Projecting Risk into the Future: Sinking of the Titanic and Failure of a Geologic Repository

Abstract: The “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank on April 14, 1912, in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York City.  There was no single cause for the loss of the Titanic; rather the improbable combination of errors in human design and judgment, combined with unforeseeable circumstance, led to the loss of over 1,500 lives.  The failure appears to have occurred over a range of spatial and temporal scales – from the atomic-scale processes of the embrittlement of iron rivets to global-scale fluctuations in climate and ocean currents. Regardless of the specific combination of causes, this failure in design and practice led to impressive improvements in both.  Disaster and tragedy are harsh teachers, but critical to improvement and progress.

The important question for the nuclear waste management community is: How do we learn and improve our waste management strategies in the absence of the benefit of failure? A geologic repository “operates” over a very distant time fame, and today’s scientists and engineers will never have the benefit of studying the failed system. In place of failure followed by improvements, we only can offer a general consensus on disposal strategies and their effectiveness.  However, it may well be that consensus leads to complacency and compromise, both of which may be harbingers of a failed repository.  I will discuss these issues in the context of recent accidents and the release of radioactivity at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a geologic repository in southeastern New Mexico.

About the Speaker: Rod Ewing is the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security in the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences. Ewing’s research focuses on the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mainly nuclear materials and the geochemistry of radionuclides with application to permanent geologic disposal. He is the past president of the International Union of Materials Research Societies. Ewing has written extensively on issues related to nuclear waste management and is a co-editor of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (2006). He received the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to chair the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which provides scientific and technical reviews of the Department of the Energy’s programs for the management and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. In 2015, he will receive the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America.