The New Clear Threat.

• Author: Assadourian, Erik
• Position: Essay

A hundred millennia from now, perhaps a new civilization will have arisen atop the remains of the civilization we now know. And as this new society explores the land and its secrets, at the base of what we call Yucca Mountain, Nevada, it may stumble on artifacts that warn-in as universal a way as was conceivable to the humans that lived before-that those who find these markers should stay away.

Why? Because under that mountain, there will be some 100,000 tons of still-active nuclear waste sitting in barrels--and by then, even in the absence of any geological upheavals in the intervening thousand centuries, about 1 percent of that lethal material (as now estimated by the U.S. Department of Energy) will have leaked out and may have entered the groundwater, creating a spreading plume of contamination.

Of course, we cannot predict what will happen geologically, biologically, or sociologically in 100,000 years. But atomic waste is collecting at 131 minimally secured sites in the United States--and many others around the world-and the need to contain the threat continues to mount.

In fact, we are finally coming to realize that securing nuclear waste is an essential step in improving environmental and global security. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the control mechanisms that regulated its stockpiled nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have withered. Between the 1.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium that are generated each year by Russian nuclear power plants, the tactical nuclear weapons and radioisotope thermal generators that are easily transportable and poorly secured, and the thousands of underemployed weapons scientists, the threat nuclear materials pose to the world's people and environment has become undeniable.

Fortunately, at least in Russia, there is movement to secure WMD and component materials. In 1991, soon after the end of the Cold War, Russia agreed to allow the United States to help secure and decommission part of its arsenal. Under the leadership of U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program was enacted, and over the course of a decade it has destroyed over 6,000 nuclear warheads, helped to increase security at 40 percent of the facilities housing nuclear materials, and employed tens of thousands of weapons scientists in peaceful pursuits.

More importantly, as Senator Lugar notes (see sidebar), there is great potential to expand this initiative multilaterally...