There’s over 160 acres of hazardous waste in the Savannah River Plant burial ground. The kind of waste that will outlive all of us reading this article.
Do you know what we did with nuclear waste in the 1960s?Scientists with doctorates in soil science were commissioned to find the right place and just the right dirt to bury radioactive materials that would decay very, very, very slowly.. Duck and Cover drills felt utterly dystopian and-ish to me. Combine that with my grandfather’s top-secret work as an agronomist—fancy word for, A.K.A.
Health Physics was a confusing department name, in my opinion, but it encompassed the study of the physical and environmental impact of radiation exposure and waste disposal. In other words, his job was to help assess how to contain and bury nuclear waste.Why did they need a soil scientist and not, say, a physicist or biochemist? I had the same question. And that’s how I discovered the environmental angle of what would become my novel.
Uranium isotopes, I might add for those who are not scientifically minded, have a half-life of billions of years. That means that in billions of years, uranium will have onlyAt the Savannah River Plant, some “low-level” waste was buried in the ground in unlined trenches, and “high-level” waste was contained in carbon-steel tanks.
The site now has tours open to the public, so my dad and I signed up for their historical guided tour.
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