Nuclear and Toxic Waste | Introduction
In many ways, the 99th Street School, in Niagara Falls, New York, was a very ordinary school. Built in 1955 on land donated by a local business, it held classroom space for about 400 elementary students, who came from the surrounding working-class neighborhood named after an abandoned artificial waterway—Love Canal.
The 99th Street School and Love Canal offered very little of interest to the outside world until 1976, when the State of New York commissioned a private company, the Calspan Corporation, to conduct some tests in the neighborhood. Public officials informed Calspan that the canal had been used as a dumping ground for some 30 years by the Hooker Chemical Company, the firm that had sold the land to the city in 1953. Since that time, Love Canal residents had been complaining of strange events in their yards and basements, and a series of mysterious illnesses affecting their families, and so the public officials had asked for the tests.
Calspan’s engineers measured and tested the air, soil, and water around Love Canal, while researchers going through old files and records turned up the fact that more than 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals had been buried in the area. The results of the investigation changed life forever for residents and made Love Canal synonymous with environmental disaster and a pressing modern problem: the disposal of toxic wastes.
The scandal surrounding the contamination of Love Canal was a watershed in the history of environmental action in the United States. An entire neighborhood was evacuated, its homes condemned, its schools closed and its residents moved away. While public officials dragged their feet, alarmed residents held meetings, formed an association, and demanded action. In the next few years, more scandals over toxic waste erupted. Some of them unfolded slowly, over a period of months or years; others happened in a matter of hours, the result of an accident or incompetence. With each newsflash and feature story, a once-unfamiliar word or term—dioxin, plutonium, PVCs, PCBs, DDT, MBTE—entered the ongoing, sometimes bitter public dialogue on environmental issues.
Toxic wastes represent one of the downsides of the industrial progress that has brought convenience, longer life, and more leisure time to the people of the United States. New manufacturing processes use or create as byproducts a wide range of chemicals that are poisonous to humans or animals. These toxins interfere with cell functions, destroy membranes, cause birth defects in newborns, or poison vital organs such as the liver, lungs, or kidneys. Some of them can be metabolized by the body—converted into simpler compounds that can be eliminated. Others do not break down; they accumulate in tissues, bone marrow, vital organs, or the nervous system, causing a range of health problems from mild skin rashes to sudden death.
The laboratory study of toxic chemicals went hand-in-hand with their creation and use in modern industry. In their research, environmental scientists classified these substances according to their effects: neurotoxins, which affect the nervous system; mutagens that cause genetic alterations in cell nuclei; teratogens (which affect the fetus), and carcinogens, the most familiar classification, which includes substances that alter cell reproduction, promoting out-of-control cell growth that can lead to cancer.
Billions of tons of waste are generated each year in the United States, with about 60 million tons classified as “hazardous,” meaning it increases the risk of serious—even fatal—illness or pose a substantial threat to the environment. Some of the most dangerous toxic chemicals are chlorinated hydrocarbons, which include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and DDT, a pesticide, as well as petroleum products that are used in oil refining and in the manufacture of plastics, solvents, and cleaning agents. Also harmful to human health are heavy metals, such as cadmium, lead, mercury, and nickel, which are used in various manufacturing processes.
In the years after World War II, an entirely new industry created an entirely new class of toxic wastes: radioactive elements and isotopes generated by nuclear-weapons manufacturing and the nuclear power industry. Although uranium and plutonium are the best-known components of nuclear waste, there are many others that are dangerous as well, such as the transuranic elements that are created by nuclear reactions. All of these substances pose a danger through their radioactivity, which even in small doses can damage or destroy human tissues and organs. Rather than being simply dumped, radioactive wastes must be stored in a safe place while they degrade, a process that can take hundreds of thousands of years.
More ordinary toxic substances are released into air, water, or soil after dumping by humans, through spills or other accidents, by pesticide spraying, or by careless storage. Water is a particularly good medium for transmission of toxic substances through the environment, since many compounds readily dissolve in water. Rainwater falling on landfills or chemical dumps can cause poisonous runoff that seeps into groundwater or into surface streams, where the toxins gradually spread out into the environment and are absorbed by plants through their roots, stems, or leaves. Animals eat the plants or drink the water contaminated by toxic wastes; humans ingest them by breathing the air, drinking the water, or eating contaminated animals or plants.
Rules and regulations
Love Canal and other toxic crises intensified what had been a mild debate over the best way to deal with toxic and nuclear wastes. As with other such issues, the debate eventually attracted the attention of elected officials, who reacted by passing legislation intended to control or eliminate the problem. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, passed by Congress in 1969, standardized rules were established governing the identification and testing of toxic substances. In 1976, the United States Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), in many ways the forerunner of modern toxic waste law. This law authorized a federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to monitor and control artificial chemicals. The TSCA requires that the EPA be notified before any new chemical is manufactured, and it allows the EPA to regulate the production, use, testing, and disposal of chemicals. The EPA also has the authority to control 65,000 existing chemicals that were already in use before the act was passed.
More legislation followed. The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act set up standard policy for regulating toxic and hazardous substances, from production to disposal. The 1977 Clean Water Act focused on toxic wastes in water. The 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) set up the Superfund program to deal with abandoned toxic waste sites. The 1990 Clean Air Act seeks to reduce toxic emissions into the atmosphere.
Individual states have also passed laws intended to reduce toxic waste. These laws set specific goals for polluters to reduce their production of toxic chemicals by a certain percentage over a certain period of time. Many also require companies to inventory their toxic chemicals and keep careful records of their use and disposal.
Controversies
Such laws can quickly go out of date. New chemicals are being invented and put into use every day in the United States, with about 1,000 new chemicals introduced each year. There are 100,000 substances officially listed as toxic and/or hazardous by the National Institute of Safety and Health, and one-third of the 700,000 different chemicals in current use have never been tested for their effects on human health.
Most of the laws designed to regulate these substances have the support of advocates who believe that strict regulation of chemicals and their manufacturers will bring about a lessening of toxic waste dangers. Environmental activists say that business owners are motivated by profits, not by better public health, and that the only way to guarantee their cooperation is to pass new laws and regulations. Many activists want to see stricter controls over certain toxic chemicals or outright banning of some substances, as was done with pesticides such as DDT. They want to see public or private funding of new technologies that rely on “clean” energies (solar, wind, or thermal) or that carry out the complete recycling of toxic waste. They also advocate better communication and cooperation between private firms and the communities where those firms do business.
On the other hand, environmental laws are never written and passed without opposition, especially from manufacturers, who claim that such laws are bad for business and make it harder for them to provide important economic benefits to the communities where they are located. They point out that industries that are unhindered by regulation and central control provide the cleanest technology and that free-market solutions are the most effective means of reducing environmental contamination.
Future wastes
In the early years of the twenty-first century, one focus of the debate over toxic wastes will likely be the nuclear power industry. In the next few years, Congress must make a decision on the treatment of nuclear wastes: whether to wait for a practical solution for “on-site” storage, or to ship the nation’s entire inventory of radioactive waste to a central dumping ground located at Yucca Mountain, in the high desert of Nevada. The debate will focus public attention on the nuclear waste issue in particular and on toxic waste in general.
There is one certainty in the debate over toxic and nuclear wastes: the debate will go on for a long time, and fiercely. Hundreds of organizations have been formed by advocates of one viewpoint or the other in order to present their case to the public and the government. Books and magazines devoted to the subject abound. Television programs and videos are produced, radio programs are aired, and World Wide Web pages are created in order to inform and persuade. The issue is ongoing and divisive because toxic waste can threaten individuals, families, and entire communities, giving an unpleasant counterpoint to the time-honored national faith in the benefits of invention, industry, and scientific progress. Nuclear & Toxic Waste FM (AI) 2/11/04 2:28 PM Page 8
