Dr. Rustum Roy , Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Pennsylvania State University, was interviewed in December 1992 by Francis Macy for the Nuclear Guardianship Forum. Dr. Roy is an internationally respected research scientist who has worked extensively on the management and technologies of nuclear waste materials. He was for many years a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Radioactive Waste Management and of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management of the National Research Council. You have worked for many years on technologies for isolating radioactive material from the biosphere. Everything depends on age, because the radioactivity and heat decline every year.
Time is on our side.
Some nuclear power stations are running out of space in their storage pools for irradiated rods removed from the reactors. In five years many pools will be filled up with rods, because the U.S. government has not collected them and shipped them off for storage or disposal, as it promised the utilities it would. It is not too complicated in most cases. Another is the expansion of existing pool capacity, relatively inexpensive, using existing safety systems. And now we have a new technology for dry storage of rods.