Former Governor On Holding the Department of Energy Accountable In Idaho (thebulletin.org) 120
Lasrick writes: "I have been involved in government at the state and federal level for a long time and have had my share of political and legal run-ins with government agencies, but rarely in more than 50 years in politics have I encountered a government agency more committed to secrecy—perhaps even deception—than the US Department of Energy." So writes former governor of Idaho Cecil D. Andrus in this account of the U.S. government's plan to ship commercial spent fuel to the Idaho National Lab for what the feds call "research" but what the Andrus (and his predecessor) feel is an attempt to store high level nuclear waste in Idaho. According to him, despite Freedom of Information Act requests, the federal government is not sharing its plan for the waste once it gets to Idaho. This is a disturbing tale of government secrecy and stonewalling, and the problem with nuclear waste: no one wants it in their backyard.
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Do you have any clue where the Idaho National Lab is? It's nobody's backyard. There are few more perfect places on the planet for "high level nuclear waste".
Re:Dirty weapons (Score:5, Informative)
Over top of the Snake River Aquifer is to you a perfect place? Which is upstream of 3 different states and supplies water for significant percentage of the U.S. Agriculture.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/... [usgs.gov]
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Over top of the Snake River Aquifer is to you a perfect place? Which is upstream of 3 different states and supplies water for significant percentage of the U.S. Agriculture.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/... [usgs.gov]
Oh, shut _up_ you whiny liberal bitches. 30 years of drinking the "...government IS the problem..." Kool-Aid has led us straight to this. Corporate America is able to buy anything they want, including the willing collaboration of "regulators" whose role was originally to look out for the interests of the citizens. We handed the reins of power to "our betters" years ago.
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Oh, shut _up_ you whiny liberal bitches. 30 years of drinking the "...government IS the problem..." Kool-Aid has led us straight to this.
Get with the times, "..government IS the problem" has been conservative Kool-Aid for some time now.
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Idaho is the home of nuclear energy in the US. What better place to put the "clean, safe and too cheap to meter" waste materials than the location of the first nuclear energy plant? They still celebrate "Atomic Days" every July 17 in Arco, Idaho. And, I believe Idaho still has more nuclear power plants per capita than any state in the US.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com... [roadsideamerica.com]
http://www.boiseweekly.com/boi... [boiseweekly.com]
So the question is not "why would the Department of Energy" want to store nuclear wastes in Idaho, it'
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Not hard to do when you are 44th in population density.
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State A has 1 nuclear plant and a population of 1000.
State B has 10
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Do you have any clue where the Idaho National Lab is? It's nobody's backyard. There are few more perfect places on the planet for "high level nuclear waste".
Been there, worked there (installed some scientific equipment there). It's miles and miles and miles and miles and miles from anywhere. But they have a helluva cafeteria. Leave Idaho Falls, drive 2 hours out to the site, work for 5 hours, drive 2 hours back to the hotel.
I remember you take a left at a place called "Mud Flats", no lie. I used to get the rental cars up to 120 on the roads leading out there. No cops for 100 miles in any direction, whoo hoo!
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You forgot about water for half of the west coast. We had a great place for storage in Nevada until politics killed it.
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Yeah. The people didn't want it. Funny thing about politicians. Once in a while the public stands up and gives them the finger. It's a shame because we need somewhere to store that waste. However, if you look at Hanford leaking into the Columbia river it's not hard to see why the locals aren't on board.
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Are you aware that elements have different isotopes with importantly different properties?
Harry Reid (Score:1)
I think a good place to put nuclear waste would be inside an extinct volcano, in the Nevada desert. That was the plan, until Harry Reid and Obama screwed it up. Yucca Mountain gets 7 inches a year. Idaho gets enough rain to support agriculture. Idaho is majority Republican....
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I take it you don't live in Nevada.
Schtink of your grandchildren! (Score:1)
This so-called nuclear "waste" will be worth a fortune in the future. Folks in a couple of hundreds of years on will be wondering why the "ancients" simply just buried this valuable fuel.
Forget oil in Texas . . . nuclear fuel in Idaho will be where it's at!
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In a few hundred years we'll have mastered harvesting the sun's energy. Assuming we don't all kill each other first.
We've already mastered it, it's just that we're primarily using solar energy that was stored millions of years ago.
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they should put the storage vault in the ground under Chicago city hall
That wouldn't be a bad idea. It could safely supply free heat and hot water for years
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It *could* be extremely valuable. Unfortunately, it would need to be reprocessed into elements (and occasional compounds) first. Mixed up like this it isn't useful for much but heating.
(Actually, some parts would need to be separated into pure isotopes to be maximally useful. The process wouldn't be cheap, and has been actively discouraged by the government.)
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Historically Idaho IS where the preppers, sagebrush rebels, neonazis, and northwest tea party types form their enclaves.
But if you want anything done, just contact someone connected to the sitting Butch Otter governorship.
'Gladiator School' prisons and defrauding Idaho taxpayers? Done!
Illegal ISP contracts issued to connected overpriced bidders? Done!
Somehow DOE has missed the boat so far. NOT done -- YET.
It would just be one more confrontational issue between tea party and traditional corporate Republi
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Re:If I were the DOE I'd do it to. (Score:5, Informative)
One shipment would be used to research fuel recycling techniques. The other would be used to research what happens to the fuel when it is placed in storage casks for years or decades.
INL is the perfect place to do this work.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/... [idahostatesman.com]
Re:If I were the DOE I'd do it to. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the issues that we deal with in the Northwest is that the federal government, particularly the DOE, has generated (and shipped in) a lot of hazardous nuclear waste in the area over the years and has horribly mismanaged its disposition. The epic levels of contamination at the Hanford site are mind boggling--and right on the banks of the Columbia River. They buried toxic waste on the reservation at the Idaho National Lab that we now have no records of--we don't know what it was or exactly where it's buried.
They keep promising to clean up their mess, but then they never seem to quite get around to fulfilling their promises. We end up having to sue them to get them to take action. Even then, they try to shirk as much responsibility as they can. There isn't a lot of trust of the DOE in this area of the country.
Re:If I were the DOE I'd do it to. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hanford was the site of the first nuclear reactor of its design, used to produce plutonium during WWII. The site was subsequently expanded to produce more plutonium, and some energy, through the Cold War. It is so messed up because of a lot of crap that went on during that time period: not knowing anything about industrial nuclear reactors, not having any kind of waste storage or processing plan, lots of scale-up, Cold War secrecy, etc. So, yeah, Hanford is a mess, but I think it is wrong to inhibit any kind of progress due to problems that were mostly documented more than 40 years ago. No waste was shipped to Hanford. The current DOE is very aware of the problems at Hanford and is actively trying to clean it up, but it takes a lot of time...and you need somewhere to store the waste. Without a waste storage facility, there is no way to clean up Hanford, and the barrels are going to keep leaking because most of them are more than 50 years old (never intended to be long-term waste storage).
Re:If I were the DOE I'd do it to. (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that the problems at Hanford have complex causes with long history. But what the former governor seems to be concerned about is a lack of transparency from DOE, which is an issue that people in the Northwest have been fighting for years (hence the lack of trust).
Listen, I understand that some level of contamination is unavoidable. But they've got liquid nuclear waste leaking out of tanks into the soil at the banks of the Columbia River, and they can't just keep telling us that they're "working on it". I'm sorry that they did such a terrible job planning for future needs, and I get that part of the reason for that is because they were doing completely new work, but another part of it was a wanton disregard for the environmental and human consequences of building their nuclear arsenal. There was plenty of money to build the bombs, but today it seems to have dried up: DOE budgets something like $3 billion per year for cleanup, but actually gets about $2 billion. I realize that's not all DOE's fault, but this is the reality. The federal government made an enormous, toxic mess in Eastern Washington and now they're dragging their feet when it comes time to clean it up.
But again, the issue in this article is a lack of trust. The DOE may be completely sincere in their cleanup efforts, but if they won't communicate about it, and we have to pry details out of them with FOIA requests, then there is no reason for the states to believe in that sincerity. This is, after all, the organization that turned 586 square miles of Washington State into the most heavily contaminated nuclear waste dump in the country. Why should the people of Washington believe that this organization has their best interests in mind?
[Also, one note: though many shipments of waste to Hanford have been stopped before they occurred, there are at least 2 shipments of nuclear waste that were delivered there from a DOE facility in California. The amount transferred is obviously dwarfed by the scale of waste products generated on site, but there is great fear that DOE just wants to ship all of this mess to Hanford and then leave it there indefinitely--likely in "temporary" storage facilities that are a continuation of the same irresponsible policies that created this problem in the first place.]
Re: If I were the DOE I'd do it to. (Score:1)
It comes down to money. DOE wants to clean it up. It's gonna take a ridiculous amount of money to do it. Congress won't give them the cash, but DOE staff can't point the finger, in fear of losing what little funding they do get. Thus the FOIA stonewall.
Congress is where the blame lies, not DOE.
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I tend to agree. Unfortunately for the DOE, they are the ones that have to implement Congress' half-baked approach to the Hanford remediation, so they are the ones who get the blame when their underfunded efforts fail to meet expectations.
It sucks that our government is unwilling to meet the moral obligations that it has to the people of Washington and the rest of the country to clean up its dangerous toxic dumping grounds--at Hanford and elsewhere. For this proje
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They keep promising to clean up their mess, but then they never seem to quite get around to fulfilling their promises.
So they have a "mind-boggling" amount of waste there (including a cubic km of contaminated soil according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) and they didn't clean it up overnight. What makes you think they're taking their time? How many decades should it take?
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Given that they've been stockpiling this waste "temporarily" for over 60 years, I think they should have made more progress toward an approach to cleaning it up rather than just filling up holes in the ground and then digging new ones and filling those up, too.
And what makes me think they're taking their time is that their plan is to be finished with cleanup by 2060 at the earliest--that's more than 100 years after they started
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Challenge it. Oddly enough, there are other sources of energy that do not require fossil fuels to be burned.
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despite the obvious evidence it is the ONLY green energy.
Except for solar+wind+storage, where storage includes electric car batteries connected to smart chargers. I already have an electric car, and a smart charger. It charges at 2am when electricity prices hit a trough. But with wider adoption of solar, it could charge at mid-day instead.
Re: NOTICE (Score:2)
There is not enough lithium on the planet to store the energy needed, so another battery material is needed.
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Not sure if troll or serious ocean dumpings been done already:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... [wsj.com]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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There are plenty of places we can store the shit until we figure out a use for it; and there are surely plenty of uses for it we simply haven't thought up a way to market yet.
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It was part of the early US nuclear weapons cycle and kept that way for inspections, later UN treaty obligations. Every US private company, the mil, gov got what they needed out of the simple methods put in place.
The UK, France, Soviet Union had their own exotic ideas about their own use, storage and international inspections, treaties.
They had fewer needs to stay with traditional methods and found ways to deal
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Reprocessing tends to separate out the plutonium that's useful for weapons, the industrial process we currently use is designed to produce plutonium as an offshoot.
There you go... (Score:2, Insightful)
Democrats just looooooove Obama when he's making up new laws and forcing them down people's throats, but this is the kind of shit that sort of government attitude leads to. "We get to do whatever we want because we're the Government - and you are not." He's created a culture of secrecy and stonewalling unprecedented in American government, he got away with it thanks to Democrats and the compliant media - and now you're surprised the government thinks it can do whatever it can get away with and lie about?
Oba
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http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2... [nytimes.com]
Sen. Rubber Band Reid got bought...
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"culture of secrecy and stonewalling unprecedented '''
The government is more transparent today than at any time in it's history. The people who can't see this are those who think US government history only goes back 20 years. It doesn't mean people should stop trying to ferret out government secrets but changes in how the government changes are incremental and government transparency is getting better and not worse. It may not be as transparent as some would like but it is not something that happens overnig
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Just because we generally support the prez doesn't mean we agree with everything he does. That's an unrealistic expectation: we vote for a representative, not individual initiatives.
Maybe there is a legitimate security reason to keep the details of this stuff secret: it's obviously dangerous in the wrong hands. Unfortunately we cannot directly tell if the secrecy is justified because it's still secret.
Let's hope our system of checks and balances works to ensure there is a reasonable review and consensus on
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Conservatives believe that their guy is great in every way and that if you criticise[SIC] him in any way, then you must hate his guts.
Sounds exactly like how the Democrats are about their savior Obama, It used to be any criticism of him was met with accusations of racism. Now that it is obvious how corrupt he is, those accusations have stopped, but it is the nasty Republicans that do this evil, right?
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Because of course, when people stonewall investigations, they will have trouble finding the truth.
IRS - Louis Lerner pled the fifth, all her records for the time period were lost in a hard drive crash (why was her email on the local machine!?)
Benghazi - Hillary was running her own email server, when asked for the data, she delivered data missing months at a time, the FBI is working on retrieving the data she illegally had wiped.
Fast and Furious - Where is the investigation? Why was the DoJ running guns int
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I highly doubt that the IRS runs without a backup as they are mandated to maintain records. Lerner was doing something odd by keeping all her mail on her computer and not on the server, but for some reason this wasn't explored too much.
How Laws Are Written (Re:There you go...) (Score:1)
They were ALL told to do that because they had no email backup server. The IT chief said so.
And as the law is written, it does NOT say the archiving has to be fail-proof. Even paper copies get eaten by rats or soiled by plumbing leaks.
Laws rarely define such contingencies. They are written by lawyers and politicians, NOT disaster recovery or prevention experts.
Adding such details into law could really bloat them up, and Republicans seem to repeatedly complain about the size of laws.
GOP wants contradictory t
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Yes, Republicans never force their own ideology "down people's throats", right?
This culture you speak of has been building for decades and was most certainly heavily contributed to during the Bush years. This is not a partisan issue
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Do you keep your KKK robes in hung in the closet where they won't get wrinkled but they might be seen, or do you keep them folded in a drawer where they get wrinkled but are less likely to be discovered?
Please respond, I really want to know.
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Funny, it seems that the DNC is much more racist than the RNC. I saw many people who voted for Obama BECAUSE he was black, not for any of his positions on anything. This is racist, you guys got exactly the person you voted for, after all he backstabbed the people while still a Senator during the election when he voted for the FISA amendments bill. He claimed he would never vote for it while it contained telecom immunity, then as soon as it came up, he voted for it, and changed his web site to reflect tha
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I live in Maryland, as it is a blue state, I will kindly disagree with you. I know too many people who voted for him.
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unprecedented... that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Let's see... when has the US government hidden nefarious motives from the unsuspecting public in the past?
Oh yes! The many, many chemical, biological, radioactive, and psychological experiments it did on its own people in secret during the last couple centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The federal government does what it wants when it wants and doesn't care what you think about it. You aren't wrong to blame Obama for thi
Simple solution (Score:1)
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No. France gets about 17% of its electricity from spent nuclear fuel. France's energy sources are nuclear (74.5%), renewables (19.5%). They've simply decided to change the mix so that 40% of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources by adding in more wind and solar by 2025.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That doesn't mean they are dropping the nuclear power, though -- in fact, they are building a Generation III plant that is much more fuel efficient and has le
And we already have a mothballed plant to do it. (Score:2)
Allow reprocessing of spent fuel. France, UK, India, and Russia manage to do it. Might be more expensive but it gets rid of long term storage issues and drastically reduces long term environmental risk.
And we already have a mothballed plant to do it.
We're just not doing it because of an executive order by Jimmy Carter, who was convinced that reprocessed fuel would all be weapons grade (depends on how much reprocessing you do, actually; you can stop before you reach that point), and that as a result, it would contribute to nuclear proliferation.
Seems to have worked with North Korea. Oh. Snap. It *didn't* work with North Korea. Jimmy Carter's "bad"...
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Nuclear waste (Score:3)
Idaho would be a perfect place to get rid of mountains of nuclear waste.
Just pile it up, throw a tarp over it, and the local yokels will come and steal it, carting it away by the pickup truck load.
Seriously, these goobers would steal dog shit if you put a sign up saying "PLEASE DON'T STEAL THE DOG SHIT".
True story: A friend of mine crushed his old, broken refrigerator flat with his tractor and left it in the yard (he was going to take it to the dump in a few days). It was stolen the next night.
I've always thought (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sounds morally right, but in fact economies of scale and security considerations make it much more sensible to have one or two specialised facilities.
Of course "sensible" debate about nuclear waste ended a long time ago...
Re:I've always thought (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the two scenarios (storage and processing) have different ideal geological requirements.
This is no different than any other activities humans have ever undertaken. Building a house is typically done in a different place than the landfill used to put the waste products. People are just as usual applying different standards to nuclear vs the rest of the industry which stores its waste in the air.
The best company to deal with one part of a process is not necessarily the best to deal with another. This applies to basically the production / manufacturing of everything humans have ever done except for small hunter / gatherer villages.
DOE EULA (Score:3)
Once you agree to any nuclear installation, they can change the rules and do whatever the hell they want. This is what has happened at pretty much every nuclear power reactor: the nuclear waste ends up being stored on site indefinitely. It makes no difference that this is the worst possible scenario because it makes security a nightmare and the sites were never designed for long term storage in the first place.
The DOE's job is to make nuclear technology happen. They don't really give a rat's ass about the environment or security. It wasn't like they wanted the EPA Superfund. They didn't start it and it's mostly paid for by taxes on other polluters, like the fossil fuel and chemical industries. All they do is spend the money when enough political pressure is brought to bear.
Take Hanford [koin.com]. They are cleaning up things they know how to deal with. Unfortunately that's not where the real trouble is. The most horrible problem are these huge tanks full of various toxic and radioactive waste. They don't know exactly what's in them and they are so old that they all leak. It is possible that moving the material around could cause either a chemical or nuclear explosion because critical mass could be reached. (Not nuclear weapon bomb level explosion, but enough heat to cause a vapor explosion.)
So they don't know how to empty the tanks and they don't know how to deal with the material when it gets out of the tanks. They had a plan to build an automated facility to make glass logs that would physically contain the radioactive material and it has failed. They are over budget and behind schedule. Their timetable is a fantasy.
So why does anyone in Idaho expect anything to be different?
Containment Facilities are required (Score:3)
One of the most major criticisms of Yucca Mountain was that the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility could not be applied to Yucca's geology. The reason to choose a specific geology (in addition to being seisemically stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to control the the amount of time ground water took to travel through the facility carrying radioactive isotopes, eventually, into the water table. If the amount of time it takes exceeds the decay rate of the longest lived radio-isotopes then the facility was providing defense in depth.
In addition, as a site like that would be containing pu-239, whose half life is around 25000 years, after considering the daughter products you need a geology capable of containing it for 500,000 years, which is what the original specification called for.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology (pdf) [wiley.com] revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. The reason is Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash.
Feild [sciencemag.org] studies [sciencedirect.com] have established that crystaline rocks [sciencedirect.com] like granite and bentonite clays can acheive this control. So far Finland [geoprac.net] is on track to be the first with an active facility with a Swedish facility [geoprac.net] also in the works.
Curiously, getting this right should be the one thing pro and anti nuclear folk should be able to agree on, if only for their own reasons. For Nuclear power to continue operating such a storage facility is essential so that new reactors can be deployed and materials removed from reactor sites. For people against Nuclear power such a facility would improve the safety of the industry as a whole by providing a place to store the materials permanently where there ingress into the environment can be controlled.
The DOE have got to build a facility somewhere. The right location has to be chosen because of all the rail and other infrastructure required to move the spent fuel has to be funded and built. This should not be a difficult thing for America to achieve by applying a scientific approach to selecting the site and building it instead of the politics used to select Yucca Mountain.
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I
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I think you will find it has more to do with budgetary and political wrangling more than anti-nuclear people. In many countries there are laws to stop any entity lower than a state government interfering with the placement of nuclear facilities.
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PU-239 is not waste, and should not be stored and allowed to decay naturally. PU-239 is one of three (U-233, U-235 being the other two) 'drivers' that can be used to sustain nuclear reactors in a LFTR thorium based reactor.
I never said it was and even if you use a thorium based reactor with 239 pu as an neutron source you still need a place to store pu-239.
It's insane to allow this valuable material to be simply stored, as if it's completely useless.
We need to switch nuclear power from the uranium based fuel cycle over to thorium, preferably using LFTR tech to get the job done.
I would suggest that IFR technology is more appropriate in this role as it burns and existing transuranics instead of creating a new radio-isotope product. Using Thorium means you have two problems instead of one. Can you show me the entire fuel cycle for thorium?
With imagination and planning you would realize that by building and siting a fuel containment facility you wou
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Thorium reactors create a new waste stream of 208 Thallium, It's a gamma emitter, not a alpha emitter like 239 pu - so it's pretty nasty stuff.
It has lots of halflives (more than the 20 or so) and many, many daughter products. Now I'm not sure if the mechanism is spontaneous fission that does this (like DU) but because it is a gamma emitter it would be a lot harder to deal with than plutonium. I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with the properties of the metal being more like aluminum than l
New gen IV reactors are needed (Score:2)