Aftermath: The Remnants of War: From Landmines to Chemical Warfare--The Devastating Effects of Modern Combat (Vintage) by Donovan Webster

Author:Donovan Webster [Webster, Donovan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307797254
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

“It’s a quarter-trillion dollars,” Werner says, with a hangdog grin. “When I told the President’s Office of Management and Budget the figure, they looked at me like I had two heads. They said, ‘On our books, only the national deficit is going to cost more.’ And I said: ‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, the Cold War created the problem.’ ”

In Werner’s unprepossessing DOE headquarters office, five floors above Washington, D.C.’s Independence Avenue, near the Mall, graphs and charts crowd the walls. Thus far, they add up to very little. “We’re just beginning to understand the vastness of the program over the last fifty years,” he says. “It’s taken us two years to start getting a handle on what’s buried where. Most of what’s been done so far was undertaken in complete secrecy.”

At the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, for instance, where nuclear energy testing has gone on since the 1950s—and where the nuclear airplane was developed in the early 1960s—a long, sloppy history made it common practice to dig long trenches and toss in barrels of nuclear waste. When flooding occurred, as it did during spring snow melts, the barrels often floated to the surface and security officers were dispatched to shoot holes in them to make them sink. In another INEL trench, near which the DOE recently built one of the largest robotic cranes on earth (capable of digging and lifting ten-ton objects from the ground, while also grasping a glass bottle without breaking it), X-ray-style gadgetry has scoured the subsurface landscape and spotted scattered fifty-five-gallon drums of waste, wooden boxes, and a radioactivity-imbued ambulance beneath the soil.

“The engineers and scientists who were doing, this, they knew what was happening,” Werner says. “But they were protected by national security, they didn’t have to care. They knew there was nowhere safe to store this waste. So, for instance, they kept it liquified in big tanks at Hanford, with motorized stirrers to keep the liquid moving; that way, maybe it wouldn’t get hot and explode. At the test site, they buried it in open, unlined pits. That kind of behavior went on everywhere: at Savannah River in South Carolina. At Rocky Flats, Colorado; at Oak Ridge, Tennessee … tell me when to stop, or I can go on almost forever.”

Werner is the first DOE officer charged with making right a half-century of atomic environmental damage. “You have to understand, with this stuff, there’s no such thing as cleaning up,” he says. “Radioactivity is an unfixable problem. You can’t do it. This stuff exists, and the physics problem makes some portions of it a reality for thousands of years; even the fastest-degrading and lowest-level waste remains problematic for decades. So the way I see it, my job has three stages: identify where the problems are; isolate and stabilize those problems; and figure out a way to keep people out, so nobody gets sick or dies.”

Werner has few answers. “We don’t even know if our culture will be around then,” he says. “We don’t know if our language will be the same; even our iconography.

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