Safety Review Finds Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site Was Technically Sound 176
siddesu writes: The U.S. Department of Energy's 2008 proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was technically sound, a report by the NRC says. However, the closed-down project is unlikely to revive, as its staff has moved on, and there are few funds available to restart it. "With the release of the final two volumes of a five-part technical analysis, the commission closed another chapter on the controversial repository nearly five years after President Barack Obama abandoned the project, and more than a quarter century after the site was selected. While the staff recommended against approving construction, the solid technical review could embolden Republicans who now control both houses of Congress and would like to see Yucca Mountain revived."
Won't be enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the Nuclear Waste Repository was located on the Moon it would be too close for some people. This was an opportunity lost.
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Re:Won't be enough (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, we don't want a stray nuclear explosion to send the moon off on a fantastical but low budget trip across the universe, requiring some really bad acting and 1970s styles to come back into fashion!
That would be horrific :(
Re:Won't be enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were the shiznit! I won't listen to accusations of bad acting. Hurumph!
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Naaah the real reason most people continued to watch it was Catherine Schell, even with the weird eyebrows they gave her...
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Catherine Schell went the Seven of Nine route. Initial assumption was that she was just the eye candy, but she displayed some acting chops and character development as well.
The other major addition to Space: 1999 Season 2, "Tony," maybe not so much. He was put in there to be action boy.
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Seeing as they came from the same producers as Joe90 and Thunderbirds, I kept looking for the strings.
Joe90 had better acting too.
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Hey, we don't want a stray nuclear explosion to send the moon off on a fantastical but low budget trip across the universe, requiring some really bad acting and 1970s styles to come back into fashion!
1970s music was awesome. Its color palette, not so much.
Martin Landau's acting in the series was excellent, Barbara Bain's was competent. Barry Morse was quite good in his season as well.
Re:Won't be enough (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just hoping for magic. The bane of our so-called modern society.
Yucca has always been an excellent place for mid-term (1k-10k year) radioactive storage - it's politics and corresponding misinfotainment that has destroyed our chances of low carbon safe energy.
Re:Won't be enough (Score:4, Interesting)
At some point long before half a million years, reprocessing this waste is going to be economical at some point.
Plus what the hell man THIS IS SIMPLE BURYING, there's no magic super lead lining these tunnels, this is simply the most geologically stable place where an earthquake / volcano / water table won't crack open the cases, the cases aren't super over engineered for radiation they are over engineered because of nigh impossible demands that these be the last surviving creation of man standing steadfast in their tomb as the Sun goes red giant and engulfs the Earth.
AND ANOTHER THING
We CAN process the high level nuclear waste down but we won't because the result can be weapons grade and the last thing we need is another nuclear arms race, especially now with all the people that would be participating.
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THIS IS SIMPLE BURYING, there's no magic super lead lining these tunnels, this is simply the most geologically stable place where an earthquake / volcano / water table won't crack open the cases...
This is why this stuff can't go forwards. There isn't honest discussion about it.
The most geologically stable where a disaster... what? What? Won't? You can see the future? Getting this wrong could have major consequences. Mistaking a decreased risk for a lack of risk proves an inability to understand the risks involved. There is no way for you to salvage any credibility on this subject after claiming that a place rated as low geologic risk is no-risk.
We can't even be honest about what we try to build, much
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If you want no risk then it needs to be glassified and buried at the base of a subduction zone where it will get sucked into Earth's mantle.
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How would you get it there without risk? There will be great risk in moving it. It is not obvious that the risk is less, even if the final storage is perfect.
It is obvious that for many of the people on the transportation route the risk will vastly go up, especially for people who have chosen collectively not to have any nuclear plants in their region. I've yet to hear of any transportation plan other than, "too bad."
With on-site storage, at least the risk is distributed according to an area having already
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The words "won't crack open the cases" implies zero risk. "Won't." In the context of unknown future disasters, even. It shows a complete disregard for probability, and for safety analysis based on facts.
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much less establish a track record of nuclear safety.
Do you realize that nuclear power - with everything that people have done wrong with it - is by far the safest method of producing energy (clean, dirty, or otherwise) that mankind has ever developed? Literally nothing, including wind or solar, is safer. Nothing is. Even if you choose to include Chernobyl (which was an experimental reactor used as a weapons research lab that happened to produce electricity for nearby communities), it's still by far safer than any other source.
So let's talk about risk and let
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much less establish a track record of nuclear safety.
Do you realize that nuclear power - with everything that people have done wrong with it - is by far the safest method of producing energy (clean, dirty, or otherwise) that mankind has ever developed?
I certainly concede that is a talking point of one side, but every time the people involved talk about it, they oversell it substantially. I don't think the case has actually been made that it is true. I think instead it is simply asserted to be true, and anybody who disagrees is shouted down as anti-science, or a "hippie."
Even your own statement, it is very strongly worded including a bunch of absolutes that ensure that the claims are not literally true, as stated. It is rather trivial to name safer energy
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It's about as contested as the validity of the Theory of Evolution and the effectiveness of childhood vaccines in that there are people who claim it not to be true in spite of massive amount of empirical evidence.
First, is nuclear power safer than other methods of power generation? Yes, by orders of magnitude.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... [forbes.com]
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... [nextbigfuture.com]
Second, Chernobyl (which is included in the evidence presented above). Chernobyl was a reactor that served two purposes for the Soviets
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Nothing you saw can stop Chernobyl from being something that happened, and the risk of it happening is part of the equation.
You blame politics, etc., well guess what: you don't get to choose the future politics of the world. That is the level of failure that exists, that is known.
That you want to write it off and have history somehow "not count" shows a deep disregard for reality; for the part of reality that has already happened, and that really should have better vision than just the covering of eyes.
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At some point long before half a million years, reprocessing this waste is going to be economical at some point.
Yeah about 20 years ago. The bigger question is that will at some point before half a million years politicians actually make decisions based on sound science instead of NIMBYs and cold war fears of proliferation?
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Because I'm CERTAIN that it's MUCH safer to just leave storage casks sitting OUT IN THE OPEN IN A PARKING LOT at the plant. Right?
No possibility of ground water contamination there right?
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If there is one useful thing a republican majority could do this would be it. At some point politicians have to have the courage to say "Thanks for the input, but we need a solution and this is the one we've chosen." If only to deal with the waste already in existence, we need some responsible way of handling it.
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Any "nuclear waste facility" which makes it a one way trip is technically flawed. Today's nuclear waste is tomorrow's LFTR fuel.
Most low level waste is about as radioactive as a radium watch buried in a barrel of sand and about as dangerous (granite is more radioactive). We really do err on the side of complete and utter paranoia when it comes to "noo-cle-ar" stuff.
Most high level waste should be being reused. If it was we could reduce "waste" levels around 99%
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The sad irony being, without a central repository, the nuclear waste just sits onsite at each nuclear power plant, either in cooling pools or open-air casks.
Humans are stupid.
You'd have to actually see the future to know which is worse. What we do know is that the Yucca Mountain site may be safe, or it may be a giant disaster waiting to happen. We can't know which, because the supporters have lied and lied and over-sold all of the specific safety details. Probably better than a parking lot, but you can't make an engineering analysis based on lies or political hand-waving.
It seems a lot of the spent fuel could still be re-processed and used again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.. [wikipedia.org]
Majority leaders home district (Score:4, Interesting)
That is politics for you.
Fact is no one wants the waste near them and distrust government and experts. Thank 3 mile island, chernoybl, and even the non nuclear deep water horizon. Promises of safety and advances for all 3 yet failures with lasting consequences create a boy crying wolf scenario whether justified or not.
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Promises of relative safety. That is the problem, people think when people say that there is relative safety that there is absolute safety.
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The supporters don't promise some relative safety, they insist it is totally absolutely safe and wonderful and anybody who questions them are anti-science.
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:5, Insightful)
At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.
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At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.
Don't forget: No additional exploration and no price increases as well. After WWII we went on an exploration binge, but since then we haven't really even looked.
With Thorium we'd have enough for tens of thousands of years.
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:5, Informative)
That shit is poison, a proliferation risk, and it isn't like there is an unlimited supply of fissile material anyway. At best nuclear energy is a stopgap technology. At current rates it is thought that there is a 200 year supply at best... more like 100 years (or less) should consumption double (or triple).
"Proliferation risk"? Please cite your source!
"200 year supply at best"? Again, please cite your source.
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Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:4, Interesting)
Fukushima was bad, but it was nothing even close to Chernobyl.
Furthermore if you average the damage done to our environment and population across all nuclear accidents ever, it's paltry compared to the amount of damage/loss of life traditional fossil fuels do. The difference is that damage from fossil fuels are like car accidents, small in scale, each one only impacting a few people, but they happen all the time. Nuclear accidents are like airline crashes, they're rare, but the impact of a single 747 going down is considerable, and impacts a lot of people. Most of the time car crashes don't make the news, but every time a 747 goes down people talk about it.
There have been exactly 2 INES level 7 nuclear disasters in the 70 odd years we've had nuclear power. Even if we take the most liberal estimates of the number of cases of cancer caused by Chernobyl, the total number of deaths related to nuclear power are still somewhere shy of 100,000. (in reality this number is probably closer to 50,000 but it's difficult to say exactly how many additional cases of cancer Chernobyl caused, with a range of between 4000 and 98,500). Coal mining alone averages 1,800 deaths a year, or 126,000 deaths over the past 70 years, and that's not even factoring in other fossil fuels.
TL;DR nuclear power is the safest cleanest, most viable option that can meet our current and future power needs.
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And still, it's better than any of the fossil fuels.
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At current rates it is thought that there is a 200 year supply at best... more like 100 years (or less) should consumption double (or triple).
At current rates with current known supplies and no further exploration we have a 200 year supply. I take it you believed in peak oil in the 60s as well right?
If you increase demand you may find people actually start looking for the stuff.
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Thank the Soviet propaganda machine. They spent a lot of time in the 50's and 60's pushing an anti-nuke message that spread from its intended target (bombs) to a completely unintended victim (power).
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Money.
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Like Radio Free Europe or Voice of America? Yeah we spend a lot of money putting out our message but they do the same thing. It's still a Spy v. Spy world and they have their propaganda engines and we have ours. There's also feet on the street, right now there's a trial going on in NYC [sputniknews.com] and it really sheds some light into the low budget approach on how Russia pursues it's goals. One of my favorite quotes [mcall.com] so far in talking about American Women:
"I have lots of ideas about such girls, but these ideas are not actionable because they don't allow (you) to get close enough. And in order to be close you either need to (have sex with) them or use other levers to influence them to execute my requests."
If you take a look at Russia Today, [slashdot.org] they spew a ton of propa
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One of my favorite quotes came when Farley Mowat interviewed a Soviet general who said, "The difference between American propaganda and Soviet propaganda is that we don't believe ours."
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, we spent more money. However, understand that the anti-nuclear message causing the anti-power issue was a tactic, not the end goal. The end goal was simply unrest in the West which would affect the West's ability to compete with the Soviet bloc in nuclear armaments. So our money pointed back at them would not have directly counteracted against their propaganda that turned into anti-nuclear NIMBY protests because we used different tactics.
No one in the USSR would have cared if we sent an anti-nuclear message to them, because they controlled their population to the extent that there would be no actual protest. The West is vulnerable to that because we have the freedom to accept NIMBY-ism. The only people who had the ability to say "not in my backyard" in the USSR would have been the Party leaders, and they were likely already covered.
So, we didn't encourage them to not use nuclear power, because it would not have had the effect we wanted. Our propaganda was to show the people of the USSR that we were prosperous and non-threatening, while being able to defend ourselves if needed. The best way to do that was free information, blue jeans and rock and roll, not countering anti-nuclear propaganda.
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But, what about the money spent to counteract Soviet propaganda? Wasn't it more money?
If you spend money on opposing propaganda you increase the followers of both extremes, and decrease support of the positions near the center. They may or may not balance each other, but they are very very unlikely ever to cancel each other out.
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How could Soviet propaganda reach the US, or the Americas (excluding Cuba)?
If you are at all interested in the actual answer, The Sword and the Shield [amazon.com] is an absolutely fascinating book that answers your question. It was written by Vasily Mitrokhin, a senior historian for the KGB, who brought over thirty years of KGB mission records to the British after the fall of the Soviet Union. He discusses "active measures", which were propaganda campaigns designed to fracture public opinion and cast the US position in a questionable light. This includes really awful and regrettable things, l
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For a more entertaining version of how the Soviets influenced America and operated on her soil, I recommend watching 'The Americans' on FX network. Set in the 80's during the height of the cold war, the plotlines in the show are based roughly on actual events documented in the book, and from other sources of KGB history.
Seconded. Season 3 just started; I'm still catching up on season 2.
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Reactor 4 at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan wasn't even fuelled when the tidal-wave destroyed the coolant circulation pumps, but the storage pool in the reactor building became a problem because the continual supply of liquid water is necessary in order to keep the fuel safe. The 'cool down' period is very, very long and if the temps get too high then reactions with the other material
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:5, Informative)
The pools aren't necessary forever - 5 to 10 years and then they can be moved to dry casks. Already, over 20% of spent fuel is stored this way. Hardly permanent, as the casks need to be reconditioned/rebuilt every 30-100 years - but not the active process that you describe.
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No, I think it is completely unacceptable that we don't have a permanent solution in place. I was just responding to TWX's post - which to my reading implied that the spent fuel requires a lot more attention than it actually does.
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay. Idiocracy is a movie. A funny one, with something valid to say, but a movie. If the world got to the point where it even resembled that, civilization would have already completely collapsed or it would be subsisting on automation that the previous generations built. In either case, you have bigger problems than some radioactive waste leaking a little in Nevada.
Much of Nevada is a marginal place for humans to live to begin with. If there was a catastrophe that eliminated a lot of people, those people wouldn't go living in Nevada near the nuclear waste site. They'd move to the places it was easier to live. Just like before the Black Death in Europe, the development of marginal lands only continued profitably (or at all) while there was high population, and thus demand. Kill off a third of the population, and they stopped developing marginal areas and depopulated them.
The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site. This isn't like Chernobyl or Fukushima where fire and explosions are spreading the material. We're talking more about material leaching into groundwater and things like that. A terrible thing to happen, to be sure, but not exactly a problem if no one is living there.
Compare this to your Roundup example, and it is apples and oranges. Herbicidal treatments will be applied to locations where weeds need to be killed for food production. That is a much more serious threat compared to some nuclear waste stored in casks under a salt dome in the middle of nowhere.
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The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site.
Well... go to Google Earth and take a look at what's already there in the general area of Yucca Mountain.
Search for "Sedan Crater" and start scanning south. That moonscape of craters? Atom bomb test craters, every one, lined with completely uncontained fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (Which is a substantial fraction of each bomb's load.)
I submit that what is already there is a much bigger hazard than anything that would ever be put in the Yucca Mountain repository.
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When I read about this stuff my only conclusion is that we're wasting a bunch of energy and should be looking at ways to harvest it.
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Yeah, but the processes to refine the stuff out is horrendous. They make oil refineries look like unspoiled wilderness in comparison.
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Yeah, but the processes to refine the stuff out is horrendous. They make oil refineries look like unspoiled wilderness in comparison.
Yeah, but we're already storing it, anyway. I might be nuts but from what I've seen if we were to take 10 or 15 square miles of land - totally insignificant when you look at the size of our country - and decide that it was going to be a nasty radioactive place but that we would work to keep it contained and do whatever we need there - seems like we could do it. But nobody wants that "in their back yard".
Re:Majority leaders home district (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the storage of nuclear waste isn't passive, it requires active processes to keep the genie in the bottle.
This is only true for the first 5-10 years after the fuel is removed from the core for the last time. There are dry fuel storage sites all around the country where used nuclear fuel sits in steel casks in concrete bunkers, and is completely cooled by the ambient air and natural convection. This fuel, incidentally, is supposed to be in Yucca mountain.
If only it were POLITICALLY and SOCIALLY sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear waste disposal isn't an engineering problem, it's a social and political problem.
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Well, what do you expect with all the science deniers in Congress and the White House? If the Democratic Party members took global warming as seriously as the Republicans do, they'd quickly cut out the red tape and solve this nuclear waste storage issue in order to economically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as places like Arizona [wikipedia.org] do. Instead, they chase after non-scientific stuff like biofuels, where the science is settled. [slashdot.org]
Re:If only it were POLITICALLY and SOCIALLY sound (Score:5, Informative)
The folks in Japan working the #4 unit of the Fukushima Daiichi plant would like to have a word with you about this. It was shut-down and defuelled before the tsunami struck, and despite this its spent fuel pool's contents blew the building apart.
You are misinformed. While the stability of the fuel pools was unknown and a concern at the time of the disaster, it was later determined that they were in fact not leaking, damaged, or in danger. No fuel in storage was compromised. The damage to Unit 4 was caused by the hydrogen explosion of Unit 2.
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Picture of all four, #1 - #4, right to left [thebreakthrough.org]
Looks like #2 is the only one that didn't blow the building apart, and there's an awful lot of damage on the side of #4 that's away from the rest of the reactor buildings.
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Really though, are you going to trust a photo supplied by ISIS? This is Islamic propaganda.
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oh wait....
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the problem with how nuclear works in the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
While most of your post I would disagree with, this part is especially wrong. The reason why power companies do not invest in reprocessing and consume fresh fissile material is because by federal law bans it. Remember Jimmy Carter's Non-proliferation deal? Yeah.
Re:the problem with how nuclear works in the USA (Score:4)
The reason why power companies do not invest in reprocessing and consume fresh fissile material is because by federal law bans it. Remember Jimmy Carter's Non-proliferation deal? Yeah.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]:
"In October 1976,[8] concern of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. ... ... the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies."
President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing."
"In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility.
It's nothing to do with the ban on reprocessing that was only in place from 1977 to 1981, and everything to do with reprocessing being completely uneconomical. If we're going to reprocess, the government has to pay for it, as companies won't, but there are no technical or legislative barriers to doing so, as multiple other countries that are already reprocessing their waste demonstrate.
Nuclear reprocessing is a fiction (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear reprocessing is one of the biggests myths proponed by nuclear advocates.
Only the plutonium, which is less than 1% of the spent fuel rod, can be really used again as MOX. However the process to seperate the plutonium is a extremely expensive and dirty one, involving pumping low level nuclear waste into the sea.
The rest of the uranium in the used fuel rod is uneconomical to reprocess because of contaminated with U232 and U-236:
"No use of reprocessed uranium in French reactors in the near future
The ura
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Yeah but the only country that really wants to do the re-processing for us is France, and Republicans hate France.
Yucca Fraud (Score:3)
It's the Mining Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Graham Pickren wrote an excellent Ph.D thesis in 2013 "Political ecologies of electronic waste: uncertainty and legitimacy in the governance of e-waste geographies". While it isn't about nuclear waste, per se, it rather brilliantly describes how industrialized nations apply a "fetishism" to material which tracks downstreams but not upstreams. http://www.envplan.com/abstrac... [envplan.com]
The point of the article is that the dirtiest recycling (or most questionable Yucca storage) is practically always better than the cleanest extraction (mining).... and this applies to the risk at Yucca (for storage) vs. mining uranium in the USA Southwest. Nevada's strangely among the most willing states to allow in situ mining, even when mercury effluent (from gold mining) turns their extraction points into Superfund sites. 14 years ago Nevada and NM legislators were trying to provide the private sector with $30 million to develop environmental restoration technologies for in-situ leach (ISL) mining of uranium. "In a statement from his office in Washington, D.C. Domenici said he decided to remove the ISL provisions from his comprehensive nuclear energy plan in order to calm fears stoked by "substantial misinformation about the legislation." (Gallup Independent, Nov. 10, 2001)"
Treatment of Planetary Environmental health oddly follows the same "waste centric" obsessions of western medical history. Western medicine is pretty great today, but went through a couple of centuries of giving mercury as a laxative, and being always focused on what comes out of the body rather than the nutrition stream. Closing the "waste deposit" while giving tax incentives to mine uranium is "anal retentive" environmentalism.
See also Pickren et. al. at AREA Waste, commodity fetishism and the ongoingness of economic life http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... [wiley.com]
Shows the immaturity of the political system (Score:3)
This thing has to be built. And there is a district somewhere that would have it. Put it in Alaska if you really want to put it out in the middle of no where. Possibly on the Aleutian islands if you really need to go nuts with it. There are islands out there that no one lives on. We have many places in the US where no one lives that could host a storage facility. We have nuclear weapons test sites for example that could be used. Might they be as ideal as the yucca mountain site? Possibly not but no one can claim they're going to make once pristine land a nuclear waste dump if the site was literally nuked... repeatedly.
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Those islands are very seismically active. One good quake and it leeches into the Pacific ocean.
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Are you sure the bottom of the pacific ocean wouldn't actually be the best place for radioactive materials? Miles below the surface surrounded by an unfathomable amount of water?
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It is all relative. Over thousands of years it might be a concern but over decades or centuries I wouldn't worry about it too much.
The nuclear issue is not going to require storage for thousands of years unless our civilizations collapse. And if they do, a nuclear leak in those frozen islands is going to be the least of our problems.
But if that bothers you anyway... find any place where no one can possibly claim to be a neighbor and put the facility there. Storage shouldn't be a big problem for more then a
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You sir, are an idiot. The Aleutian Islands encompass some of the most productive fisheries in the world. You want you King Crab to glow in the dark? Your salmon to grow flippers?
Sea water causes things to corrode. Unless you vitrify the waste (and the vitrification works), it will leak into the ecosystem. There is a reason water is called the 'Universal Solvent'.
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Fine... then we'll build coal power plants and just not do nuclear. You win.
Either let the waste be stored some place or it is hydrocarbons forever.
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You sir, are an idiot. The Aleutian Islands encompass some of the most productive fisheries in the world. You want you King Crab to glow in the dark?
It would make them a lot easier to handle on deck of the ship, what with the dark and harsh lights and all...
Re: Shows the immaturity of the political system (Score:2)
Not to mention another ice age it's on it's way in just a few thousand years. Can it withstand a few miles of shifting ice on top of it?
The Big Year (Score:2)
They are also one of the best birding areas in the world. I'm pretty sure some ecologists and wildlife people might object to that location also.
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You don't want to put the waste out in Alaska. You can see Russia from here!
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Unless people want to start stuffing it up their asses they're going to have to put it somewhere.
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Unless people want to start stuffing it up their asses they're going to have to put it somewhere.
Well since you don't get Yucca Mountain, I guess you better start stuffing.
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Nope. I was fine with Yucca. The stuffing is what people standing in the way of nuclear power should do. It is the best power source known to man and a bunch of fucktards let it get shut down by the coal and natural gas lobbies. That is who has been funding anti nuclear groups by the way. Not concerned environmentalists. The coal and gas lobby.
Idiots.
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Not very neighborly of you
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Only small fishing ships use your coastal water, everything bigger takes a more direct route across the open ocean.
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You can't stop us from moving it by sea. We have every right to do that.
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So worst case an isolated wilderness in the middle of alaska will be contaminated. Unfortunate but no real impact on the lower 48 or anyone that lives in Alaska since you can find parts of the state that are totally depopulated.
Look, I am looking for a place to put it. And at some point, I'm just going to put it in someone's backyard and leave. There are a lot of reasonable places to put it. Accept one of them. Any one of them.
Accept none and I'm just putting it on the sidewalk.
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I don't really care where they do it so long as they do it somewhere.
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I know it is political. I'm just saying perhaps we need to appreciate that the NIMBYism is not going away and find some part of the country that no one can claim is in their backyard. For example... a federal territory might be an idea. If it isn't a state then their ability to complain in congress will be reduced.
Chernobyl? (Score:2)
Why wouldn't Chernobyl be an ideal place to park nuclear waste? A large "exclusion zone" around the plant is already cordoned off with some degree of security. There have also been ongoing efforts to consolidate the waste and construct dry storage containment facilities for it. Just expand the construction project so that it has more capacity.
The USA recently gave an enormous aid package to Ukraine, maybe they should return the favor by taking and storing some USA nuclear waste?
Would it be too dangerous
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Being right on the Russian border makes it a serious hazard zone for random explosions. Probably one of the least safe locations you could have come up with right now. There is a significant danger of major artillery battles involving the exclusion zone. It isn't even safe to fly over, much less to put something dangerous on the ground.
And yes, the risk of moving it is most of the reason for opposition to Yucca Mountain, so moving it even farther doesn't really help for compromise. Now you're endangering At
Nuclear is a dead end (Score:2)
In 75 years all of the low hanging fruit reserves will be mined out... according to current estimates that leaves 125 years of increasingly harder to get (i.e. more expensive) ore.
Then what? I guess develop the clean energy that we should be working on now.
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In 75 years all of the low hanging fruit reserves will be mined out... according to current estimates that leaves 125 years of increasingly harder to get (i.e. more expensive) ore.
Then what? I guess develop the clean energy that we should be working on now.
No. Using proven fast reactor technology, we could supply 100% of the world's energy needs for 10,000 years just using the depleted uranium sitting unused in storage barrels at enrichment plants. Not to mention the huge amounts of raw uranium ore, tailings, reserves in localities that have previously banned mining, and seawater extraction. Nuclear fuel availability is purely a political and social problem, not technical.
Not to impressed (Score:2)
I'm not too impressed with the reasons why the program "can't" be restarted. The thing is, someday this will have to be done somewhere. When the politicians and scared public finally get their thumbs out of their 4ss3s they will have to designate funds, hire a staff, and deal with NIMBY syndrom. All of this is true regardless of where they put it.
Here's a location where the studies have already been done. Call it a restart of the old program or call it a new one.. either way it will make more sense to ju
What Happens At Yucca Mountain... (Score:2)
'The name "Yucca Mountain" is synonymous with danger and excitement. It's so much more than some single-industry desert town with a lot of unusual buildings—the entire place surges with activity and pulses with the thrill of the forbidden. The eerie luminescent glow lights the Nevada sky all through the night. Everyone has heard stories, but no one who hasn't visited can truly understand Yucca Mountain. Why's that? Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: Wh
WIPP storage facility? (Score:2)
http://www.dcbureau.org/201406... [dcbureau.org]
Re:Hire new staff? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not like the nuke waste has another home to go to. Open the damn thing already.
Actually, there is a better option: Do nothing. Just let the waste continue to accumulate in the cooling ponds at each individual plant.
The cooling ponds have sufficient capacity. Security is adequate. The waste is becoming less radioactive as it sits there. So there is no harm in waiting. A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc., and be in a better position to make a long term decision. It is quite possible that by then we will have power plants that can burn the "waste" as fuel. Even if not, we will have much better robots and other technology that will make processing the material far cheaper than if we did it today. Sometimes procrastination is the best policy.
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and more here: http://www.nae.edu/Publication... [nae.edu]
On site storage is not a viable or better long term solution. We are only now hitting a point where reactors are starti
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" A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc."
And a few decades from then someone will be there to point out that in a few more decades "we" will know even more.
And a few decades from that...
And a few decades from that...
Meanwhile the waste sits in what was supposed to be temporary storage requiring more maintenance than permanent storage would, opening it up to more chances for an accident or even theft. And this is at the power plants, near population cen
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" A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc."
And a few decades from then someone will be there to point out that in a few more decades "we" will know even more.
And a few decades from that...
And a few decades from that...
Meanwhile the waste sits in what was supposed to be temporary storage requiring more maintenance than permanent storage would, opening it up to more chances for an accident or even theft. And this is at the power plants, near population centers as opposed to in the middle of a desert mountain.
If there is a concern that we might want to re-use it some day just go get it back from the mountain!
In other words; "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good."
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don't worry, eventually something bad will happen, hopefully not to close to where you live, and the political motivation to deal with this shit will suddenly exist and some of the same people opposed to yucca now will be clamoring for a centralized storage solution and wondering why we let this stuff sit all over the country for so long.
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Or, they'll start moving it all to a central location and the increased short-term risk of moving it will result in an accident in a place that otherwise didn't have any spent fuel at all, and then your whole scenario is blown up.
When you find yourself thinking things are a little too obvious, you might be missing something. There is no guarantee the "other side" is wrong, especially if you find it necessary to be dishonest about their concerns. When you have to pretend that real concerns don't exist, you p
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