American Forum

In April President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START), a measure designed to mutually and verifiably reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Specifically, it would reduce U.S. and Russian warheads by approximately one third and would continue and strengthen the verification regime that has allowed the inspections and surveillance that have informed U.S. intelligence about Russian nuclear forces for decades.

The treaty is now before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and may come before the full Senate for a vote on ratification this summer.

Over the last several months, Americaís military leaders and national security expertsófrom both Republican and Democratic administrationsóhave testified before Senate committees, all with the same message: the treatyís modest mutual reductions and strengthened verification regime improve our national security, and the Senate should ratify the treaty.

Alongside rivers and lakes, on ocean shores and tidal bays, nearly 63,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste – which remains dangerous for longer than recorded history – sits in “temporary” storage. In some cases, it’s been there for decades. And it’s almost certain to remain for decades longer, scattered around 33 states.

Some of that waste is squeezed into small pools housed inside flimsy buildings; some sits outside in storage containers never intended to be permanent. In both instances, the spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants is exceedingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks.

Like so many of society’s waste problems, out-of-sight, out-of-mind has become a de facto “solution” -- except to the thousands of Americans who live near these high-level waste storage sites. I am one of them. I reside near two spent fuel pools, one in Massachusetts, at the now-shuttered Yankee Rowe reactor, and another at the troubled Vermont Yankee reactor, only 16 miles away. Together, these pools hold more than 90 million curies of radioactivity. (The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki released 1 million curies of radiation.)