History
In 1961 the state of New York acquired 3,345 acres (14 km²) of land in the town of Ashford, New York, near West Valley, for the Western New York Nuclear Service Center (WNYNSC, currently managed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority ). The next year the Davison Chemical Company established Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. (NFS) as a reprocessing company, and leased the WNYNSC.
The operation of the plant was repeatedly criticized and the project ran into insurmountable logistical problems. There were lax security measures and employees were exposed to dangerously high doses of radiation, exceeding federal regulations dictated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which was established in 1970. The cost of reprocessing was originally estimated to be US$ 15 million, but was later reported to be US$ 600 million. After reprocessing only 640 tons of spent fuel, while accumulating 600,000 gallons of high-level waste, the facility was closed in 1972. It was not until 2002 that the plant was stabilized to the point where it could be safely decommissioned. However, "remaining cleanup was estimated in 2008 to cost an additional US$5 billion and take another 40 years".
Read more about this topic: West Valley Reprocessing Plant
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)