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.

Comments

Re:Load the stuff on a rocket and shoot it to the

[Ewan]

The other minor downside would be if the rocket blew up you would just have annihilated the entire planet...

Pretty creepy.

[torpor]

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 ...

Re:Pretty creepy.

[Mike Connell]

Imagine what sort of a hideout that would be, for, say, an international terrorist or two ...

Quite a hot one according to the article - it's 400 degrees F (~750 celsius)

Actually, maybe that's what you meant, it'd be like a 5 minute preparation for where they're going to end up for the rest of eternity ;-)

Re:Pretty creepy.

[torpor]

Yeah, that's what I'd *WANT* you to think, if I was Dr. Bad, hiding away in a mountain lair, I "conveniently" had built for me by the "U.S. Government"...

And I'll take my blonde bunny army with me, too!

Re:Pretty creepy.

[jmorzins]

it's 400 degrees F (~750 celsius)

I think you converted in the wrong direction: 400 degrees F is only about 200 degrees C.

Re:Pretty creepy.

[sweetooth]

Except those of us who live here and don't use Nuclear power.

Re:Pretty creepy.

[leucadiadude]

Umm, well I'm looking at one of the shipping/storage casks right now. I can't imagine anything that could *burn* that sucker other than a tactical nuclear device. Kinda ironic.

I think a train wreck off of a tall trestle onto sharp granite wouldn't even scratch the damn thing. Oh wait, that was one of the design and testing criteria. Huh, no wonder.

Re:Pretty creepy.

[leucadiadude]

I'm all for just compensation for the state of Nevada for taking on this burden for the good of the whole country. Other states have been compensated when they were forced to accept federal projects that did them no good at all.

The real usage...

[Mike Connell]

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! ;-)

here's a little math problem

[crayz]

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

Re:here's a little math problem

[mirko]

The price estimation you gave is the current one.
Now, if everybody consider doing this, won't the cost dramatically decrease to some more reasonable level ?
We should start thinking about mass-space-travelling so that price won't mater as much anymore.
Maybe our grand-children will be able to spend their honeymoon on the moon.
I know I sound a bit optimistic but if somebody had told our parents some people would walk on the moon, they wouldn't have believed it.

Re:here's a little math problem

[arkanes]

This would be a perfect application for those big rail-gun launchers we were talking about a couple weeks ago :). Just build a giant mag lev track up Mt. Kilimanjaro or something, rev the stuff up to 5000 G's and let it go.

Re:here's a little math problem

[El_Che]

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...

Despite all that, some people continue to insist that nuclear power is the cheapest, most reliable source of energy around. Go figure.

One quote jumped out at me...

[zesnark]

"He said increased unease about terrorist attacks makes it even more important that the nation's radioactive waste be consolidated."

Eggs. Basket. z

Lawyers, start your engines!

[zbuffered]

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?

Life imitating art...

[ct]

1) add one part Nevada
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)

//ct

Re:Life imitating art...

[ImaLamer]

I agree with two other respondants... that movie was good.

It's tremors two and three that sucked.

The first time I watched it I was on the edge of my seat.

Re:Load the stuff on a rocket and shoot it to the

[silentbozo]

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...

Why is it being thrown away at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why is it being thrown away at all?

[leucadiadude]

The 400F figure in the article is a worst case number for design verification purposes, with brand new very hot waste (and a lot of it) all stored together. The actual temperatures will be way lower, say 150F or less. Not enough to make power generation worthhile. But it's a nice thought anyway.

No Maps...

[alpinist]

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?

Problems....

[ishark]

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....

Re:Problems....

[Mike Connell]

Perhaps they have in the back of their minds the fact that at the moment the waste is being stored all over the country in various temporary containment facilities.

I don't know for a fact, but perhaps even with the known problems for the new site, they still think it's better than the current situation.

0.02

Re:Problems....

[karb]

I don't understand: if there still are issues which are not resolved, how can the decision to put the dump there be taken?

In any engineering discipline, there are all sorts of problems which need to be solved. Just because those problems exist doesn't mean they can't be solved. In fact, you usually do something called 'risk reduction', which means you sit around and think of solutions to a problem, and backups to those solutions.

Many public problems with the government (and the private sector, too) are the results of a 'common sense' approach to engineering projects. "I know how long it takes to drive to the grocery store, therefore the government should know, to the dollar, how much it would cost to build the most technologically advanced strike fighter in the world ten years before they do it."

Re:Problems....

[hawk]

If memory serves, one of the problems remaining to be solved is that the water table sometimes reaches above the level at which they plan to store the waste (every hundred years or two--but this is designed for thousands!).

hawk

Re:Problems....

[ender81b]

Of course they haven't answered the questions of saftey - they're is no way they can. No place on earth is *designed* to hold nuclear waste or, really, suitable. However the U.S. has a 50 year stockpile of the stuff sitting around in temporary containters that are a hell of a lot less safe than Yucca mountain.

What you should be saying is that you are glad that after 80 billion dollars (if that is the real amount) and 20 years of study Yucca still looks like the best choice. For us to *not* spend every possible resource to dispose of radioactive waste which will be harmful for 10,000 years would be a criminal affront to future generations. You should be glad that your government is doing it's best to look ahead for future generations, hell future governments, and making sure that this waste is disposed of probably.

Re:Problems....

[leucadiadude]

Check your facts please. They have spent about 8.1 billion on research/design/construction/site characterization and testing of various storage strategies there.

80 billion? Sounds like FUD to me.

Re:Problems....

[monkeydo]

Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. So far $6.8 billion has been spent researching the site, and construction is estimated to cost $40 billion.

http://sltrib.com/01112002/utah/166549.htm

hmmm...

[gnovos]

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?

Re:hmmm...

[limber]

Using deep-sea subduction zones to dispose of waste is an interesting idea that has been kicking around for awhile.

However, there are a few concerns, some political, some practical which have not been sufficiently dealt with (yet), for use of this method to be deemed acceptable.

It goes against the grain of current 'waste disposal' thought. In the past, the model used to be "dilute and disperse". Then, as we realized some pollutants remain toxic even in low low exposure rates, the model changed to "concentrate and contain". You can see this mindset in our acceptance of smokestacks: they used to be a sign of progress, now they're not welcome in your neighbourhood. So, simply dumping nuclear waste into a subduction zone gives the shivers to anyone raised in this mindset, even if logically you can show that the subduction zone does in fact carry material only downward -- you can't guarantee the waste isn't going to wind up someplace where it can do harm. Models can only show you what should happen; the real world often decides to disagree. So it's a tough approach to sell.

The key thing is, once the waste is down there, you no longer have control. Who knows what might happen to it. Once waste is placed at the subduction zone, human intervention will be extremely difficult, whether by submersible or robot remote.

If a waste container breaks open down there (and don't think you can economically design one that won't -- the forces down there are spectacular), there's not much you can do except cover it with dirt or other materials. "Oh, it's just one broken waste cannister at the bottom of the entire ocean" -- see how well that goes over with Greenpeace.

The other main practical consideration is actually getting the waste containers to go into the subduction zones. Most subduction zones have thick sedimentation layers over
their sea floor opening. We're talking about tectonic processes here, not vacuum cleaners. That is, any container you put there is just going to sit at the bottom for a long long time without actually going anywhere.

Re:hmmm...

[G-Man]

If a waste container breaks open down there (and don't think you can economically design one that won't -- the forces down there are spectacular), there's not much you can do except cover it with dirt or other materials. "Oh, it's just one broken waste cannister at the bottom of the entire ocean" -- see how well that goes over with Greenpeace.

Aww, who cares? The animals down there already glow in the dark...

Re:hmmm...

[leucadiadude]

Hmm,
US: Thresher, Scorpion

USSR/Russia: They picked up the Kursk, but I seem to remember they have lost 5 - 8 nuclear subs over the years.

So I would guess about ten nuclear cores.

And how much spent resin has been dumped into the oceans over the years? Not enough to really matter is my guess. But I'm glad no one is doing that anymore.

Re:hmmm...

[loraksus]

Perhaps I'm wrong, but generally nuclear waste is more dense than water (i.e. it sinks). It shouldn't be a problem even if it does escape if you dump it into a deep enough trench.

ACK!

[PD]

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.

Re:ACK!

[Detritus]

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.

For large values of eventually.

Re:ACK!

[Detritus]

Where the hell did you get your figures man? So-Called "breeder" reactors are called that because they generate plutonium, a substance that has a half-life of 35,000 years and 1 gram has the lethality potential to kill nearly a million people.

And where do you get your figures?

Pu239 has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years, and contrary to the ravings of some environmentalists, it is not "the most toxic substance known to mankind." There are many organic compounds that are far more poisonous.

Re:ACK!

[duffbeer703]

One problem with breeder reactors is that they operate at higher temperatures and pressure than most reactors in use today.

With the current anti-nuclear hysteria the grips many people, they could simply never be built.

Re:ACK!

[squiggleslash]

The region is geologically unstable, (there was an earthquake measuring 8.2 approx old scale) less than 200 years ago.

People are currently focussing on the potential for 1950s B-movie scenarios ("My god! Giant Mutated Radioactive Ants are coming out of Nevada!"), but isn't this beginning to sound like a bad disaster movie?

Politician: "We need to build more Nuclear Reactors, and I've got just the place to store the waste!"
Scientist: "No! You can't store it there. That's an Earthquake zone!"
Politician: "No, we must do it. There's too much money at stake!"

(Everyone laughs at scientist, then cue earthquake killing millions of holiday makers.)

Why is it that there's so much support for this phenominally dangerous method of power generation anyway? In the 1950s it was "new" and "revolutionary" and everyone thought the problems would be worked out. More to the point, it had massive government backing because the nuclear waste could be covertly converted to use in weapons.

That was 40-50 years ago. We haven't worked out how to get rid of vast quantities of waste with half lives in the hundreds of generations. We can't make it safe, the best we can manage is to hide the damned stuff while shielding it as much as possible. The best argument that can be raised for it "being safe" is that some solutions have been proposed that might, stress the word might, be viable in 20 years (namely certain unbuilt untried untested types of breeder reactor.)

It's pretty much black and white. And yet there's a voceferous pro-Nuclear lobby. Is it a backlash against green politics, which can be luddite and a little inclined to exaggeration and are, right now, heavily anti-nuclear?

I'm used to hearing that Global Warming is a myth (the overwhelming evidence out there says it isn't, the only question marks over the debate about global warming is whether human beings are actually contributing to it in any significant fashion, and therefore whether changes in our behaviour would make any significant difference, and secondly what the actual effects would be.) Is this because of exaggerations and over stated assumptions made by certain environmental lobbies or is this just people voluntarily putting on the blinkers? Is there another reason - America seems to be the western democracy with the most vocal supporters of pro-Nuclear "such-and-such is a myth" points of view, and it's also the only western democracy I'm aware of where there's an active and largely successful (in terms of convincing people black might be white) campaign organised by the religious establishment to discredit fundamental tenets of science, be it "Big Bang" or evolution.

It's a little tiring seeing people denying the obvious, especially when overwhelmingly you get the impression that they're basing their evidence on one political group being extreme and opposite in their agenda.

Let's hope future generations do not suffer thanks to the incompetence of 20th and 21st Century political debate.

Re:ACK!

[PD]

I got my figures the hell from the Internet! :-) I am aware that breeders generate plutonium. That gets burned in your nuclear reactor along with the uranium. The French do this already.

Re:ACK!

[PD]

I guess all that plutonium in our nation's nukes was generated by hamasters then?

Re:ACK!

[leucadiadude]

Fragile? You obviously have never seen one of these things. They are most decidedly NOT fragile. The damn things could probably withstand a drop from many thousands of feet in the air.

Re:ACK!

[leucadiadude]

Breeder reactors that are designed to maximise Pu production from U-238 can operate at the same temp and pressure other plants have, they will have a much higher neutron flux though.

Re:ACK!

[leucadiadude]

"You can't have water in a breeder reactor since it is a moderator."

Sure you can. You just need to re-work your neutron flux for your design. It won't be as efficient as a NAK reactor or other designs not using water, but it'll work. Plus you can use more "normal" materials.

Re:ACK!

[AnalogBoy]

I'm confused. How come the SNAP-9A incident over madagascar in 1964 didn't kill people?

Re:ACK!

[PD]

Yes, I didn't mean to say that all reactors are breeders. Most reactors would be regular reactors. The breeders are used for fuel recycling. And, the possiblity of cool sodium fireworks is something that I hadn't considered, but it definitely is a bonus for the breeder reactor system. :-)

Re:ACK!

[MrResistor]

One of the problems with Yucca Mtn. is that it ISN'T stable. In fact, it's right on top of one of the most active faults in the country.

Breeder reactors are probably the most realistic idea scientifically, but there are some serious political barriers that would have to be overcome.

Re:ACK!

[PD]

I'm pretty sure that we have breeders. We have plutonium, right? Reactors that make weapons grade plutonium are essentially the same as breeders, except it takes longer to make reactor grade fuel for a power plant. Since the government is handling the waste disposal problem, let them handle the operation of the breeders and the security concerns around the plutonium.

Re:ACK!

[Macadamizer]

The lethality of plutonium (1 gram could kill a million people) is based on somehow get finely-ground plutonium into peoples lungs (not that hard to do, really -- finely ground plutonium (and uranium) is pyrophoric, so it will spontaneouslu burn and create smoke containing plutonium oxides, which can be deposited in the lungs -- this is the main reason why reactor fires suck). Then, once it is in the lungs, allowing the radiation to develop into cancer. So, even if plutonium gets into your lungs, it kills you by developing a cancer in your lungs -- not everyone who has plutonium in their lungs will get the cancer, or will die from the cancer if they get it. There can be other effects, but only the canerous effects are generally life-threatening.

Finely-divided plutonium or uranium is really only hazardous if it gets into your lungs -- if it gets into your body by eating or whatever, your body will just get rid of it (since is causes cancer and it not simply poisonous, it is only dangerous if it hangs out in your body for a long time).

SNAP-9A burned up at a pretty high altitude, so the plutonium, even when divided, was spread over a huge amount of area, so by the time the plutonium got to the ground, the density of plutonium dust in the air was probably extremely low, making the chances of breathing in enough plutonium to cause cancer extremely low.

Lung cancers caused by uranium or plutonium inhalation are pretty easy to diagnose, since you can easily detect the radioactive material. As far as I know, there are no cases in the literature of increased deaths due to lungs cancers as a result of radionuclide inhalation in Madagascar following the SNAP-9A incident, so chances are the density of plutonium dust in the air at ground level in Madagascar was too low to have a reasonable chance of infecting anyone.

Last thing -- plutonium and uranium are wicked heavy -- even though the "dust" was in the air, it won't stay suspended for long, so the low density of particulate matter at ground level combined with the limited amount of time the dust remained suspended is likely the reason why their weren't excess cancers due to radionuclide inhalation in Madagascar.

Re:ACK!

[leucadiadude]

I'm pretty sure the Pu effect on the body was as a chemical heavy metal poison. And extremely toxic. It was not a (short term) carcinogenic.

In other words, you would die within a few days or weeks of heavy metal poisoning, way before the year(s) needed to develop cancer.

This was discovered during the manhattan project, if you inhaled/ingested/injected Pu (accidentally of course) it would very quickly enter your bloodstream and chemically poison you. In fact if I remember correctly, first aid for a Pu sliver in your hand was rapid amputation of the limb. Ouch.

Sub-Seabed

[kEnder242]

There was a Scientific American article about this alternative solution a few years back.

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/s ea bed.htm

Re:Sub-Seabed

[Anonymous Coward]

Like my brother the geologist once said: "Geologically inactive? What's that?"

At least the feds are giving full disclosure!

[pgpckt]

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.

Re:At least the feds are giving full disclosure!

[Leven Valera]

Will Sept 11th be the excuse for the de facto revoking of sunshine laws and intrusions on liberties? I think maybe.

Exercised your free speech recently?

LV

Re:At least the feds are giving full disclosure!

[MrResistor]

Considering that the DOE has chosen to ignore the fact that Yucca Mtn sits on top of one of the most active faults in the country, I'm certainly reasured by how easy it is for the public to obtain this information.

-1 Offtopic

[ishark]

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.

Not great, but better than current solution.

[Shivetya]

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

Re:Not great, but better than current solution.

[webmaven]

The biggest problem that Nevadans (like myself) have with Yucca Mountain is that the whole 'site selection' process has been a sham from the beginning. No other location has ever been under consideration, and the DOE has simply ramrodded this up the state's collective backside.

I mean, they've been constructing the project for quite a while now, in anticipation of the eventual selection of the site, despite the citizen protests and the fact that ground water has been discovered there during construction.

Despite all their protests that "we haven't really made up our minds yet", the writing has been on the wall from day one. And this announcement is a despicable PR sham.

Re:Not great, but better than current solution.

[leucadiadude]

Well you can thank your friendly democratic senators from the northeastern states (especially Vermont and Maine) for ten years ago ramrodding a law though making it illegal to consider a repository in granite bedrock (actually the preferred medium for a number of reasons). Thus removing a big chunk of the US from consideration. Where is the criticism of that "scientific" decision?

Oh, I see, it's only republicans that can make politically motivated "scientific" decisions. Silly of me.

Re:Not great, but better than current solution.

[webmaven]

That's very interesting. Could you provide further info on that law?

BTW, I'm hardly a Democratic booster, so i'm not sure why you're attacking whatever political leanings you seem to think I have. By no means do I think either party has a monopoly on corruption, stupidity, ignorance, or self-serving motivations.

Re:Not great, but better than current solution.

[leucadiadude]

By no means do I think either party has a monopoly on corruption, stupidity, ignorance, or self-serving motivations.

I am a republican through analysis and logic, not inheritance, and I still have to agree with you on this one. Sigh.

As for the law, here is a link.

And here following is an excerpt (note the bold text):

Sec. 10172a. Siting a second repository

(a) Congressional action required

The Secretary may not conduct site-specific activities with respect to a second repository unless Congress has specifically authorized and appropriated funds for such activities.

(b) Report

The Secretary shall report to the President and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository.

(c) Termination of granite research

Not later than 6 months after December 22, 1987, the Secretary shall phase out in an orderly manner funding for all research programs in existence on December 22, 1987, designed to evaluate the suitability of crystalline rock as a potential repository host medium.

(d) Additional siting criteria

In the event that the Secretary at any time after December 22, 1987, considers any sites in crystalline rock for characterization or selection as a repository, the Secretary shall consider (as a supplement to the siting guidelines under section 10132 of this title) such potentially disqualifying factors as -

(1) seasonal increases in population;

(2) proximity to public drinking water supplies, including those of metropolitan areas; and

(3) the impact that characterization or siting decisions would have on lands owned or placed in trust by the United States for Indian tribes.

Re:Load the stuff on a rocket and shoot it to the

[pgpckt]

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!

even worse...

[renard]

if you want to get it into the sun you have to supply a delta-velocity of 30 km/s (Earth's orbital velocity). that's four times the velocity to get to Earth orbit (your $10k/lb figure).

conservatively speaking that's going to increase your cost estimate by a factor of 10...

-renard

Sucks for Nevada, but we gotta store this crap

[baptiste]

Yes, in an ideal world we'd produce electricity without producing hazardous waste, etc. But the bottom line is we're building up loads of waste. Its got to be stored somewhere and somewhere secure. Like a previous poster said, talk about an ideal target for a terrorist. Many of these power companies have the waste stored outside on cemet pads surrounded by motion sensors, razor wire fence, armed guards and such, but a determined terrorist could still get to it if he wanted. This stuff needs to be stored in a secure location. Here in NC, our local power co, CP&L stores its waste in holding pools, allowing for denser storage of the fuel rods. There was a huge fight with a nearby county about the expansion of those pools (Currently only one is in use and CP&L wanted to bring another online) Both sides spent millions claiming the other was wrong. But in the end? Its an easy target. One well placed technician who knows his stuff could find a way to empty that pool or disable the cooling system and you've got three mile island all over again as teh rods boil off the water and start a reaction - remember, these things aren't inside a cement surrounded reactor vessel - they're open on top for access.

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 :)

Re:Sucks for Nevada, but we gotta store this crap

[bpowell423]

Well, at least they're told you they're going to build a road through your house and you didn't wake up this morning to a big yellow bulldozer outside your kitchen window. :)

But your post is right on. Storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the least-risky route. Launching the stuff to space would be cool, and would certainly rid us of the stuff, but one disaster...

Trucking it to Nevada and burying it under the desert is simply the best option. It would certainly be safe from "terrorists", as I imagine they'd never get past the security, and if they did, they'd die pretty quickly once they got underground with the stuff.

Maybe someday we'll have an abundant source of power that doesn't produce toxic waste, but for now, we're stuck with fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Myself, I like nuclear fission, because all the waste is contained. Nuclear fusion would be wonderful, but that's been 10 years away for the last 50 years. Beaming power down from satellites definitly has the geek factor, but seems to be way to obvious a target for sabotage.

I'm hopeful that this will finally go through.

Re:Sucks for Nevada, but we gotta store this crap

[Nelson]

We already have a ton of this waste. That's the critical part. YM is only being used for commercial grade waste and there is a lot of it out there already just waiting for an accident or to be stolen by terrorists or something.

I think that it's far more likely that there could or would be an accident or "issue" at the dozens of sites around the country than at one storage facility.

I think that are some other issues of praciticality too. Yucca Mountain isn't exactly Malibu or Park City or Tampa. For the forseeable future people aren't going to be aching the build on it. It's a desert, a rough desert. They aren't tarnishing prestine wilderness or some ultradesirable place to visit or live. The waste needs to be stored and that's as good a place as there is. Throwing out a few of the more radical climate change theories, YM is going to substantially change for thousands and thousands of years and it hasn't for many thousands of years. I also kind of dismiss the "forget about it idea" it is marked and unless there is a catastrophic change to the human race it will be remembered for several thousand years.

Re:Sucks for Nevada, but we gotta store this crap

[Waffle Iron]

Per KW/h, nuclear power is cheaper than many other generation facilities.

Would it still be economically competetive if nuclear power plants did not have their special exemption from liability claims? If they had to buy full liability insurance on the private market, I doubt it.

Put it in a fast reactor

[morbid]

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.

The Beast of Yucca Flats

[LarsWestergren]

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.

Yucca Mountain is on a fault line

[sdo1]

Putting a nuclear waste dump in a mountain that sits on a fault line doesn't seem the wisest of ideas. It seems that it's still fairly active.

-S

Re:Can't we do better than 100 miles?

[Detritus]

Yucca Mountain is located at the NTS (Nevada Test Site), where the USA has performed most of its nuclear weapons testing. So it isn't exactly a pristine example of desert wilderness. The site also has the most of the needed infrastructure and security already there.

Re:Mass Drivin'

[s390]

Well, although it seems you have some, er... unresolved issues with Nevada government as well as an unfortunate affinity for bold text, I will agree with you in principle. A mass driver to get this poisonous junk entirely off the planet seems like a reasonable proposition. Imagine mag-lev and an inclined railgun mass-driver able to accelerate a ton or more per shot to escape velocity. One problem is that it needs to face East (use the Earth's rotation rather than have to overcome it) and that makes most politicians based eastwards of wherever it's built nervous in case of a "partial" launch. A ton or more of highly radioactive nuclear waste landing anywhere can really ruin your next ten thousand years. And the US isn't a good place to site this - it's too far North - someplace near the Equator would be much better (that's why Ariane launches there). Maybe Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, even Panama or Puerto Rico? Their economies could sure use the massive cash infusion lasting decades until the job's done. And the system could be used to drive materials into orbit for space stations, Mars and beyond exploration (oops, different bureaucracy). But of course our vision impaired, cover-your-ass bureaucrats won't ever think of doing anything even remotely like this. They've spent $6 Billion on CYA for Yucca Mountain and they are determined to do it, whether or not it's the right answer or Nevada (or anyone else) objects to this. That said, it's a conservative choice - big hole in the ground under a stable desert mountain, way above the water table. Just hope they weld the doors shut when they leave, post warning signs, etc. Ten thousand years is a long, long time - about as long since people developed languages. Let's just hope global warming and geological changes don't turn Nevada into an inland sea in the interim, or something. Keeping it on-planet seems risky to me.

Marking the Site

[KingRoo]

Another question is how do you keep the site marked, and perceived as dangerous, for 10K years? What message will last through whatever potential societal chaos/collapse/evolution is a'comin?

There was a design competition about this - my favorite is the Landscape of Thorns.

Re:Marking the Site

[NearlyHeadless]

Another question is how do you keep the site marked, and perceived as dangerous, for 10K years? What message will last through whatever potential societal chaos/collapse/evolution is a'comin?

You don't, but it doesn't really matter. The stuff that is most radioactive decays very rapidly, so it's not really all that dangerous.

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. 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.

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?

By the way, the 1,000 people per year is a conservative estimate, it is NOT auto-industry hype and it is NOT because large cars plow into small cars. The last time I mentioned this on slashdot, somebody ignorantly said it was and he was, of course, moderated up as insightful. Here's a good article from USA Today about this issue.

Shoot it into the sun?

[nihilvt]

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.

Re:Shoot it into the sun?

[jamie]

Here's Robert Heinlein on nuclear waste. Expanded Universe, 1980, pp. 566-7. The President of the United States is speaking to one of her advisors:

She touched a switch. "Get me the head of the U.S. Engineers. How would you dispose of nuclear power plant wastes? Rocket them onto the Moon as someone urged last week? Why wouldn't the Sun be better? We may want to go back to the Moon someday."

"Oh, my, no! Neither one, Ma'am."

"Why not? Some of those byproducts are poisonous for hundreds of years, so I've heard. No?"

"You heard correctly. But the really rough ones have short half-lives. The ones with long half-lives -- hundreds, even thousands of years, or longer -- are simple to handle. But don't throw away any of it, Ma'am. Not where you can't recover it easily."

"Why not? We're speaking of wastes. I assume that we have extracted anything we can use."

"Yes, Ma'am, anything we can use. But our great grandchildren are going to hate you. Do you know the only use the ancient Romans had for petroleum? Medicine, that's all. I don't know how those isotopic wastes will be used next century ... any more than those old Romans could guess how very important oil would become. But I certainly wouldn't throw those so-called wastes into the Sun!

Re:Shoot it into the sun?

[Hangtime]

I would add one thing to your comments. All of those rockets use conventional fuels. If it came to the point where we would need/want to lift this stuff towards another planteary body, we would probably want to use a nuclear-powered system. In theory, your getting a lot more boost, carrying capacity and fuel weight effeciency from a nuclear-powered rocket.

Random thoughts,
HT

Re:Shoot it into the sun?

[leucadiadude]

DAMMIT!!!

Where are my mod points when I need them.

This is the single most insightful comment in this ENTIRE article.

What a waste. (pardon the pun)

More Radiation in the Capitol Than at Yucca

[rtos]

Quoth Radiation Sources at the U.S. Capitol and Library of Congress Buildings:

Summary
Gamma radiation dose rates were measured at several locations in and around the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Library of Congress buildings in Washington, D.C. A qualified radiation surveyor used a Bicron MicroRem meter for measuring. Dose rates inside the Capitol building and outside the Thomas Jefferson Building were measured at 30 microrem per hour. This dose rate: (1) exceeds local background radiation dose rates; (2) is up to 550 percent greater than the typical dose rate "at the fence line" around nuclear power plants; (3) is about 13,000 times greater than the average individual dose rate from worldwide nuclear power production; (4) is about 13,000 times greater than ongoing worldwide exposures to radiation from the Chernobyl accident; and (5) exceeds the dose rate associated with the radiation protection standards proposed for the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste facility. The measured level of radiation is associated with up to a 0.5 percent increase in cancer risk, according to U.S. EPA risk assessment methods.

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.

Re:More Radiation in the Capitol Than at Yucca

[prizog]

Wait, how do we trust this guy at all? They have a *huge* political agenda. Quote:

"SOCIAL ACTIVISTS, such as the "food police," environmental extremists, and gun-control advocates, may use junk science to achieve social and political change."

But polluting corporations and gun-control foes aren't mentioned... hmm...

If you look at the papers this dude writes for, it's pretty clear where his politics lie. Ooh, look, here's even something attacking evolution:
http://www.junkscience.com/aug99/darwin.htm
Yes, I know it's not by the site's main dude, but he printed it.

Notice that first paragraph. Do you want to talk about fucking junk science? There's no reference there! Maybe this "chinese scientist" is a total crackpot. Maybe the bones are really planted. Who knows? The only way to find out is to examine her research -- preferably, in a peer-reviewed jounal. Anyway, it ignores punctuated equilibrium.

Re:More Radiation in the Capitol Than at Yucca

[duffbeer703]

I think I read an article a few years ago about this.

The junkscience.com article is a little misleading. I believe the captiol statues are emitting Alpha particles, which are blocked by ordinary clothing.

Many granite & marble structures emit some radiation, but not the hazardous gamma rays associated with pluotonium.

Re:More Radiation in the Capitol Than at Yucca

[stefanlasiewski]

What will the radiation levels be in 1000-25,000 years, after some canisters get damaged by an earthquake or flood, long after the politicians who set up Yucca mountain are dead?

A Participant's Perspective...

[ChaoticCoyote]

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...

Stupid Proofreader...

[ChaoticCoyote]

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...

Re:Mass Drivin'

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I'm no expert (slight modesty), but there's a few problems with this idea:

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

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, causing not only dirty nuclear fallout that lasts 10's of thousands of years, but also straightforward meteorite style damage; or what if one of the coils shatters and hits one of the barrels at mach 20- not nice; really not nice.

c) ablation- the first 100m will probably lose atleast a couple of mach and quite a bit of the casing

d) solar orbits don't decay very much, for example the earth would have burnt up long ago

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

Let's Call it Hanford II

[ackthpt]

Best not to repeat the errors of the Hanford site, near Richland Washington. Most likely part of the project will entail digging up the Hanford mess and re-burying it in Nevada.

Desert does not mean, nor is, wasteland.

Close the fuel cycle.

[fwc]

I agree with #2 above.

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.

Re:Close the fuel cycle.

[leucadiadude]

"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."

Which has ben shown then and now to be totally specious line of reasoning. The technology and cost to take a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) bundle and pull out the Pu to use to make a bomb would require the resources boyond the reach of almost all nations. But the main problem was that the neutron flux of commercial power reactor cores is "wrong" for breeding the Pu isotope most easily used to make a bomb. You need a different (and harder to maintain) neutron flux to get good bomb making Pu. MOX fuel from commercial reactor cores wouldn't work as a source of bomb making Pu.

Only a few commercial plants in the US could be modified (such as the CE System 80 designs) to achieve the higher flux values to breed good useful quantities of MOX. It would be prohibitively expensive to convert the design of the rest. Even to use the resulting MOX bundles will require some design changes for most US plants.

Next generation plants could easily have this ability designed in.

Arguments against

[Hard_Code]

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.

http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/issues/natural_r es ources/documents/NCAIYuccaMtncomments.htm

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991209. ht m

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/nwpo991202c .h tm

http://www.shundahai.org/yucca_mt.html

How to warn people away

[yndrd]

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.

Re:How to warn people away

[Leven Valera]

Link stolen from earlier comment.

http://www.halcyon.com/blackbox/hw/wipp/wipp.htm l

Not so fast

[foo fighter]

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.

Re:Not so fast

[Huusker]

NPR is reporting this morning that the plan cannot go forward until Nevada has agreed to it.

.. while conveniently neglecting to report that the law says that Nevada veto's can be overriden by a simple majority vote of both houses of Congress.

Yucca Mountain

[z84976]

Forget Yucca Mountain, what about the experiments going on down in the Black Mesa Research Facility!!!

Why don't we ...

[Archanagor]

Just start burying the nuclear waste in the caves in Afghanastan?

Just think of the benefits:

• Osama couldn't hide in them anymore, and if he did, he would glow a nice conspicuous green.
  
• It's no longer our problem, it's theirs!
  
• Essentially, it's the same as burying it under a mountain, here.
  
• It can suffice as an effort toward the war on terrorism.
  

NO NO NO!

[IPFreely]

Why do people keep saying "Drop it in a subduction zone"? IT WON'T WORK in any way/shape/form at all.

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.

A lot of misconceptions here!

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Re:A lot of misconceptions here!

[MrResistor]

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.

So in other words, NOT YUCCA MTN!

Re:A lot of misconceptions here!

[MtViewGuy]

Now you know why the Department of Energy is looking at using very deep salt mines to store nuclear waste (there are plenty of those here in the USA). Given the fact the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the normal nuclear waste (and that includes metal from nuclear powerplants), put it in the ultra-strong containers that the DoE has been using to transport nuclear materials and store them in these mines.

The fact salt is a very nice radiation absorber is a major plus, too.

Re:A lot of misconceptions here!

[MrResistor]

I've heard of this and I think it's a cool idea; certainly a better idea than Yucca Mtn. But I think there's plenty we could be doing to reduce the amount of waste we need to store, such as using breeder reactors to burn our current "waste" to something with less mass and a much shorter half-life. This is already being done in France.

Not Exactly

[virg_mattes]

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

Re:Load the stuff on a rocket and shoot it to the

[mindstrm]

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)

A Question...

[virg_mattes]

> Oops yeah, I multiplied by 9/5 instead of 5/9.

Do you work for the JPL?

Virg

In the wake of 9-11...

[John Harrison]

Even if there are problems in Nevada it seems imperative to store this stuff at a secure site as soon as possible.

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.

It was decided years ago--a fraud from the start

[hawk]

The DOE is putting this in terms of a decision now, but the decision was made more then ten years ago.

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

Not so fast John!

[John Harrison]

So as it turns out, opponents of the temporary site in Utah are also opposed to Yucca Mountain.

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.

Wrong link you idiot!

[John Harrison]

Serves me right for not hitting preview!

http://sltrib.com/01112002/utah/166549.htm

That is the link to the right article.

Re:Load the stuff on a rocket and shoot it to the

[Guppy06]

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.

Physics

[virg_mattes]

Jeez, where do you people get your math? Let's address:

> 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 ;.)) 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.

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

Re:Physics

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Hmm. Checks certificate. Hmm still says Degree in Physics. Oh well.

a) sonic booms occur above mach 1 not at mach 1. They are produced continuously. They are going to be more intense at higher mach.

b)&c) Making a mach 27 object survive at all is not easy. IRC no vehicle except rockets have exceeded about mach 5 or so (give or take a couple of mach), and they do it OUTSIDE the atmosphere. Reentering space vehicles do sort of enter the atmosphere but they deliberately lose a lot of speed at high altitude in thin air, so that's not really comparable.

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.

The orbital velocity of the earth is 67000 miles per hour BTW. Escape velocity of the earth is ~25000 miles per hour, so I was way off- its more like mach 60 or so. Forget about it; it ain't going to work.

I suggest you pull a book on orbits and read it for once; I know I have. I've also played around on computer simulations. You will find its generally a good idea not to make assumptions about people online based on little to no evidence.

Oh yeah, you mention rail guns. Rail guns have achieved about 5 km/s (about mach 12ish); but they suffer from severe rail erosion. I'm not aware of any that can go faster than this. Coil guns don't have any rails but top out at about 2 km/s right now, although faster is probably doable.

Re:Just a question ...

[leucadiadude]

Fast breeders produce more plutonium than they burn. You load in a lot of U-238 along with enough U-235 and Pu-239 to maintain criticality and during the ensuing core life that U-238 breeds into Pu-239/240/241 etc... Plus if you have loaded other fission wastes in there the neutron flux will "burn" them away. Yes, you are left with shorter half-life highly energetic stuff. But it's no worse than what comes out of a core now. And you are reducing the volume and the time it's dangerous by several orders of magnitude. The storage time is on the order of 50 - 100 years.

This technology was out worked completely over thirty years ago. The ONLY reason we aren't doing this is political.

Shoot into Foot!

[virg_mattes]

> 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

Re:El Nino/Nina

[leucadiadude]

You would have about a snowballs chance in hell of raising the temp of the ocean a billionth of a degree. Just think how big the ocean and the earth really is. Now think about how much heat just the Hawaiian hotspot put's into the water.....80,000 tons of more than 10 year old waste (after ten years the heat output is about 1/10000 of the heat when first discharged from the core) is not going to put out enough heat to do anything to the ocean by comparison.

This should have been done years ago

[Animats]

It will be much safer with used fuel rods out of the spent fuel pools at operating reactor sites. This should have been done years ago.

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.

Saving Yourself

[ChaoticCoyote]

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.

Re:Saving Yourself

[MrResistor]

Nuclear waste disaster on the order of Chernobyl is really only possible if all the nuclear waste were concentrated in one place; like, say, Yucca Mtn.

In the current situation we face isolated incidents on the order of Three Mile Island. Certainly undesirable, but nowhere near Chernobyl.

The situation is nowhere near as critical as you seem determined to believe, and there are much better solutions available, and in fact already in use in other countries. Specifically, the French use breeder reactors to burn this type of waste, which produces electric power and results in a reduction of total waste. The waste produced by these breeder plants has a half-life of only 30 years; much less of a storage problem than the 10,000 year half-life of the waste the DOE proposes to store at Yucca Mtn. Personally, I would rather wait another 20 years and spend another $80 billion to develope a real solution than to just dump it all in a storage tank on top of one of the most active faults in the country. What was that about Chernobyl?

And as for the Shoshone, their land wasn't stolen long ago as you seem to believe. It was stolen in 1979 (oddly, about 20 years ago. I wonder if that's just coincidence...) and the US government doctored the paperwork and manipulated the "legal" proceedings to make it look like it was done in 1872 and they were merely paying reparations for a wrong commited long ago.

Re:Saving Yourself

[MrResistor]

What you have at these sites are the equivelents of 13-14 Chernobyl's (in terms of the amount of spent fuel stored).

I don't see how putting all of these eggs in one basket improves the situation. Improving the storage facilities at the present locations seems to me to be a better idea than putting all of this stuff in a single storage facility located in the middle of one of the most geologically active areas of the country.

Breeder reactors are a great idea that we should really use - except that they don't use all of the waste only most what do you do with old contaminated piping, reactor vessels, etc?

Disposal has always been an issue for the nuclear power industry and always will be. I object to the idea that taxpayers should be the ones footing the bill, which is certainly the case with Yucca Mtn. It seems to me, though, that as long as a material is radioactive there is potential for continued power generation, and I think that should be investigated and developed. That would certainly include the weapons-grade plutonium produced by the breeder reactors. I know there is a great deal of political opposition to them, but what else are we going to do with this stuff? Stuff it down a hole and pretend it doesn't exist?

Re:Just a question ...

[leucadiadude]

"You don't have to put in a Uranium blanket to breed new (plutonium) fuel AFAIK"

True. But you do if you want to use existing core designs and save money.

Whoopee!

[MrResistor]

Now we can truck radioactive waste across the country on public roads to one geologically unstable location! And as an added bonus it'll cost taxpayers about $50 billion. Gee, I'm sure glad our Prez has an energy policy!

Is it just me, or is this a monumentally stupid idea?

Re:Whoopee!

[leucadiadude]

And you have a better idea?

Don't give me that crap about "no more nukes"...

What do we do with the 40,000 tons of waste we have RIGHT NOW?

Re:Whoopee!

[MrResistor]

Well, we could leave it where it is, possibly even *gasp* make the producers of that waste build better on-site storage facilities and pay for it themselves. At least that limits the scope of potential disaster to a few Three Mile Islands rather than a Chernobyl.

Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.

Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.

Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.

Even a combination of these would be acceptable.

So yes, I do have a better idea.

Re:Whoopee!

[leucadiadude]

Well, we could leave it where it is, possibly even *gasp* make the producers of that waste build better on-site storage facilities and pay for it themselves. At least that limits the scope of potential disaster to a few Three Mile Islands rather than a Chernobyl.

We (the electric consuming public) have already paid for it's disposal. Saying have the producers pay for it (again) is unrealistic.

Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.

Agree 100%. This was the actual original plan put forward 35 years ago from the AEC. Reprocessing tech was invented here in the US 40 years ago, and has been improved since.

Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.

And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?

Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.

Agree about finding a site based on science. Disagree on the seismic FUD. BTW, the northeastern US has an awesome granite shield. So besides Texas (which I agree with you BTW), I think there are lots of places that would work as well or better than YM.

Re:Whoopee!

[MrResistor]

Saying have the producers pay for it (again) is unrealistic.

The producers (nuclear power industry) haven't paid for it (disposal) at all. They have raked in the profits and relied on the government to take care of the disposal problem using taxpayer money. Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill. I don't think it's unrealistic to ask a private corporation to cover their own costs. Plenty of corporations manage to do that, and the nuclear power industry should be no exception.

And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?

By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.

Disagree on the seismic FUD.

Well over 600 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater within 50 miles of Yucca Mtn in the last 25 years is FUD? How exactly do you define "geologically stable", then?

Re:Whoopee!

[leucadiadude]

Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill.

Exactly backwards.

All nuclear utilities have been required to tack on 0.1 mil per kW/hr for disposal, storage and site remediation costs since the beginning. That is part of the problem. DOE has spent 6.8 billion of the ~20 billion collected through rates and still no repository is ready. No tax money is involved at all.

By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.

Nuclear is by far our least environmentally damaging electric generation technology. And if the original AEC plan had actually been followed, we would be awash in MOX fuel assemblies and the makings of assemblies. No, nuclear is not renewable, but for all practical purposes with spent fuel reprocessing it might as well be.

And your answer still doesn't address what we do with the 40,000 tons of spent fuel we have now.

Also, do you realize that oil constitutes less than 1% of electric production? It's nearly all coal and natural gas now, and has been for years. I wish people would stop referring to it with electricity production. Oil is going to gasoline for SUVs etc... thats about it.

Ok, 2.5M earthquakes are not significant. If you know the geology, you can engineer up front to handle it. And even if there was a 9.0M earthquake, what happens? The tunnel collapses, burying this stuff. The water table is a couple of thousand feet below the repository. Give me a break!

Re:Whoopee!

[MrResistor]

Ok, 2.5M earthquakes are not significant.

That was "magnitude 2.5 or greater". Certainly one can engineer for earthquakes, but no amount of engineering is 100%. Take the earthquake in LA a few years ago. Everything in LA (indeed, all of California) is engineered to be earthquake safe (up to 6.something minimum as I recall, it's been a few years since I worked in construction). However, they were engineered to withstand earthquakes with horizontal movement, which is by far the most common type in CA. That particular one was mostly verticle which is why it caused so much damage. Bridges were literally speared through by their own supports when they were lifted up and then slammed back down on top of them. If you drive through SoCal now, you'll notice that all the overpasses now have more of an arch shape, when they used to have a flat bottom supported by straight pillars.

I wandered a little bit there, but my point is that we don't know enough about geology to relyably engineer for seismic events. They are still incredibly unpredictable. Why not store the stuff somewhere stable like the salt caves in Texas (which have the added bonus of being naturally radiation absorbant)? My arguement is that we shouldn't store this stuff at Yucca Mtn, not that we shouldn't do anything with it at all. Ther are much better alternatives, even if all we're going to do is store the stuff.

Personally, I'd rather see reprocessing, but there's a lot of political opposition to building more nuclear plants and I can't say I disagree with that ideologically. But at the same time, if we can reduce the half-life of our waste by orders of magnitude it needs to be persued. The fact is that storage is not a solution, it's merely procrastination. It's like fixing dry rot with a new coat of paint.

And yes, I'm aware that very little electricity is produced by burning oil, but apparently our president isn't, and since the statement was specifically a dig on his energy plan I thought it best to use his own wording.

Re:What about WIPP?

[leucadiadude]

WIPP stands for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

It's designed to allow the DoD and DoE to learn more about disposing of transuranic wastes from US atomic weapons programs, and from military reactor cores, not from commercial power plant waste. It's only a small fraction of the size of the Yucca Mountain facility.

Re:Mass Drivin'

[WolfWithoutAClause]

>Sonic booms occur at mach 1

Nope, sonic booms only occur ABOVE mach1. They occur throughout the transonic flight regime.
As to intersecting the sun- this might be best achieved by firing the gun roughly horizontally, 35 degrees east north east at about mid-day so that it leaves the earth at exactly the earths orbital speed plus earth escape velocity; and gains the earths rotation speed.

10,000 years

[Artagel]

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)

Re:Gee, no one ever thought of that

[PD]

Actually, they WOULD be farther ahead. It can't be any worse than listening to people who think "NUCULAR? I don't want no nucular plants in my backyard. It might blow up and destroy the Earth! We've got to stop all this nucular technology because I'm afeard of radiation making my turnips too large to fit into my icebox." All of the people on this thread who didn't post as an anonymous coward don't seem to have that knee-jerk fear that blocks some people from even considering possible alternatives like breeder reactor fuel recycling.

Re:The internal cavern is going to get hot...400F

[leucadiadude]

A few corrections... (ignoring the many spelling corrections - are you 16 years old or something?)

The original plan put forward by the AEC was for several nuclear chemical processing plants to reprocess spent reactor fuel into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel to be reburned in the (couple of hundred) nuclear power stations. The waste products would end up passing through several power core cycles before finally being removed for burial. At that point they would be hazardous for about fifty (50) years. This process actually makes more fissionable material than it burns.

This technology exists right now. It is not new or unfinished. But because of political concerns rather than scientific/engineering ones, it has been stalled for at leat 25 years. So we are still using the "once through" cycle method.

And the 400F figure is an upper analysis boundary for safety testing. The actual number will be far less, probably less than 150F. Who cares if some rock 1000 feet underground gets heated from 85F to 150F ? It just will not matter.

More Physics

[virg_mattes]

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

Re:More Physics

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No, it's still impossible the delta-v for this is much too large even with a rail gun or coil gun with any current technology.

Re:Don't worry

[leucadiadude]

Tell me about it. Check my profile. I reply to 15 FUD posts here, and before I hit submit on the last one, there are thirty new FUD replies.

Exhausting.

Do these people have medical doctors they trust? Do they trust the engineers who designed their cars? Airplanes? Trains? Do they trust anyone with any kind of engineering? How about if someone came to them and said Linux sucks because (insert FUD here)? Especially if that person was not a programmer or software engineer??

It comes down to this, ignorance breeds fear and distrust.

Plus some people want to make a name for themselves by scaring other more ignorant people.

Just burn the plutonium

[Mike Van Pelt]

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".

Re:Just burn the plutonium

[Mike Van Pelt]

It's not just the "issue" that the anti-nukes want. They figure that if the powerplants and other generators can't dispose of their waste, then they will have to stop operating.

Bingo.

The problem with their approach even in their own terms is that even if all the nuclear power plants were shut down this very moment, waste disposal is still not optional. There's enough existing waste that it is necessary to implement a disposal program for what we've already got.

Re:Don't worry

[MtViewGuy]

I think the anti-nuclear crowd often conveniently forget that Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen because there was no containment structure and also no really decent backups for the radiation moderating system.

Indeed, Three Mile Island was proof that the American safety measures for nuclear powerplants WORKED. The containment structure at TMI did succeed to keeping the radioactive release to a very low level indeed.

Anyway, the nuclear waste will be processed into a form that has a tiny fraction of the original before being stored away. It'll probably have less radiation that many natural rock types anyway.

My Math

[virg_mattes]

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

I Don't Understand...

[virg_mattes]

> 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

Re:I Don't Understand...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It's not impossible in the theoretical sense; but the size of the rocket climbs exponentially with delta-v, so the rocket ends up really, really huge; really heavy and really expensive, even with multistaging.

The required delta-v here is roughly 30 km/s including earth escape. This is 3x bigger than that needed to achieve orbit. That makes the rocket exp(3)=20 times bigger than one needed to reach orbit.

Adding a running start helps quite a bit exp((30-5)/)=12 times bigger than a normal launcher, but its still way too big. Also, if you are launching a rocket 12 times bigger than, say, the Space Shuttle; that's one mother of a rail gun.

Seismic stuff

[leucadiadude]

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.

Re:Seismic stuff

[MrResistor]

A quick google search on "San Onofre" turns up a lot of info on safety at nuclear plants. This article from the Orange County Register, amusing references to the pressure in a car radiator and winter in San Diego aside, does a pretty good job of outlining the reasons why I inherently distrust any info that comes from the nuclear power industry or the NRC. They're always saying everything is perfectly safe, and they're regularly found to be lying and/or not performing the proper tests. Political and economic factors tend to dominate the decisions of these groups more than best practices.

This is really the heart of my disagreement with Yucca Mtn. That the siesmic properties of the site can be engineered around is largely irrelevant, I don't trust those responsible to do what they should. The responsible agencies have proven time and again that the economic viabilty and public image of nuclear power are much higher priorities than public safety.

Moving on, though, this page has a lot of information about the Northridge quake, and the cover photo shows exactly the type of damage I'm talking about. The pillar hasn't sustained much (if any) damage, basically serving as a spliting wedge driven through the roadway that formerly rested upon it. Compare that to the photos of pillar damage from the 1971 quake on the transportation page. In all fairness, none of the overpasses that failed had been retrofitted yet.

I agree that what I laid out is an oversimplification of the design criteria, but I also think you seriously overestimate our ability to predict geologic activity. Going back to the Yucca Mtn site, there have been over 600 earthquakes within 50 miles, ranging from 2.5 to 5.6, over the last 25 years. How confidently can you say that there won't be an 8.0 in that area next week? How safe do you feel this site is for storage of nuclear waste?

The 5.6 (1992) did a million dollars in damage to the DOE field office which was studying the site. In 1999 an earthquake derailed a train on one of the tracks that could be used to transport nuclear waste to the site. How safe do you feel now?

Is a single large point of failure safer than 70 smaller ones? I'm not convinced that it is. My understanding is that the security at the current storage locations is poor, and I see that as an arguement that those installations need better security, rather than combining them all into one location that may or may not be more secure. The sad truth is security at many "secured" government sites isn't very good.

I'm not entirely opposed to storage as a temporary solution, but I am certainly opposed to storage at Yucca Mtn. The site itself is simply not stable enough to be suitable, and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites.

Re:Seismic stuff

[leucadiadude]

I guess we are just going to disagree on some issues, and that's fine with me. Discussion and intelligent debate is always good.

" and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites."

I'm afraid I have to agree 100% here. However, I don't lay the blame at DOE's door. I'm sure they would like to have been free to pick the most qualified site from an engineering perspective. However, Congress decided otherwise. Specifically powerful Senators with reelection NIMBY thoughts running around in their heads. What a shame.

One other quick comment, if the connections between the pillars and the undersides of the bridges had been of sufficient strength, the roadbed would have never left contact with the pillar and that punch through damage would have never happend. Believe me or not I guess.

Re:Waste is shipped quite safely

[MrResistor]

The standards listed impress me about as much as the 5mph bumper.

40 inch drop puncture test -- That's the MINIMUM distance a container would drop if it fell off a STATIONARY train. Most tracks are placed on top of embankments which at least double that. Considering that within 20 miles of my home there are 3 (that I know of) railroad bridges where the drop to the SHARP rocks below is at least 50 feet, plus the fact that the train would likely be traveling in excess of 50mph, a 40 inch drop is equivalent to kicking the tires of your car. Unless there is a serious defect, this proves nothing relevant to real world performance.

That pretty much covers the 30 foot drop to a flat surface standard as well

1475F for 30 minutes -- sounds impressive, until you consider that estimated temperatures inside the world trade center exceded 1600F (which, btw, is what caused them to actually come down. With less heat the upper stories would merely have been gutted by fire, with little or no actual structural damage.) What if it's subjected to heat before it's dropped?

50 foot immersion for 8 hours -- how exactly does one recover one of these 25-120 ton casks from under 50 feet of water? How long would it take to get the necessary equipment and trained crews to a remote location, for the divers to prepare their dive plans, etc?

The actual tests listed are much more impressive (and realistic), but no statistics about repeatability are listed. So what if a container can withstand one of these tests, can 30 containers in a row survive? (Note that 30 tests is the minimum number for true statistical significance.)

Another issue is terrorism. This is briefly touched upon in the article you linked, but important details are missing, such as the size of the explosive used. Regarding hijack, 25-40 tons is not unmanagable. A licensed heavy equipment operator can easily rent (or steal) the necessary equipment. In my area heavy equipment yards tend to be located near railroad tracks, probably to facilitate shipping/recieving of equipment, but price/sq.ft is likely also a factor. Security tends to be pretty lax at these yards, generally consisting of a padlocked chainlink fence.

It may come as a surprise to you to find that the people who designed our nuclear infrastructure are neither stupid nor suicidal.

It may come as a surprise to you to find out how hampered these designers are by politics, beaurocratic red-tape, and "financial concerns". That's true of any design project, and quite visible in the design standards listed here.

It may also come as a surprise to you that the NRC is almost completely controlled by companies it's supposed to be regulating.