Alan Waltar, nuclear engineer, Past President of the American Nuclear Society: Nuclear energy may be the first large industry in history that is capable of removing essentially all its wastes from the biosphere. [p. 108] It is important to recognize that the waste quantities we need to deal with are quite tractable, much smaller than the waste of any comparable industrial endeavor. If Americans received all their electricity from nuclear energy, rather than the 21% we receive today, the amount of high level nuclear waste (HLW) we would each be responsible for annually could be contained in three small marbles. By any relative measure, the volume of HLW that we must deal with is small, incredibly small.
