Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

Humans have attempted throughout recorded history to create enduring achievements and lasting symbols of our ingenuity, our pride and our dreams. The ancient Egyptian pharaohs constructed massive tombs of stone as testaments to their self-styled grandeur. The Romans built cities of marble and granite and forever etched into the stone's surface images of times we can only imagine. Europeans in the Middle Ages erected immense castles as fortresses and homes that still stand today as reminders of a time long past. Artisans during the Renaissance and savants during the Scientific Revolution made contributions to their respective fields that have spanned centuries and shifted paradigms, forever changing the way we view and think about our world.

We too, throughout much of the twentieth century, have built, created, sculpted, learned and discovered many things that will have effects reaching far into the future. We have reached for the stars and landed on the Moon; we have created cities of steel and concrete on a scale never before seen; we have spread our influence and civilizations to every corner of the globe; and we have unlocked the secrets of the atom. The breadth of our scientific knowledge has increased exponentially over the short span of these last hundred years and we use inventions in our everyday lives that even just our grandparents never could have imagined. We have also created our own enduring legacy in a more infamous way. While the pyramids may well last for many thousands of years, no civilization to date could create a legacy to last millions of years - until now.

Our unfortunate contribution to the ages will be the legacy of the Cold War and the nuclear waste and high level radioactive by-products that have accompanied it. With half-lives reaching into the millions of years, human civilization is confronted with a task of titanic proportions - we must find some way to isolate these nuclear wastes from society and from all contact with the environment. They must be permanently - not for 1 year, or 100 years, or 1,000 years, but permanently - sealed off from the rest of the world like so many casks of Amontillado until they are reduced to harmless piles of slag. Never before has such a task been attempted, yet never before has such a task been so vital to the very well-being of the environment and to life on this planet. Having created this problem, the question of "what next?" rings in many scientists' and policymakers' ears.

This article proposes that the best solution to-date to deal with the problem of high level nuclear waste disposal is the entombment of such wastes beneath the ocean floor in the deep-sea clays at the centers of the continental plates. This article will attempt to address this issue from an international policy standpoint and will attempt to discuss several of the pertinent issues concerning the subseabed disposal (SSD) of high level nuclear waste and the implications of those issues. While this article will attempt to steer clear of most of the highly technical aspects of SSD, as the author lacks the necessary scientific credentials to adequately deal with them, some discussion of the general scientific principles is necessary. It should be understood from the outset that this article will not attempt to be a definitive source of all the information on SSD and on all the relevant legal issues. While it will attempt to address some of the major concerns and policy considerations, the author hopes this article will serve merely as a starting point in the legal scholarship of SSD as there is an apparent dearth of materials on this issue in the legal literature. Part I of this article will outline the nature of the current nuclear waste problem and will discuss some of the issues and consequences of current disposal techniques. Part III will give a brief technical overview of the SSD option and will discuss the various aspects of what such a plan would entail; it is important for the reader to take away from this section that SSD is not the equivalent of ocean dumping. Part IV will discuss some of the international and national policy considerations and some of the various legal issues that the international community is currently grappling with in its attempt to deal with the disposal of the world's nuclear waste. Part V will reiterate the main thesis of this article that SSD should be given serious consideration from the political sectors of the world's governments and that there are no serious policy or legal reasons why SSD could not be implemented in our lifetimes.

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