Safe Storage Begun For Nuke Wastes

For the first time since the beginning of the atomic age, the United States has begun work to store the poisonous, radioactive waste products of nuclear weapons makers in a form that should be safe for the long term.

In a ceremony here Tuesday, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary opened the Defense Waste Processing Facility, where liquid waste that has been stored in leaking steel tanks will be solidified into high-strength, radiation-absorbing glass. Workers at the plant will mix deadly radioactive goo with molten glass, pour it into stainless-steel cylindrical canisters 10 feet high and 2 feet in diameter, and seal the canisters with enough electricity to light a town.

The glass will have to be stored for thousands of years, and government officials still do not have a permanent site for it. But for the foreseeable future, they say, the poisonous wastes will no longer leak into the soil.