Oak Ridge, Tenn., a city with a long history of living alongside nuclear industries, will be processing nuclear waste from Germany. They’ll be taking on almost 1,000 tons of material, and the shipments could start coming this year. NPR reports:
Radioactive residue left over from the process will be sent back to Germany for disposal, but opponents have voiced concerns that the U.S. will become the world's radioactive waste processor …
"When you're starting to talk about managing the rest of the world's waste, the German waste looks like the beginning of what could be a large flood of material from other countries," she says.
The company doing the work claims the work is safe; the Oak Ridge city manager said that because Oak Ridgers deal with radioactive material more than most other people they "have a pretty sophisticated familiarity with it," in NPR's words. Let's just hope this new business doesn't also mean the city will have an increasingly sophisticated familiarity with cancer.
