Health cost of a nuclear waste repository,WIPP

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the United States of America's first nuclear waste dumping site, has over the years generated a great deal of concern and controversy. The most sensitive aspect of this project is that it may impose serious health risks on future generations. The first leg of this project is about to be completed and at the time of writing the Department of Energy is planning to perform experiments with a small quantity of waste for operational demonstrations. If everything goes well, then towards the end of this decade large quantities of wastes will be transported to the site for disposal. This article reconsiders the health cost of this project from an economic perspective in light of recent developments in the field of social discounting. As in earlier studies, two cases of health risks are considered: total cancer and genetic deformity over a one million year cutoff period. The analysis shows that whereas ordinary discounting method wipes out the future health detriments, expressed in monetary terms, the modified discounting criterion retains a substantial proportion of such costs in economic analysis.