Human Hubris: From the Simply Silly To The Manifestly Absurd

One of the more depressing upshots of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections is that the new Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is one of the most ardent opponents of disposing nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain Nevada. Here's a quote from Mr. Reid's Web page:

The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is never going to open. Since I was elected to Congress in 1982, I have been fighting against Yucca Mountain because it threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and people across the United States. The science is incomplete, unsound, yet clearly demonstrates that Yucca Mountain is not a safe site for isolating nuclear waste. The tide is turning on Yucca Mountain, and it is time we look at viable alternatives and realistic approaches to long term nuclear waste storage. My highest priority is to ensure the health and safety of Nevadans and I will continue to fight against bringing spent nuclear fuel to Nevada.

I am far from conversant with the pros and cons of Yucca Mountain, but one aspect of the deabte recently caught my attention: whether, in designing the repository, DOE should be required to demonstrate that it will protect people for 10,000 years or for a million or more.

Some background (mostly taken from the opinion of the DC Circuit in the case linked below):

In 1992, following years of fierce debate (and litigation) over what to do with nuclear wastes, Congress stepped in and picked Yucca Mountain as the best (i.e. least worse) option. At the same time, Congress directed EPA to promulgate "public health and safety standards for protection of the public from releases of radioactive materials stored or disposed of in the repository at Yucca Mountain." These standards were to be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences."

Ten years later (approximately nine years late), EPA finally got around to adopting these standards. It promulgated three standards, but one of them is sufficient to illustrate the issue:

The DOE must demonstrate,using performance assessment,that there is a reasonable expectation that, for 10,000 years after disposal, [no individual is reasonably likely to receive a specified does of radiation per year].

The State of Nevada (and others) challenged the standards arguing that 10,000 years was too short. The Court of Appeals agreed, holding that EPA needed to establish standards that would require DOE to demonstrate that the "acceptable dose" would not be exceeded for a million years or more. (The decision is 100 pages long, but if you want to read the key part, see pages 20-32. The rest is stuff no one could love and only a lawyer could even tolerate).

This is a patently silly outcome, but before you go off on the evils of "activist" courts, the key to the decision was the statutory requirement that the standards be "based upon and consistent with the findings and recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences." The National Academy of Sciences determined (quite sensibly) that there was "no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual-risk standard to 10,000 years or any other value." According to the Academy, radiation exposures were likely to change only "on the time scale of the long term stability of the fundamental geologic regime -- a time scale that is on the order of [a million] years at Yucca Mountain." Thus, NAS concluded that human populations might not experience peak exposures "until tens to hundreds of thousands of years 'or even further into the future.' " As a result, NAS recommended that the exposure evaluation "be conducted for the time when the greatest risk occurs, within the limits imposed by the long-term stability of the geologic environment."

Personally, I find this recommendation to be impenetrable. Are they saying that the period EPA must consider is dictated by "the long-term stability of the geologic environment" and that because Yucca Mountain is so geologically stable, the projection has to go out a million or more years? If the geology were less stable, would the time for consideration be shorter? If that is the point, then we have a case of "no good deed goes unpunished:" the very aspect that makes Yucca Mountain appealing -- it's geologic stability -- would appear to make the period that must be covered in the risk assessment longer. What would seem sensible would to start by making the policy-based, risk management decision on a period of time over which unacceptable exposures must be prevented and then assessing whether the geologic stability of Yucca Mountain (together with other design aspect of the repository) were sufficient to prevent such an exposure from occurring within that time frame.

But the legal niceties of all of this are beside the more fundamental point: We can't reliably say anything about human society even 10,000 years from now, much less 1,000,000 years from now. Even attempting to do a "risk assessment" over thousands (to say nothing of millions) of years is just plain silly.

From Wikipedia, here are some of the major innovations to occur ten thousand years ago, i.e. in 8,000 BC:

Agriculture in Mesopotamia.

Domestication of the pig in China and Turkey.

Domestication of sheep and goats in the Middle East.

Domestication of dogs from wolves in China.

Ancient flint tools from north and central Arabia belong to hunter-gatherer societies.

Clay vessels and modeled human and animal terracotta figurines are produced at Ganj Dareh in western Iran.

Exchange of goods may represent the earliest pseudo-writing technology.

People of Jericho started to mold bricks out of clay, then hardened them in the sun.

Even if the rate of change were constant, which it is not, can you imagine a human society that is as different from today's as today's is from that which existed in 8,000 BC? Now, extrapolate that out 100 times.

Congress, NAS, EPA and the Court all share some of the blame for an outcome that results in EPA mandating an entirely pointless (and manifestly silly) "million year risk assessment". But, I think something important underlies this silliness: despite the evidence of history, human beings simply cannot internalize how little the current state of the world has to tell us about the state of the world even hundreds of years from now, much less tens of thousands or millions of years from now. The risks that concern us today are no more relevant to the risks we will confront even 500 years from now than the risks that concerned 16th Century Europe are relevant in today's world. And, that is only 500 years. It is pointless to even try to imagine what human society will look like in 1,000 years, much less 10,000 or 1,000,000 year from now. For all we know, radioactive waste generated in the 20th Century and stored at Yucca Mountain will be a critical source of energy for people (assuming any exist) even 500 years from now. 10,000 year from now, humans will have either disappeared entirely or colonized the universe. In either event, the fate of nuclear waste deposited at Yucca Mountain will not be relevant.

In terms of the age of the earth, to say nothing of the age of the universe, the whole of human history is not even a blink of an eye. We exist in an incredibly narrow environmental envelope that by itself is almost freakishly improbable. Given the forces at work in the universe, it is improbable to suppose that we will last even another 10,000 years, much less another million. But if we do, one thing can be said with certainty: whatever we are worried about today will seem as quint to our progeny as the worries of the Sumerians seems to us today.

Simple humility, if nothing else, requires us to recognize that fact. Yes, we need to be concerned with the future, but a hundred or so years is probably the limit of meaningful speculation. Anything beyond that is outside the range of our influence and, if we are to assume humanity is to survive at all, we have to trust that they will be able to deal with the issues we leave behind.