajo Reservation. The uranium boom in the 1950s left much of the reservation in shambles; piles of mill tailings seeped into the ground and released radon into the air. The mill tailings, then, leached into the Navajo’s groun...

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...exico Communities: The Struggle for Environmental Justice." Human Rights 30.4 (2003): 23-25. Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
“Radioactive Waste Management.” World Nuclear Association. World Nuclear Association. Nov. 2013. Web. 22 Apr. 2014. << http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Radioactive-Waste-Management/>>.

“Waste Management Overview.” World Nuclear Association. World Nuclear Association. Nov. 2013. Web. 22 Apr. 2014. >.

Taylor, Kathryn S. "Fewer Nuclear Waste Sites Poses Problems for Hospitals." H&HN: Hospitals & Health Networks 67.12 (1993): 58. Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
Thorpe, Grace. “Our Homes are not Dumps: Creating Nuclear-Free Zones.” Natural Resources Journal. 36 (1996) 956-963. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

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