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Yucca Mountain, Open For Business
John Galt writes: "It seems the Feds have finally decided that Nevada will host the government's nuclear waste repository." The Yucca Mountain project has been in the works for a while. Here is a cutaway diagram.
Thats always been my take on this. The one major downside is that we may need the resources in the future. Otherwise what better way is there to spread it through the universe so it can be redeposited at a later date in a different spot in less toxic densities.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Jon Katz has been working hard for the past few years, and I think he deserves a vacation. I've been thinking about where we could send him for a while now, and I think I just found my answer
The other minor downside would be if the rocket blew up you would just have annihilated the entire planet...
Hey, maybe they'll be able to make more souvenir salt packets from the salt they mine while excavating the tunnels - I still have mine - looks like funny colored rock salt, with a little WIPP logo on the outside...
Imagine what sort of a hideout that would be, for, say, an international terrorist or two ...
...
Man, the world is definitely getting to be more like "James Bond" than it is "Space, 1999".
Damnit.
Anyway, big deal about this nuclear repository problem, anyway. Once it's there, it's there, and all we gotta do is keep an eye on it.
Of course, getting it into that hole is going to be interesting. Imagine what a security nightmare *THAT* is going to be... I'd say a train carrying a bunch of nuclear, radioactive, material through, oh, say, 20 different states would be a pretty handy for any sort of weapon that would *burn* it easily.
Ercck. I don't even want to think about it. Way too much 007
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think the launch would be a pretty risky thing. Imagine the rocket blowing up at 15km up or so.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
What could be safer than disposing of unwanted bodies in the Nevada desert? Stick them in an enormous nuclear silo with 77 000 tons of stuff that'll kill you if you get near it! ;-)
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
After they load this sucker up, will you be able to detect the emissions from space, gamma, visual, or otherwise?
Look for laws mandating that routes for waste transport be published for the public saftey and need to know, then subsequently rovoked under homeland defense concerns...
one nuclear power plant makes 30,000lbs of waste per year. sending one pound of something into space costs $10,000.
now multiply those two numbers together to determine the cost of waste disposal using your plan. for one plant. for one year. then ask yourself who is going to pay for that
"He said increased unease about terrorist attacks makes it even more important that the nation's radioactive waste be consolidated."
Eggs. Basket. z
Ideally, that would be great. What better way to rid us of nuclear waste than to shoot it into space? But what happens if the rocket blows up? We've just put an entire hemisphere into a nuclear winter.
Do it doug.
Truly a nice idea.
Apart from the safety issue, the other problem is the cost-benefit of doing this.
Space launches cost X million, and you'd get a 'few' tons of waste disposed of. Digging a really big, deep hole is much cheaper and you can store more.
I agree, that the big hole is a problem for _much_ longer than the space launch, but politicians only care about the next 4 years...
How much money could you squeeze out of the US govt. if you live next door, and turn up with cancer or lose your hair or go impotent or whatever? Enough to make the remainder of your life and your kids' lives comfortable, I would assume.
And if you don't suffer any adverse effects, then what does it matter that there's nuclear waste next door?
Synergy is your friend
1) add one part Nevada
//ct
2) sprinkle with underground radioactive waste
3) bake for two hours in the presence of Kevin Bacon
Let me save you the wait - the resulting giant cannibal worms will be suckers for TNT & the last one will have to be tricked into burrowing off of a canyon ledge.
(Yeah I know - calling Tremors art is stretching it a little... ok alot)
Nuclear winters are caused by the dust kicked up by multiple warheads impacting and exploding on the earth's crust. A single rocket with waste blowing up in the atmosphere, critical mass or not, will not cause a nuclear winter.
What you will get is a nasty case of Chernobyl-style fallout, combined with a Mir-like dispersal of radioactive junk across a given hemisphere. Time to stock up on fallout shelters and iodine tablets...
If this waste is supposed to be generating temperatures of 400 degrees, why can't it be used to generate power? Not even anti-nuclear people could argue against it; its already nuclear waste.
Interesting to note is the removal of maps of the site from http://www.ymp.gov/reference/maps/index.htm
Didn't the Soviets classify maps too, to "minimize the risk of providing potentially sensitive information that could result in adverse impacts to National security"? (Quote from the site.)
Brave new world, indeed! Am I the only one who misses September 10th?
From the link:
Energy Department scientists contend those issues either have been resolved or can be dealt with as a final design for the facility goes through the licensing process.
I don't understand: if there still are issues which are not resolved, how can the decision to put the dump there be taken? What if the issues CANNOT be dealt with during the final phase? Does anyone believe that they will they be able to admit and back out?
I'm not surprised that the local politicians (and I suppose also the population) are NOT happy about it....
Also, in the post-9/11 world it'll be much harder to keep en eye on what's happening as "for security reasons" lots of stuff has been pulled from the Internet. For example, in France we have a recycling site at La Hague which used to give access to many webcams inside the installation (the new director's policy was "absolute transparency" to reassure citizens), but now they are offline....
I think Yucca mountain is close to Frenchman and
Yucca flats. If that's the case, it makes sense
to build a nuclear waste dump there.
In case you didn't know, that area was used for
a large proportion of 'on continent' nuclear
testing done in the 50's and later.
http://www.em.doe.gov/tie/lasnts.html
The land is toast, adding more embers seems
to make sense, in this case.
- Penguin Kicka.
One would assume that you could go an dump your heavy metals in one of the pacific trenches and let it get sucked back into the earth's core, right?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
This doesn't seem like it's the best solution here. I can think of two alternatives that aren't being used or investigated: 1) subduction zones. Put the waste deep into a subduction zone instead of a stable region like Yucca Mtn. Instead of hanging around basically forever, the waste will be pulled underneath the Earth's crust eventually. 2) Breeder reactors. Using breeder reactors would allow ALL of the Uranium isotopes to be burned in the production of energy, not just the U-235. That means that the ultimate waste product of the reactors would have a half-life of under 30 years instead of thousands of years. France deals with their nuclear waste like this already, and we should too.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
This immense mass driver could hurl ten thousand (10,000g) gallon drums of nuclear waste into a rapidly-decaying solar orbit. Just dunk the stuff into the sun. This immense project would create thousands of jobs (construction, operation and maintenance), as well as being a stepping stone on the high, jagged cliff face that is the complete eradication of our dependance on fossil fuels.
But nay, the (Californicated) local government (fuck you Douglas County) thought that it would be decidedly too costly and was shot down before even making it to state assembly. I don't see how it could be though. Sure, it would take about four nuke plants on its own to operate, but the costs would be essentially negated by the charge placed upon each ten thousand gallon drum of waste. And not to mention the added tourist dollars. I mean, who in their right mind WOULDN'T want to see that thing fired? Clouds would part and thunder would roll as the drums travel at twenty-five times the speed of sound...
Imagine the casino revenue, brothel revenue, et cetera. We were sitting on (another) gold mine there people. But they wanted to go with the lame, unambitious, non-dramatic way of eliminating a major stumbling block for the widestream acceptance of nuclear power...
Also, it could be used to liquefy those that pronounce The Great State's second A incorrectly. Listen here people, it's like "can" not "soft." Fuck, if it were like "soft" it'd be spelled Nevawda, you fucking savages.
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
There was a Scientific American article about this alternative solution a few years back.
s ea bed.htm
Vol. 276, Jan. 98, pp. 60-65, Burial of Radioactive Waste Under the Seabed.
Holes could be drilled hundreds of meters below the seafloor in geologically inactive areas. Canisters spaced around 10 meters appart could be lined up around the bottom. Removal (in case something goes wrong) would not be a problem with a rentry cone at the top for a future drill.
It turns out the mud under the seabed has a consistancy of peanut butter, ideal for slowing the spread of any radioactive waste.
"Around 1,000 years later the metal seathing would corrode, leaving the nuclear waste expodes to the muds. In 24,000 years (the radiocative half-life of plutonium 239), plutonium and other transuranic elements would migrate outward les than a meter."
Unfortunatly this soulution is sometimes grouped with "ocean dumping" an therefore prohibited by international law.
(quick google search)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
Maybe people will pay more attention when there's reports of (glowing) green men emerging from craters in the desert.......
SECURITY NOTICE
The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management promotes the open review of documents by the public during the Yucca Mountain site recommendation consideration process. However, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have removed certain content from our Internet site to minimize the risk of providing potentially sensitive information that could result in adverse impacts to National security. The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management apologizes for any inconvenience that this action may cause. We appreciate your patience and understanding during these difficult times.
Translation:
We support open disclosure. Except to you. Or anyone else that might care about the safety of radioactive waste. I mean, not providing this info on the internet is to prevent terrorism! So that's good!
(sigh)
Will Sept 11th be the excuse for the de facto revoking of sunshine laws and intrusions on liberties? I think maybe.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
This message is not a troll,
No, it's just completely -1 offtopic. There are lots of threads about licensing where it may have a place (ok, it's written to sound like trolling, so it may end up moderated accordingly), but here it's just out of place.
Too bad I don't have an "offtopic" for you.
This might not appease the people in Nevada but it is many many times better than the haphazard method we use now of storing the waste at the nulcear sites.
31 places to watch, to have an accident, to possibly poison ground water, versus 1.
Its not a hard choice to make, especially given todays state of affairs
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Um, congressmen only care about the next two years, and Senators only care about the next six. If you are going to be cynical, at least be accurate!
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Ive always wondered this to. uranium comes from the earth so why not put it back in the earth? like a undersea volcano or somthing? whats wrong with that?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
No text
Make the nuclear waste material open and available to everyone to use according to the license (BSD or LGPL, I'd say). If they do this, then the bugs in it can easily be fixed by these new users and eventually the waste will be time-tested and ready for a more widespread public consumption. After all Bush has let us know that nuclear power is cleaner, safer and, along with consuming all the oil reserves in the world as fast as possible, it is the future of energy production in our lives. Therefore we should make all parts of this beautiful process open to everyone to enjoy and improve both it and themselves.
The website says that it is an ideal location because it is 100 miles from a major population center, Las Vegas. There is a whole lot of nothing out west and I would think we could do better than 100 miles away from a big city. I personally wouldn't be too keen on having the nuclear waste for the whole country being dumped an hour and a half away.
Wired ran a story about this the other day.
Basically the gist of the article was that we can't be sure if this is safe and/or a good idea until we try it. I know some kids who started smoking for that exact same reason in junior high... Oh well, at least I don't live anywhere near the site.
In .uk the government is elected every 4.
conservatively speaking that's going to increase your cost estimate by a factor of 10...
-renard
What kills me is millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in non stop fights over this site. Yes, nobody wats it in their backyard and if I lived near the site (like within a few hundred miles) I'd probably think about moving. But in this world if its not a nuclear dump, its a real dump, a highway going through your house, high tension utility wires, etc. I'm currently in teh study area for a divided highway, with oone of the routes going straight through our house. Sucks huge not knowin if you'll still be allowed to own your house X years from now - nice to know that none of us realyl OWN our land :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
"There are compelling national interests that require us to complete the siting process and move forward with the development of a repository as Congress mandated 20 years ago"
So 20 years ago, Congress stimulated nuclear power investment by making wild promises about how they would solve everyone's waste problems with this central storage facility. Of course, they completely underestimated the technical difficulty of the task, and no magical safe storage method was discovered in the intervening two decades. Now the government is pushing the project ahead ANYWAY, despite serious technical problems and unresolved questions.
I really wish someone had shown some guts 20 years ago and said "how about we hold off until we're sure we can deal with the waste"...
Much better idea:
Put the plutonium in a fast reactor and generate electricity while reducing the quantity of plutonium and creating shorter-lived daugter products. So, that's (1) reducing the amount of plutonium (2) getting electricity out of it (3) reducing the waste storage cost.
The problem is getting the screaming hedgemonkies in Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to let you do it since it impinges on their superstitious beliefs.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
..considering the limited options the government had to choose between.
Let's face it, we all know the best way to dispose of something is to flush it down the toilet. Hell, it works for fish - it should work for nuclear waste too! Just a quick flush later, and it should be on its way to a nuclear waste treatment plant. Unfortunately, in 1992, congress shot themselves in the foot by limiting the volume of flush water to 1.6 gallons (6.08 liters, to the rest of the world) per flush. As anyone who has tried to flush the end result of a recent mexican buffet knows, this isn't even enough water to flush the average feces log, let alone nuclear waste!
Clearly, flushing down the toilet is still a good solution, so I propose the government take a long hard look at the new pressure assisted toilets available today, which make the best use of the 1.6 gallons available to them by using the line pressure to increase the velocity of the flush. I've had the pleasure of trying one of these toilets out for myself and I have yet to find anything this toilet cannot flush. The sheer sucking power is nothing short of breathtaking. I'm sure this is our solution to nuclear waste disposal.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
Is there much interest in this subject around here, or in the environment in general? I would say no judging by the low response, there doesn't seem to be much. Well, at least they're doing it in the very unpopulous Nevada, though I honestly have not idea where the Yucca mountains are.
Mr Atlas says that the yucca flats are a little North East of Vegas in the Nuclear Testing area, so I guess that makes sense.
So, how long before Tor Johnson becomes exposed to the radiation and starts hunting 1950s B-movie babes?
THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (a.k.a. ATOMIC MONSTER; a.k.a. GIRL MADNESS)
If you haven't seen it, you can download the film and other MST episodes here.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
don't volcanos usually erupt?
I remember reading this article way back when that talked about using Jimson weed to more efficiently store nuclear waste, water with plutonium in I think...
The gist of the story was that Jimson weed is supposed to be fairly hardy when exposed to nuclear waste. Feed the plant water with waste in it and the plant supposedly filters out and stores the waste material. The idea was to start with around 1000 barrels of liquid and end up with 1 barrel of radioactive Jimson weed. The end of the story was that this would all be a no-no because Jimson weed was a cousin to Marijuana- a controlled substance and so on.
I wonder- would doing this make the waste easier or harder to deal with? Wouldn't that barrel be much more radioactive? I know the total amount of radiation would be roughly the same, but it would be concentrated in a smaller volume. Ooh...critical mass maybe?
I tried to find the article online, but the closest thing was a reference in The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I guess even with his position of power Harry Reid finally lost and/or the rest of congress finally got (a little) common sense.
"America's Radioactive Dustbin"
Thad
Things would not get sucked back into the Earth's core, the best you could realistically hope for is some recycling/mixing in the mantle.
Earth cut-away
Sorry I could not find a diagram depicting mantle flow; also mantle flow is a current "hot-topic", nobody can say for certain what the flow looks like. This means it would be very difficult to predict when/if the stuff would come back up in a nearby oceanic ridge, hot-spot (Hawaii, etc.) or volcano (volcano's go hand-in-hand with subducting plates, read trenches).
This means the risks are still too high/unknown, just as in the case with the "booster rocket to the sun" idea. Both excellent ideas but until we can minimize the risk let's bury it in Nevada's backyard.
After getting that damn message ten times in a row, I just stopped hitting the damn "preview" button. Only after I had posted, had I remembered that I left out an R from the good old break tag. Whoops.
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
There was a design competition about this - my favorite is the Landscape of Thorns.
Question: We have some of the smartest minds in the US working on this issue and the best thing they can think to do with this stuff is burry it in the ground. Come on!! I don't know about you but I would rather not be surrounded by vats of nuclear waste.
There's always a lot of talk of shooting nuclear waste into the sun and/or into space as an alternative to underground storage. Over the past 30 years, 77,000,000 lbs (35,000,000 kg) of nuclear waste (from reactors) has been created. Rockets commonly used today for space launches (Atlas, Delta, Titan, etc) can put about 4,000 - 5000 lbs into an earth escape trajectory.
Give these numbers, that would require about 15,400 launches to get the nuclear waste off the earth and out of earth orbit. The rockets that we would most likely use for this have a failure rate of about %5. This would make about 800 failures. 800 failures in which 5000 lbs of nuclear waste could potentially be spread into the atmosphere and the air.
I know these numbers are just numbers, and statistics are just statistics, but I think it shows that the risks for launching nuclear waste into space are unacceptable.
I've got a better idea. Argentina needs money right now, why not pay them to host our little facility?
We don't even have to tell them what it's for, just say it's a cookie factory or something. Then whenever inspectors arrive to check the plant, pass out cookies. Problem solved.
------
Today's Top Deals
Yes, read that again. The pedestal for the statue of Roger Williams (Rotunda/Senate Chamber Hallway, U.S. Capitol) gives off about 30 microrem per hour... more than the proposed standards for radiation at the perimeter of Yucca Mountain. Just to put it in perspective.
-- null
A story on NPR said if it was decided to be used, the first radioactive material would start to arrive in about 10 years...
... time to sell the homestead.
I've been closely following the Yucca Mountain investigations since the mid-1990s; my garage has hundreds of thousands (really!) of pages generated by various parties involved in this effort. I doubt DOE will continue to be so free with its literature, in light of "security cenrcenrs" raised by September 11th.
But I digress.
In a nutshell: "Approval" of the storage facility has been a foregone conclusion since the studies first began. Yucca Mountain was the only site studied, and any "problems" discovered have been ignored or glossed over.
The real problem is a lack of planning -- it isn't just the "Internet generation" who can't think ahead. Back when we began building nuclear power plants, no one thought about what we would do with the waste -- and so it now sits in over a hundred locations around the U.S., in hardened canisters sitting next to power plants. Because no one looked ahead fifty years ago, we now have a crisis on our hands, and little chance to make a rational decision.
The problem at hand: Nuclear waste needs to be stored somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the only site selected for study. There may not be a rational, safe solution to the problem of nuclear waste -- and so Nevada's residents may take it in the shorts because of short-sighted and selfish politicians and
I say "may" because Nevadans are unlikely to lie down and "accept the inevitable." They're a feisty bunch, especially the ones who don't live in Reno or Lost Wages -- er, Las Vegas. The Ages Brush Rebellion is gaining strength again in the American West; confrontations between federal officials and local residents continue to rise.
You don't think this issue affects you? If you really think freedom is important, you might want to consider that Nevadans will be hosting nuclear waste that they did not create, as dictated by the federal government on behalf of big, stupid corporations. (Note: I like lots of businesses, even big ones -- but I have great disdain for stupid companies and people who impose their mistakes on others.)
For a somewhat different perspective on the issue, consider this article about the people who actually own Yucca Mountain:
Stealing Nevada
That article (which I am currently updating) has been published all over the world (search Google for it) in print and online. It won't make much difference, of course, because most people only care about right and wrong when it affects them directly. It's too bad, really; what the federal government is doing today with national IDs, intelletual property, and waste dumps is the direct result of letting them push other people around.
Good luck to those in Nevada, Shoshone, Paiute, and other-American alike. You need it...
All about me
Frell it! It's "Sage Brush Rebellion", not "Ages Brush Rebellion!" Arrrghhhh... I even proofed the dammed article twice!
Eh, I'll blame it on my dyslexia; I'm always typing things sdrawkcab...
All about me
I just noticed that they fixed the scripting on the rollovers. Not bad responce. Just hope they act that quick if something goes wrong.
;)
Will the waste site be using any scripting in there processes
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?g=events/ts/01110 2yucca&a=&tmpl=sl&ns=&l=1&e=6&a=0&t=
They added this note:
RETRANSMISSION TO ADD EDITORS NOTE: NOTE OBJECTIONABLE LANGUAGE ON SIGNS IN BACKGOUND
Not to sound too much like an IndyMedia posting... But, there have been allegations of serious conflicts of interest in the selection and design of this site.
Here is one report.
O=='=++
Desert does not mean, nor is, wasteland.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When we started to do nuclear plants the idea was to build the plants we have today which basically "burn" Uranium. These plants usually take an enriched 3.5% U-235/ 96.5% U-238 mix (U-235 is what actually is Fissioned). After enough U-235 is spent to prevent efficient fuel usage, they remove the fuel and end up with a waste product which includes both U-235 and U-238 along with Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) isotopes and other radioactive isotopes.
What was supposed to happen is that this spent fuel would be reprocessed to extract the unused U-235, the Pu-239, and the other products. These would then be used in a fast neutron reactor which would actually burn not only the fuel itself but the waste products, producing as a result waste with a half-life of about 30 years (safe after 300 years and a lot less volume to store).
In the 1970's someone realized that the Plutonium-239 was also useful as bomb-making material. They decided that the risk of some of this being diverted to some third-world country which wanted a nuclear bomb was too high to take and so President Carter canceled the research project.
There is still a lot of debate over the real risks involved. From everything I've read I think the real story is twofold - first the Plutionium isn't really "weapons grade" when it is reprocessed in this manner, so the risks are over emphasized. And second, I think that the people running the power plants don't want to do this because it is cheaper to just run the uranium through their plants once.
Why don't they just shoot the nuclear waste into deep space? It's probably a little more expensive than storing in Nevada in the short term, but this stuff isn't going to go away unless we unleash it into the awesome reaches of space. Why isn't the government doing this instead of burying it underground?
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
Do government officials really have no other ideas except to dump waste on Native American holy sites? If these were Christian or Jewish or Muslim holy sites there would be no way in hell. But because they're Native American (and who really gives a damn about Native Americans, I mean, didn't they go extinct years ago?) we can just shit all over them.
r es ources/documents/NCAIYuccaMtncomments.htm
. ht m
c .h tm
http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/issues/natural_
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991209
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991202
http://www.shundahai.org/yucca_mt.html
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Can't we just GPL nuclear waste? Think about this..everything that open source touches turns to shit. Witness the decline of Linux companies like RHAT and LNUX...that's one hell of a fast stock price half-life! So, since shit != nuclear waste, problem solved!
I knew the GPL was good for something!
~mjones
Sunflowers have been used for the same purpose, using floating rafts of them to clean radioactive materials from open ponds. Then you need to dispose of the sunflowers.
Hey, I have an idea! How about if we stop making the stuff? Wow! How revolutionary. It's a really stupid way to make power anyway, and there is absolutely no need whatsoever if we look at alternatives which have already been developed.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
There was a great article in Analog a year or two ago in which the author debated how exactly one would label a place that will be highly toxic for tens of thousands of years. You can't use the same symbols or words we take for granted to mean danger; who knows what people will use to denote that in the distant future?
Ideas bandied about included making the surface from dark stone tiles so it would be too hot to approach or making some huge symbol on the ground to warn people away.
The main problem, though, was whether anything you do to warn people off would actually end up attracting them. Imagine making a huge warning that future generations or visiting aliens think is just something cool like the lines at Nazca.
The Dept. of Energy, one branch of the executive has approved it. For this to be completely approved, the President, Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Comission must also approve the selection, in addition to which, we have a tradition of dealing with issues like these in the courts in the US. So no, the "Feds" have not approved the storage of waste in Yucca mountian. The DoE has made a site selection. The fighting has just started.
its the cheapest energy.. take into account the thousands of years they willhave to store that crap, and it no longer becomes viable at all.
Wake up America.. your deaming!!!!!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Having worked at the Nevada Test Site in the early 80's (Reagan's Accelerated Test Program), once into the "Forward Areas" it would take about five minutes for even the slowest person to conclude that the land is unredeemable and suitable for little else, i.e., it's the perfect repository. Only politics stand in its way.
As a result of aboveground thermonuclear testing in the 50's and 60's, there is fused silica lying about, molten steel stubs that were once towers, and speed limit signs with the black numbers vaporized rendering them into templates. And don't forget "Doom Town", the artificial town that was constructed then nuked into annihilation.
From the 70's and 80's, the rest of the terrain was rendered lunar as a result of underground testing and the craters there from. There's also concrete grout the size of a school bus blown halfway across a valley from a test in T-Tunnel that went awry, and multiple sites of long-forgotten accidents remembered only by yellow rope and Keep Out signs.
Security? The Nevada Test Site is divided into Areas, the most notorious being Area 51. Not to elaborate, but it's easy to envision NTS's concept of security - "Deadly Force Authorized". Oh, and if you want to sneak in the other side, you can traverse the Nellis Bombing Range (wonderful viewing at night), climb a few peaks, then face the same friendly folks that are indemnified to shoot first and don't ask questions.
Sealed casks of nuclear waste deep within a repository? Wouldn't even make the rubbernecking list if you were cleared to freely wander about.
Seriously, just as one can't write code and declare it valid without testing via executing it, the NTS served the nation during the height of the Cold War in our development and verification of the complex physics that's part and parcel of nuclear weaponry - both in validation of design and in safety. Scores of tests were performed to insure that nothing happened. Proud legacy, tragic legacy, it doesn't matter, as it's all history now.
Is there any place where one would want to accumulate nuclear waste? Yet could there be a better place to consolidate and store sealed waste? I think not.
Mod the parent up!
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
As someone who lives in Las Vegas (90 or so miles from Yucca Mtn), I was pretty pissed that the it took only three days for the energy secretary to decide that Yucca mtn would be a suitable home for waste after visiting the site. I'm pretty fucking sure that he got $$ from all the nuke companies. As I'm sure local and state politicians will fight but it wont do any good. I was about to buy a house in vegas, but now I am moving out of town after I graduate from college in two years.
I'm pissed, can ya tell?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
There are a lot of empty tunnels in Afghanistan these days... think of the possibilities.
NPR is reporting this morning that the plan cannot go forward until Nevada has agreed to it. Their Congressional delegation is strongly opposing it, and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) is also against it. Until Nevada agrees to it, nothing will happen until Congress votes on it. And they won't vote for it while Daschle is in the driver's seat.
Nevada and Congress are aware of the issues involved in keeping this stuff in temporary locations, but there is a big NIMBY issue as well.
IMO, it can't hurt to be very, very, very sure this will be safely stored. A couple more years of study are not all that much when you consider this crap will still be radioactive 10,000 years from now.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Forget Yucca Mountain, what about the experiments going on down in the Black Mesa Research Facility!!!
Yucca Valley is in *California* a hundred miles or so east of Los Angelos. Please check your facts next time.
Just think of the benefits:
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
A. Subduction zones move material two directions. Soft material on top of the plate is scraped up and piled into mountains. Only the hard rock plate goes down. So anything we drop will go up, not down. You might as well put it in a mountain of your choice rather than a random mountain of the future.
B. It takes for ever for anything to happen anyway. Geologically, Yucca is just as good as subduction. By the time anything happens, it will only have moved a few feet anyway.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Is that the mountain is built on or around a pretty major earthquake fault, and scientists are justa little worried that it may cause envirnmental devestation if something were to happen.
Folks,
When it comes to storing nuclear waste permanently, people are wrongly conjuring up images of thin-metal barrels of waste in liquid being dropped off.
WRONGO. Very likely, the radioactive waste will be mixed with molten glass and turned into glass balls, which are chemically extremely stable and have a tiny fraction of the radioactive output of spent fuel rods. These glass balls are then put into special large containers that are so strong even dropping them 30 meters wouldn't make anything close to a dent in the container. With the waste in barely radioactive form and these large containers, they could be dropped off anywhere undergground that has stable geology and never be an environmental problem to anyone.
I remember there was a bad joke going around early in the current Bush Administration about sending all the nuclear waste to Texas. That joke quickly ended when people read that DoE is actually looking at salt domes at now-dry oil fields in Texas as nuclear waste repositories, since salt absorbs radiation extremely well and these underground salt domes are geologically very stable.
That's why we need to boost our research levels to discover new superdense, (physically) unbreakable materials. Then we use those to build the space elevator to get the toxic waste out of our atmosphere safely.
I know, I know, I've been playing too much Alpha Centauri....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Cooling and heating of oceanic waters has a huge impact on the weather. What could this do?
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
To paraphrase an American military hero, Nevada has not yet begun to fight.
First the USDOE's ruling must be agreed to by President Bush. Depending on whether or not Karl Rove thinks it is wise to alienate a state that voted for Bush in 2000, the decision may get reversed here.
If Bush concurs with Abraham then Nevada itself can veto the selection of Yucca Mountain. However, Congress can override this, and it was Congress that suggested Yucca Mountain in the first place.
If Bush agrees and Congress agrees with Abraham, Yucca Mountain still isn't a go, because the state of Nevada and the city of Las Vegas have vowed to sue the US over the planned repository.
If the lawsuits fail, Nevada will still fight it by trying to block the actual waste shipments themselves. The city of Las Vegas will pull over and arrest any trucker hauling waste to Yucca Mountain. Nevada politicians and citizens have promised to block the rail lines leading to Yucca Mountain.
In the end the feds may be able to overcome all this, but it promises to be a VERY long and drawn out fight.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
For the first point, you're on the money. Even with a critical mass of waste on the top of the rocket, there would be nowhere near critical density, so no boom. However, on the second point, you're off the money. With a properly designed drop vessel, if the payload had to leave the booster for any reason, it'd fall to earth without burning up (think reentry of human astronauts; the same type of vessel would protect against burnup of the waste payload). There are three problems with jetting nuclear waste into the Sun instead of burying it locally. They are:
1.) Money
2.) Money
3.) Money
It's far too expensive to put stuff into orbit to consider lifting off heavy metals instead of putting them in a deep hole.
Virg
Why?
First, it's certainly not cheap to launch the stuff into the sun (which is harder than you might think)
Secondly... rocketry is dangerous. What happens when the thing explodes in the upper atmosphere? Radioactive waste aerosolized and spread around the globe? Not a really good idea (and probably a primary reason for not doing it)
> Oops yeah, I multiplied by 9/5 instead of 5/9.
Do you work for the JPL?
Virg
As a Utah resident, I happen to be well aware of the industry's backup plan: They want to simply put the containers in a big parking lot owned by an Indian tribe. They would keep the containers there until Yucca Mountain opened. The nuclear energy industry has promised "a lot of money" (nobody knows how much) to this tribe, but the leadership of the tribe has recently shifted. Perhaps this had something to do with the decision.
Anyhow, if anybody decided to drop an airplane on their open-air parking lot then bye-bye Salt Lake City. If the winds were just right Denever might go too.
Lasers Controlled Games!
The DOE was ordered to study a list of sites, and to build at the site on the list which was safest. Not told to determine if any of the sites were adequate, but to choose the best and go forward.
The list was: Yucca Mountain.
That's it. No second candidate. Along the way, the general press in Nevada took to labeling the laws "Screw Nevada I" and "Screw Nevada II". Senator Johnston of Louisiana had the votes to push them through. When a professor at UNLV got a little to noisy about the problems with the site, UNLV received a supercomputer to shut him up (really. They never quite figured out what to do with it, but that's another story.) And then the building where DOE housed the project studing earthquake safety took over a million dollars in damage from--you guessed it!--a routine (for the region) earthquake.
I'm a Nevadan, and my permanent home is in Las Vegas, about 100 miles from this site. I have absolutely no qualms about a nuclear storage facility that close to my home run by scientists. I'm terrified of what's being done here, though.
One more time: There was not a study to see whetheror not the site was safe. Therewas a study to prove that this site was safer than, uhh, nothing.
I'd feel a lot betterif this was turned over to the state (heavens, no, not the local governement. Look at the last couple of mayors of LV: Oscar Goodman, who became wealthy denying there was a mob while representing it; Jan Laverty Jones, commercial girl for the Fletcher Jones car dealerships who showed up at times in a chicken suit or in a black velvet jumpsuit as her own evil twin . . . [and if memoy serves, her opponent was worse!]). Fortunate, I live in county
hawk, nevadan
Here is a Salt Lake Tribune article about the consequences of the Yucca Mountain decision for the "put them ALL in a parking lot in the desert in Utah" plan.
Lasers Controlled Games!
http://sltrib.com/01112002/utah/166549.htm
That is the link to the right article.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Meanwhile at at least one plant waste piles up in huge cylinders that are hot to the touch sitting on concrete slabs. I'm not sure why they don't bury it or at least get it out of sight somehow.
This is not final yet. Sec. Abraham has given the go ahead from the Dept. Of Energy for Yucca Mountain. Next, Pres. Bush must sign off from the Whitehouse. It is expected that the President will as he has indicated strong support of Yucca Mountain as a National Repository. Nevada of course, as a State, is highly opposed to the repository being sited there. Under a 1982 law, Congress must grant the final go ahead on the repository. Sen. Harry Reid is the Senior Senator from Nevada and on Senate Majority Leader Daschles leadership team. He has pledged to do whatever possible to stop the repository being located at Yucca Mountain.
Here is where the politics gets real thick. Enter the wayback machine with me to Washington DC a year ago. The Republicans control the Whitehouse, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Sen. Jim Jeffords, a liberal Republican from Vermont opposes the Bush Tax Cuts and angers the Republican Leadership. In retaliation, the Whitehouse threatens Vermonts Dairy Subsidy among other key issues dear to Jeffords heart. Enter the picture Sen. Harry Reid. Sen. Reid promises Jeffords a powerful chairmanship and support for Dairy subsidies from the Democrats if Jeffords will caucus with the Democrats. Reid approaches Daschle with many delicate negotiated details. In exchange for working with Jeffords, Daschle cuts a deal with Reid to oppose Yucca Mountain. Jeffords becomes an independent and caucuses with the Democrats making Sen. Daschle Majority Leader. Daschle of course owes his Majority Leader status to Reid and as such opposes Yucca Mountain.
Of course this doesn't even go into the many pending and future court cases which will tie this issue up well beyond any 2010 expected opening date.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Because getting something into the center of a gravity well is deceptively difficult. Any little mistake and, instead of plunging into the sun, you whiz on by in a highly eccentric or hyperbolic orbit. If it were easy to get something to fall into the sun, there'd be a lot less comets in the solar system than there are now.
In addition to the cost of firing waste into the sun there are some other factors:
1) Would the plant output as much energy as it takes to fire it's waste into the sun and refine the module, chemicals, etc. from ore, etc.? It could be that creating nuclear power, if we have to do all this, is actually causing an energy drain rather than a supply in the long run.
2) Whenever you fire something off of earth that doesn't return, your upsetting the balance of mass on earth. Granted there is a lot of mass on earth, but the fact remains the more we shoot into space the less we have on earth. Remember, heavy elements are much more rare than lighter ones.
3) Heavy elements are not good for fusion controlled reactions (such as the Sun). Anything heavier than iron is an endothermic fusion process. Thus, firing heavy elements into the Sun is poisoning it. Granted it has a lot of mass (much moreso than the Earth), but it is something to consider for well into the future..
Remember on #2 and #3: Our ancestors felt that dumping waste into rivers would be no big deal since the volume of water was so much more massive than what one settelr family disposed of. I bet they didn't know that it would only take 150-200 years for rivers to actually have enough crap in them to catch fire. You can say earth / sun are so incredibly massive that it wouldn't matter, but history has taught us that's not always true later on down the road.
After all, why else will they call it a Yuccy mountain?
The USGS has announced that the nuke-waste storage facility in Nevada will henceforth be known as Yuk - A Mountain of Waste.
My physics class is a little behind me, but :
a fast reactor would produce shorter lived, but critically dangerous byproducts (Cesium something I think).
Byproducts that are much^n more expensive to store , even if it's only for 5 000 years...
If somebody care to correct me 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I live in New Mexico and I know there's a rather large nuclear waste plant down south called WIPP. What's the difference between this place and WIPP? Besides the fact that WIPP is much closer to a large-ish city.
The DOE has been transporting low and medium level waste to temporary holding facilites at the Nevada Test Site since at least the late 90's. Why temporary? Because they plan to unbury it and move it to Yucca Mountain later. Joy. Gotta love it.
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Jeez, where do you people get your math? Let's address:
;.)) would cause a fairly short, backward-curving (relative to Earth) drop into the Sun lasting less than three months. And, barring escape velocity (which is extremely high) once it's out of Earth's orbit the speed at which it's moving is relatively unimportant, unless the Greenpeace detachments for Venus or Mercury are worried about a package striking those planets on the way in.
> a) sonic booms- concorde at Mach 2 gives big bangs for tens of miles; Mach 27+ sonic booms are going to reach hundreds or thousands of miles
Sonic booms happen when you cross the sound barrier (that's once, at Mach 1), and they don't get louder under harder acceleration.
> b) failure modes- e.g. it doesn't quite reach escape velocity due to a coil failure and lands in the middle of Tokyo or something,
A valid concern, but it could be handled through several possibilities. First, the launch package could be designed to allow for controlled abortion of launch in the case of launcher failure, just as astronauts can "eject" from a failed rocket on launch. Second, the package can be designed for reentry (and safe landing, like a manned capsule) in the case of low-apex launch failure.
> c) ablation- the first 100m will probably lose atleast a couple of mach and quite a bit of the casing
Again, this problem could be designed out.
> d) solar orbits don't decay very much, for example the earth would have burnt up long ago
Huh? Didn't pay much attention in physics class, did you? Orbital mechanics is orbital mechanics, and there's nothing special about the Sun's gravity well. The reason the Earth hasn't burned up is that we're in a stable solar orbit. Stuff falls into the Sun all the time.
> e) Orbital mechanics issues: to a reasonable approximation anything
> fired from the earth, still intersects the earths orbit twice per year,
> and takes a year to complete 1 orbit. You have to fire it quite fast
> to avoid this issue. It takes a LOT of speed to fire something from the
> earth and get it to impact the Sun; off-hand you'd need maybe Mach 32 or so
Again I'm baffled by your physics. The first sentence is simply incorrect. To wit, let's discuss the best launch vector for such a device. The original poster suggested an eastward launch, with which I can agree. However, this launch could be timed so that when the object exited our gravity well it's moving back along our orbital path (that is, back the way the Earth came from), minus some number of degrees into the ecliptic. This would put it on a slowly arcing orbit toward the Sun that would bring it nowhere near the Earth's orbit ever again, and if properly calculated (which may be tough considering what happened to the Mars probes
All that said, it's still very likely to be prohibitively expensive to lift these containers out of Earth's gravity. Rail guns are useful to accelerate objects to insane speeds, but they're much less efficient in terms of necessary input energy than other forms like rocket boosters, so there's still the BIG problem of cost.
Virg
We really should reprocess our fuel. It would make it a lot cheaper, and much less waste would need to be buried.
Anyway, the Yucca mountain facility is 1000 feet below the surface in ultra-reinforced containers in a huge restricted area. Its not going anywhere. Anyway, they blew up over a hundred nuclear bombs over in the area. Virtually no radiation would escape. If you stood on the surface above the facility, you would get pore radiation from a Potassium isotope in your body than you would the waste. The radition would be almost undectable from background.
Remember that nuclear power has a very good safety record in the US. A Chernobyl type of realease is not possible in our type of reactors. In the event of a meltdown, the containment building would contain almost all of the radiation. Three Mile Island did not kill or injure anyone. Chernobyl killed 30 people, but that had a crappy Commie reactor with no containment.
Also, remember the tens of thousands in the U.S. that are killed by pollution from coal power every year. Nuclear does not realease air pollution.
One interesting fact is that radioactive materials in coal realease hundreds of tons of highly radioactive radium, thorium and uranium every year. Nuclear does not realease nuclear materials like this.
Also,
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
"I don't know about you but I would rather not be surrounded by vats of nuclear waste." Seems that the point is that we are already surrounded by vats of nuclear waste. We missed the opportunity to no be surrounded several decades ago. The issue at hand is what to do with it now that we have it. Burying it in a secure facility is really about the only safe option.
Anyway, it's bogus to assume that future civilizations are going to be more ignorant than we are. We can't avoid all possible dangers to the future citizens of the world.
Haven't seen The Mummy recently, have you? If you had, you'd know that back in the 1920's, we came this close to the end of the world, all because some egyptian religio-engineer figured out a more cost-efficient way to dispose of the dangerous by-products of their culture.
If civilization collapses and people are unable to read English or use Geiger counters, I think they have bigger problems than worrying about one dangerous site.
The Rosetta Stone, which holds ancient greek and egyptian writing, translates to "you of the distant future are damn lucky to have found this, otherwise you wouldn't have any idea what the egyptians were going on about with their wall writings..." Progress is about improving on what your forebears have given you. Fortunately, the egyptians didn't give us much, warning-wise (see The Mummy), so we don't have to contribute much to live up to our responsibilities to our progeny. Still, in the words of the immortal Gawain, 'true men can but try.'
People lose their perspective when it comes to nuclear energy. Over 1,000 people a year die because of the relatively mild CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards, yet we're supposed to worry about one reckless miner 10,000 years from now?
In 10,000 years we won't be mining anymore (at least not here on earth). We will, however, be desperate to return to our so-called 'mythical' roots, so of course many of us will be living underground. In fact, in 15,000 years, all of us will be living underground (the ozone layer having faded to a more distant memory than even /.) As you can see, effective warnings are critical since what you're proposing is storing nuclear waste in people's living rooms and pantries.
As to the CAFE standards killing 1000+ a year, well you'd think after 7000 years of civilization, we'd do a better job of warning people about the dangerousness of heavy technical reference tomes falling from 30 story buildings. Look people, stand out of the way when those things start dropping. And as for the folks losing control of their CAFE Standard reference manuals, there oughta be a law: No CAFE Standard reference book reading above the lobby.
> Why isn't the government doing this instead of burying it underground?
Because they can't afford to. Lifting stuff out of Earth's gravity well is alarmingly expensive (more than ten time as expensive as just getting it into Earth orbit). To say, as you did, that it's "probably a little more expensive" is such an understatement that it's almost funny. If we (the U.S. alone) were to take this practice up as a nation, assuming that everyone paid the same part of the resulting bill and assuming that by some means the government could cover 90% of the tab, the average power bill for a U.S. citizen would still be around $8,000.00 per month. That's per MONTH. Could you afford $10,000.00 annually for your electricity?
Virg
We don't have enough of a grasp on understanding the structure of the planet to be able to say what sites will be stable for that long. And water gets around. The Tao will tell you that.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Open source is the means by which the communists ...
among us get a say. They failed on the political
stage now they want to make what is mine theres
- and call it freedom of speech. Nuts to you
Slashdorks who follow these "Stalins." Try to
have original thought and think through what
you are getting into. Don't be the next shrimp
on the barbie
Slashdot: News for Nerds? Or Propaganda for the Impressionable?
Day in and day out, Slashdot sings the praises of "open source" software. New readers of the site must be a little puzzled to find items like "GPL Violation discovered" and "Open Source Guru Speaks" listed on the main page alongside the "straight" science and technology news. Unfortunately, few people really know what Open Source stands for. Perhaps Richard Means Stallman, one of the founders of the movement, can elucidate.
"[The GNU goal was] to be able to use a computer without using any proprietary software," declaims RMS. [cnn.com] "Because that way, you can lead a better life." Of course, the only way to get rid of proprietary software is to destroy the software companies that produce it. One way this is accomplished is by putting software that would normally be public domain under a license RMS himself created, called the "General Public License," or "GPL." Simply put, this license allows code to be reused-- unless the final product is distributed without its source code, as a proprietary product must be.
Software is a commodity, and people will often take the cheapest product, even if they have to spend inordinate amounts of time struggling with poor documentation and clumsy user interfaces. "One of the best things I could do with my life is: find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," enthuses RMS. [free-soft.org] "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself."
It's time to stop the doubletalk and start thinking about the real meaning of intellectual property. By some measures, intellectual property is the main export of the developed countries of the world. Artists, actors, and musicians make a living off the intellectual property they produce. Programmers and engineers create designs to be sold. And journalists and writers depend on intellectual property. Ironically, the only jobs not deeply tied to intellectual property are the jobs many slashdot readers affect to despise, like service workers, menial laborers, and administrators. If slashdot readers can't stomach Scott McNealy, maybe they would prefer to work with Ronald McDonald. From the other side of the fast food counter.
Not everyone enjoys working at a menial job in the day, simply in order to slave away at poorly organized programming projects. Not everyone enjoys being told that he has the "freedom" to work, without pay, for a small clique of free software partisans. It is one thing to oppose microsoft's monopoly on the desktop, and the RIAA's slow strangulation of fair use rights. It is quite another to embrace a whole economic and political ideology that centers around the exploitation of childlike programming savants.
This message is not a troll, although many slashdot readers may take it as such. It is simply a warning to users to think carefully before they blindly follow the political lead of Rob Malda, Jon Katz, and the like. I encourage readers to repost the text of this message, and others like it, to the supposedly "free" message boards of slashdot and other sites.
Peace out, and God bless.
build some breeder reactors or similar in Yucca Mountain?? Think about this - they could process the crap until it's mostly harmeless, use the reactor until it dies, then close the mountain - in the meantime, making it safer by the day and getting energy all the while!
If they've already declared the mountain useless, why not?
I'm all with Greenpeace, but I've read about safe designs in nuclear power...can't they improve on this? I've read about reactors hanging over lakes of liquid boron so that if all other methods don't work, the system is designed so that the heat will fail the system in a controlled manner and the whole kit-and-kaboodle will sink into the boron and can then be safely closed up...no "boom", etc.
Fusion is great, but couldn't they put money into safe nuclear reactor research at the same time??
Why would they spend an un-GODLY amount of money digging out a mountain, when they could have spent the money on figuring out how to safely use the fuel to begin with?? I just refuse to believe there aren't options here...
A breeder reactor in the mountain wouldn't be any more or less dangerous (given terrorists), then just dumping the shait there and hoping there isn't an earthquake, or that a commet doesn't pick that spot to slam into - is it??
The French underground site for radioactive waste disposal offers tours of their two disposal sites and one R&D facility. Their deep disposal R&D site is in rock that hasn't done anything exciting for the last 150 million years.
It isn't just a few dissenters, and their voices began to be raised early in the 20 year time span...
How few people do you sacrifice for the good of the many? Programmers are certainly a minority in the world, and we scream bloody murder every time a patent or trademark intrudes on our work.
Using your logic, we should just shut up, since a patent may well "benefit" more people than will the "freedom to code" of a "few" disgruntled programmers!
If anything, I hope the non-Indian people of Nevada learn something from this: That stealing rights from anyone (the Shoshone, in this case) allows government to steal rights from us all. Sadly, most people only focus on "their" needs and "their" rights, failing to see that we are all in this together.
National interest be dam(n)ed; people need to start taking responsibility for their own actions instead of dumping problems -- like nuclear waste -- on the conveniently powerless.
All about me
Low level nuclear waste is already being stored in salt flats in New Mexico. It's the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.
Some of my information may be out of date, as I visited the place in the summer of 1994, as part of a DoE program for talented science students. (One student from the 50 states, and a few from overseas. Unsuprisingly, the kids asked harder and more uncomfortable questions than the political delegations that came through. Unlike the delegations, we kids also understood their answers.)
The basic ideal is to tunnel deep into the salt flats and store the waste canisters. These canisters eventually will corrode and crumble to dust. This is not a problem. Remember the salt? Under extreme pressure (like that cause by millions of tons salt), the salt will flow. Over a few decades time the tunnels will close, and permanently entomb the waste.
As for problems: geologically speaking, the salt flats have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and no one is going to live there. There are two problems: 1) water: massive climate change might affect the preciptation in area is that in the future and also possible local water table contamination and 2) someone might mine for salt where the waste is.
Website: Radioactive Waste Management Complex - Background
Is it just me, or is this a monumentally stupid idea?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
So Yucca Mountain is in the UK now?
Something tells me there is a concise, clear argument as to why you are completely wrong.
Why do all the posters here think they know something that the DOE doesn't? Gee, how much further ahead they would be if they just trolled /. all day, all of society's problems would vanish.
I for one am not happy about this. There has been one two many reports of ground water leaks inside the mountain and other bad news about this place to store nuke waste... nevada already has a higher than normal back ground radation reading anyway.. I can feel the cancer growing in me! ;)
The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
Here's a link describing natural human radioactivity.
s %2 010%20notes/HumanRadioactivity.html
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/physic
Although it is too late for the waste being stored at Yucca Mountain, we need to stop making more. ANY nuclear waste will take tens of thousands of years to decay to safe levels. Think about it! Human civilization has been around for Maybe 4000-5000 years. Think of all the political changes: The rise and fall of the Roman empire. The dark ages with feudal lords and serfs. Entire civilizations can span much less than a thousand years, let alone ten thousand. Basically, one cannot expect the current political landscape to last for that long! Entire civilizations have mysteriously dissapeared less than a thousand years ago, and we don't know why. My point is that way before the waste is no longer radioactive, we may have forgotten that it is even there. THAT is a major safety hazard. Of course, we do have to deal with the waste we have already made, but I'm saying we shouldnt make more.
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
here's the pic
sulli
RTFJ.
They should be careful how deep they dig. No telling what they might wake up.
=surfcow
I have always been astounded at picking 10,000 years as a number. This is longer than written human history. If you think about the technological changes between 8000 B.C. and now, and think of where technology is likely to be even as soon as 3000 A.D. (much less 12000 A.D.) even 1,000 years ought to be plenty.
Of course, you have lots and lots of people who would rather that the waste sit in the temporary storage facilities near major metropolitan areas for the next 10,000 years. That looks VERY good to them. That is the only alternative to Yucca Mountain that I can see, and it is not pretty.
Practically every posting here, every statement made by an interest group or a politician, make it perfectly clear that the very last thing that to be considered to decide where this waste ends up will be the most practical scientific solution currently available. Nobody is saying that there is a better solution than Yucca Mountain, just that Yucca Mountain isn't "good enough." I think the issue must be Yucca Mountain vs. the status quo. The naysayers will just keep lifting their bar otherwise. (100,000 or 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 years, whatever)
That's our governement at work for ya. The original atamic energy plan was to have two sets .. well, gee what happens when
of reactors, a fission reactor and a fusion reactor. Radioactive waste would become fuel for the fusion reactor, and wast from the fusion reactor would be fuel for the fission reactor. No
wast like that. Instead we are going to dump tons
of spent fissionable material into a hole in the
yucca mountains.
radioactive material is stored together? It gets hot, very hot. What happens when rocks get hot?
400 degrees over a long period of time.
I guess it's better than the original plan, they were going to dump the wast inside mountains in New Hampshire. Everyone that hikes up the granite mountains knows there's water everywhere.
Why not send the waste into outer space? Possibly
towards the sun? Or a wast depot on the moon.
If we don't use the fussion/fission model for atomic energy then we should scrap nuclear power all together!
I figured it was some new use for Pilot that I didn't recognize. Kind of like calling it a 'waste isolation plant' instead of a 'dump.'
Why are we spending all this effort to try to
store this stuff safely for 10,000 years? People just seem to think that the problem will remain the same forever.
Don't you all think that technology will develop to let us handle this stuff safely?
This thread so far has talked about the danger of rocket launches. Don't you think it's feasible that, say, in the next 100 years, rockets launches will be significantly more reliable?
Don't you think that we will have learnt how to encase the radioactive components in diamond or buckeytube fibers in the next couple of hundred years? Or even perhaps to manipulate matter such that materials are rendered un-radioactive.
At the very least, we'll have a space elevator to get the stuff up into orbit safely, and then from there, send it into the sun.
In other words - don't worry about it. Let's get our kids something to work on!
How does one excpect the tons of waste to get to Nevada? In trucks. For years, there will be trucks from current repositories around the country. The canisters have gone through testing, and are supposedly safe.
Do you suppose it's hard to steal a truck from a long haul trucker on a 2500 mile trip?
This shit may wind up in a hole in the desert, but it has to go through your town to get here.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
The good thing about the yucca mountain site is that is incredibly high above the water table (somewhere on the order of 2 miles). However, we must consider the proximity to Los Vegas. Should something go wrong, this could be disastrous placement. Another negative is that there is a fault line running very close to the mountain. The fault has not moved in a significant amount of time, but this is still a risk to consider.
Personally, I believe the Sun is the best place to send or nuclear waste. This would have tiny impact on this extremely large fission machine. The downside of this is that if we ever found a method to recycle the energy, we would never be able to get it back. It is also extremely risky, launching a rocket with all of our nuclear waste out of a populated area...remember the challenger.
Matt
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
"And then the building where DOE housed the project studing earthquake safety took over a million dollars in damage from--you guessed it!--a routine (for the region) earthquake."
Unless you have evidence that the building was designed and built by the same people who were doing the earthquake study, I fail to see any relavence.
Rule #1 of spotting hidden agendas: little factoids that sound real at first, but upon critical analysis are clearly pointless and irrelevant.
I don't know enough about this issue to speculate as to which global conspiracy out to soil our politicials good names you're a part of. Its gotta be one of the conservative media conspiracy, the liberal environmentalist conspiracy or the unitarians. fess up.
nt
First things first. On rereading my response, I was crankier than I intended to be, so my apologies for my tone.
On the points, further thoughts:
> a) sonic booms occur above mach 1 not at mach 1.
Agreed, but there are two things to consider. Firstly, jets make a lot of noise, but something thrown from a rail (or coil) gun doesn't, until it uses afterlaunch engines. Secondly, since this object is to be moving upward and two miles off the ground by the time it begins its own acceleration, I didn't consider the sonic boom to be an issue.
> b)&c) Making a mach 27 object survive at all is not easy.
Holy crap, I'd hate to try to design that object. I didn't realistically consider that this object would be thrown into orbit by the launcher alone, a' la Jules Verne's moon bullet. My thought was a booster engine thrown up into the air by the launcher, which ignites and completes the exit burn. On review, I never mentioned that in my reply, so reread with that in mind and it makes more sense.
> d) orbital mechanics... what can I say... there are three types of
> orbits around anything; elliptical, escape and hyperbolic. Any object with
> less than escape velocity is in an elliptical orbit. These orbits are
> generally stable. It's theoretically possible to get a decaying solar orbit,
> but not practically; decaying orbits need atmosphere- the sun doesn't
> really have this.
A simple misunderstanding here. I'm focused on the problem, so I didn't consider a decaying orbit so much as a death shot. I considered "impact" (insofar as anything can impact a star) to be the goal and thus, the target. If the arc is calculated correctly, the object passes into the Sun's corona, which I'm sure you will agree will alter its orbital mechanics to a great degree. Hence my comment on stable orbits (again, sorry for the tone) which does not apply to paths which are so elliptical as to pass through the orbited body.
> Oh yeah, you mention rail guns.
Only because to original poster did, but considering the above comment about points B and C (that I was assuming an assisted rocket, not a ballistic object) the rail gun is not a completely undoable approach, considering power needs.
Virg
What about the dozen or so people who live in Nevada? Will they move to Wyoming? I don't think Wyoming can handle a dozen more people. The eight it has now is crowded enough.
The NY Times had a cute little article about Amargosa Valley, which is apparently within sight of Yucca Mountain (although they point out you can see for 100 miles from Amargosa on a clear day, which is most days). They point out that the government is also looking at that area to set up a national training center for combating terrorism. They've been doing some kind of training there for several years.
:-)
By the way, I grew up in bumpkinville NY (house in a forest with the nearest neighbor about a mile away), but Amargosa Valley sounds pretty quiet even by my standards.
All in all, it sounds like quite an interesting place to live!
Would putting radioactive waste in old uranium mines satisfy the eco-nazis?
In the same vein,
last Nature has an article about natural toxins
(pesticides and other cancerogens) exceeding by
far the levels of artificial ones in food. It's ironic that natural food producers advertise the use of naturally occurring crop protection substances, as if it was healthier to eat a natural toxin.
A dose is a dose is a dose.
I'm not sure why people think a special reactor is necessary in order to burn up the plutonium in a power plant. It fissions perfectly well in an ordinary power reactor - by the time a fuel rod is too laden with neutron-absorbing fission products to sustain a chain reaction any more, about 40% (IIRC) of its power output is from the plutonium that was bred in the rod. By that time, a significant percentage of the plutonium has been transmuted to Pu240 and Pu242, which makes it somewhere between very difficult and impossible to make a bomb out of it.
(If power plant plutonium could easily be made into bombs, wouldn't India have done so, rather than going to the trouble and expense of building a special-purpose breeder? Wouldn't Pakistan have done so, rather than building an isotope separation plant to make U235 bombs?)
It may require something special if you want to use pure plutonium in a fuel rod, but mixed uranium and plutonium is producing power in every nuclear power plant on the planet, right now.
Current thought on the other transuranics is, you put them in a new fuel rod, and they'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay, until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they will cease to be part of the "transuranic" problem, and become part of the "fission products" problem. (And generate energy to boot.)
If you only bury fission products, forget the "tens of thousands of years" hype. In about 500 years, there's less radioactivity in the waste than there was in the ore the uranium came from.
The inescapable fact is that there is no choice about implementing disposal of nuclear waste. We already have enough of it that not developing a disposal site is not an option.
The anti-nuke types do not want any disposal of nuclear waste to be permitted. It doesn't matter how good the site is. They want the waste to remain right here on the surface, where it can be used as an "issue".
Yep, the "Screw Nevada Bill" has come to full fruition. This latest development means the government will be sending tons of high level nuclear waste to the Nevada desert for disposal and storage for thousands of years. There's a couple problems with that.
Most of Nevada is considered an active fault zone. That's right, we here in Nevada experience earthquakes on a regular basis, geologically speaking. This activity poses a couple of problems, both related to the water table.
As of the studies done on Yucca Mountain, it is practically impermeable to water from rainfall. Precipitation will pretty much stay out of the mountain as it is. The problem is that an earthquake can change Yucca Mountain to a geologic structure to something more like a sieve than solid. Think of Yucca Mountain as a big hunk of glass. One earthquake can shatter that glass and add cracks in the rock. Water will shoot straight through these cracks to the waste, leaching it into the water table.
The other potential problem is that earthquakes can shift the water table. Right now, the water table is below the dump, but it has been higher in the past.
We Nevadans have known for a long time that nuclear waste was coming to Yucca Mountain. They stopped looking at other sites long ago. For the past 15 years, the government has been doing feasability studies to determine weather Yucca Mountain was suitable, but there was never any doubt about what the results would be. After pouring billions of dollars into researching the site and designing the facility, the government has no choice but to say the site is suitable.
Most of the studies were not done by the Environmental Protection Agency (who I have some faith in), but by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is made up of people with very close ties to the nuclear industry. The NRC has an interest in finding any site to put nuclear waste, weather it's suitable or not. By eliminating all other candidates and putting the NRC in charge of efforts to find suitable sites (from a list of one), the government has painted itself into a corner and have no choice but to foist off the nuclear waste on a state that can't fight back.
I'm very glad our representatives, Harry Reid and John Ensign, a Democrat and a Republican, are going to fight the Yucca Mountain dump tooth and nail. There are two final options to keeping the waste out of Yucca Mountain. First, the site will require massive amounts of water, but the west (California, Arizona, and Nevada) are short water. The states and cities already fight for every drop and the government will have a difficult time getting what they need. The final hope is that enough states surrounding Nevada will ban the transportation of nuclear waste through their states to make transportation to Nevada unfeasable.
In fact, radioactive waste is shipped VERY safely. You probably don't REALLY want to know how it's done, but JUST IN CASE you're interested in LEARNING something, take a look at this link:
How waste is shipped safely
It may come as a surprise to you to find that the people who designed our nuclear infrastructure are neither stupid nor suicidal.
<bart
The issue is that U235 and U238 are the same chemical element with the same chemical properties. They can only be separated by distinguishing their atomic weights, hence very expensive gaseous diffusion processes, centrifuges, laser isotope separation, etc. Plutonium, on the other hand, is a chemical element in its own right, and can be separated from reactor fuel by chemical means. That's certainly not trivial, but it's much easier than isotope separation.
Taylor compared the difficulty of separating plutonium with the difficulty of processing opium poppies into heroin: both are achievable by someone with money to obtain the required materials and chemical engineering skills. And as the heroin example shows, it can be done on a large scale despite the efforts of governments to stop it.
This CBS Marketwatch article gives some insight into how these decisions get made. Welcome to the Corporate States of America.
"It seems the Feds have finally decided that Nevada will host the government's nuclear waste repository."
Nevada IS a waste repository.
dump away...
To win Nevada's 4 electoral votes (without which he could not become President) George Bush promised Nevadans that the decision of whether to store waste at Yucca Mountain would be based upon science. But it seems to me that the Energy Secretary and the DOE had already made up their minds to do this. How can we endorse Yucca Mountain as THE dump site when the feasibility studies are still being conducted? How can unbiased scientific studies be performed, when scientists working for the DOE are virtually told that discovering information contrary to the choice of Yucca Mountain is a fireable offense? Why have no other sites been studied?
Even if it is safe to store the waste at Yucca Mountain, how will the perception of it as dangerous affect the Las Vegas tourist based economy? And how will the federal government and the nuclear power industry compensate us Nevadans for these economic effects?
Keep in mind that these numbers are wildly rounded off, but it comes from the cost of lifting a pound of material into space, out of the Earth's gravity well, which is around $10,000 per pound. It's safe to assume that you can cut that by a third, because the only things we've put out of Earth's orbit were devices we didn't want damaged (or people), so you can cut corners if you're not concerned about failure after escape. Then, multiply that by the number of tons of radioactive waste that U.S. generation plants create (spent fuel and other "hot" items like tools, machinery and containers) and divide the answer by the number of people in the U.S. Chop off 90% for my example and the result falls around $8,000.
Overly simple, yes, but it does serve to prove my point.
Virg
> it's still impossible the delta-v for this is much too large...
I'm not sure I get you. If a rocket booster can lift off from a standing start on the Earth's surface, why is it impossible to start it moving with a rail/coil gun and then start the burn when it leaves the launcher? Since a railgun can accelerate the object at any speed (modifying the current lets you pick the potential difference and thus the delta-a), it's not required to chuck it into the sky at Mach 20+. The use of the launcher is to give the rocket a kickstart so it can carry less fuel (thus less weight) and still get out of Earth's G-well. As an example, take something very dangerous that we did as kids for illustration. We used to build and fly model rockets. We discovered that if someone stood on the flat and held the rocket in hand, he could throw it upward off the ground. Then the "launcher" would run like Hell and "mission control" would hit the starter. Barring a bad throw or entangling (or igniting) your launcher, your rocket would climb noticeably higher because it was already moving upward when the engine fired.
I'm still sure the cost is prohibitive, but I'm having trouble seeing why the physics would interfere.
Virg
I can only reply to you with what I am familiar with, I work at San Onofre, and I am familiar with the seismic engineering in place here.
It's overly simplistic to say horzontal movement and Richter scale number are the only things designed against.
A properly qualified seismic design is against the g forces (horizontal and vertical)at the location of the structure.
What this means is, you have to do very thorough geological studies in the region of the structure in order to understand how it will transmit energy to where you have your design. I.e., where are the nearest active faults, what is the largest rupture that could be generated from that fault, what subsurface structures are between your building and the fault. Once you have all this data (and some other stuff too) you can calculate within a specified degree of statistical certainty what the maximum g-force at your structure location will be for specified amount of time, say 100,000 years. You can then use this to generate design criteria. With the proper amount of engineering conservatism, you can design a structure to withstand any significant earthquake to be expected in the lifetime of humanity. It's all a matter of cost. You can design in the strength needed to withstand the g-forces from a 8.0M earthquake anywhere, but why waste the money to do that if nothing more than a 6.5M earthquake can be expected to occur in the next 250,000 years?
I agree that strorage is not a permanent solution. It's the next best thing, put this stuff in a centrally guarded location. Easily retreivable for later use (or a permanent solution). It's definitely safer than leaving it at 70 odd separate storage locations across the U.S.
One last comment on the bridges here in SoCal, It was the support pillar connections to the underside of the bridges that was the weak spot. And the secondary (but almost as bad) problem was the structural strength of the pillars' concrete. Once the existing pillars were wrapped in high tensile strength steel cylinders, and the connections to the underside of the bridges were beefed up, that basically took care of the problem.
I was wondering about the cost of operating fast breeder reactors. What I read indicated they had mainly been used for producing weapons-grade plutionium, and that the power generation was a small side bonus. Is this type of reactor an economical way to produce power? If not, where should the money come from? Should nuclear waste be a 'public problem', or should dealing with it be part of the tab for the power generation company that produces it?