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Yucca Mountain Approved for US Nuclear Waste Storage
Cephalien writes "As reported by Reuters (The link is from AT&T Worldnet -- No registration required, etc, etc), looks like congress has pushed this through against Nevada's objections (NIMBY, anyone?). Now all that's left is the licensing from the NRC. I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada." After 20 years in the making and 4 billion in studies construction on the $58b facility can begin. It was this or Cmdrtacos basement.
It's got to go someplace and the Yucca Mountains are as desolate as you can get. A good storage facility will be a huge boon to the energy industry and our computers will continue running unabated.
Good news for all involved.
I have been pwned because my
...you're keeping your waste at home now, instead of dumping it into the third world?
Wow, what a nice step one towards fixing that whole "hated on a global stage" thing.
When will they come out with a better source of energy to power my laptop? Batteries are an old tech.
It's sad that tens of billions of dollars are going to this when there are millions of people who are dying of hunger.
Opponents, including a number of environmental groups, argue Yucca Mountain and shipments of nuclear waste to it would provide an inviting target for terrorists.
Seriously... Let's get realistic. "Let's not build anything big, because it might be a target for terrorists. Let's all live in flat houses that all look alike, and we can each keep a little bit of nuclear waste in our backyards so that it's take FOREVER for the terrorists to build a bomb. That way we can all get cancer together."
Get a life, protest groups. Nuclear waste is nasty stuff, and it'll be around for thousands of years. We can either trust thousands of people in thousands of places to keep it under lock and key, or we can pile all of it under one mountain and know FOR SURE that it'll be safe forever.
Duh.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
> It was this or Cmdrtacos basement.
That'd be CowboyNeal's basement, of course. No?
--
I refuse to use
But this is NUKULEAR waste! Everybody knows that NUKULEAR waste is dangerous for 900000000000000000000 years, so it would be better to just wring hands about it and let the waste remain in temporary storages, rather than bury it deep underground in a desert.
I'll admit that this site is probably about as good as any, but the idea that you have to keep 77000 tons of deadly radioactive material isolated for the next 10000 years just scares me. Civilizations rise and fall in such timescales. Who is going to know it is there, even 1000 years from now? What happens if some geologist of the future unknowingly takes a core sample in just the wrong place, to name just one of many not entirely unlikely scenarios.
For goodness sake, my local council doesn't even know where all its buried services are located under the roads and pavements. Do we really think we can preserve data and ensure political stability for 10000 years?
This has to be the biggest argument against nuclear power. Forget the operational safety aspects. We just can't guarantee the long-term safety of the waste.
I know this is an old debate, and you might consider it a troll, but if we had invested 58 BILLION DOLLARS (falling over backwards here ...) propermy 20 years ago, we might have had an alternative for nuclear power by now. I recently heard a radio interview with a nuke expert who said that, with a bit of luck, they might have an experimental FUSION reactor by 2030. Right now they do have the capabilities of warming deuterium plasma to 150million degrees celcius, which is sufficient to start fusion. Now they have to invest 17billion dollars to build a reactor. Dollars they don't have...
silly, isn't it ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Go to Nevada. Start in a nice big city. Drive 90 miles out. Discover what 'nothing' is all about.
I'm glad I don't live in Nevada.
I would gladly locate the national nuclear waste repository within 1/2 mile of my home if the alternative is to leave it where it is. My home town of Portland, OR is about 30 miles from the Trojan nuclear power plant, a now-defunct power reactor whose pool is being used as its spent-fuel storage facility. The pool is a few hundred yards from the Columbia river. Given that situation, IMHO almost any sensible thing one could do would be an improvement.
It is probably safer to put your genitalia in the plutonuim, but Kobe Tai is definately better to look at. Overall, it is rather a tossup.
-Charlie
why don't they just launch it in outer space. or is the cost too prohibitive, they might, for example dump it to the sun. I don't know, just curious.
National Geographic runs a story in the july issue, part of the story is online with some useful related links.
They decided they couldn't use CmdrTaco's basement, cuz they'd have to move the used-geek storage facility to a less secure site, and it was decided that misuse of used geeks posed a larger threat than the construction of nuclear bombs from nuclear waste.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
"hello dude? I think I spot a of terrorist who is planning to dump extremely dangerous toxic matter which will destroy the civilization of Nevada as we know it. Can you come to do something about it? His name is Bus...."
is it wrong or right to be a NIMBY? You seem to be unsure ... you imply some kind of disapproval with your "Namby anyone" comment and then go on to suggest that you wouldn't want to live there either ... :)
The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!
This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?
This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?
Too abd they didn't sue Taco's basement. I for one would have liked to see the atomic mutant geek kid offspring he and his bride could have produced.
It'd have to be a helluva big car, with some really bad-ass explosives. Six inches of Very Hard Steel, with a lead liner and a thick energy-absorbing outer casing. A simple bomb would just push the thing over. You'd need a shaped charge just to poke a hole in it, and all that would do would be to let some nasty stuff out (which would contaminate a few hundred meters of ground). Collisions? They tested the cask design by running a locomotive into it at 60+ MPH, and all it did was bounce the thing along the track.
Meanwhile, several thousand tons of extremely nasty chemicals of all sorts (from caustics to poisons to explosives) are running down roads and railroad tracks at speeds of up to 100 MPH.
And at this very moment, over two BILLION gallons of a horrible chemical (poisonous, explosive, and carcinogenic) are currently being transported around the US in vehicles, and normal folks are allowed to handle the stuff with little or no formal training (at places they call "gas stations").
Tell me honestly: how drunk are you to post the same thing over and over again at +2? Posting once is more than enough... Finally a use for the "Redundant" moderation.
to run my electric air conditioner to keep me cool from the global warming caused by all the fossle fuel emissions from conventional power plants because of the enviro idiots who won't permit more safe, clean nuclear power plants to be built. There's still way too much irrational fearmongering about nuclear materials, most of it second hand propaganda spread by entertainers w/o a clue looking for some 'cause celeb' to vent about and completely misleading the public. People who are steadfastly opposed to anything associated with nuclear to such a degree that they tremble with fear over getting a completely safe "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging" scan really should do the intelligent world a favor and study the enemy and get over their misconceptions - get a damn geiger counter and /measure/ what the heck your afraid of, get some low level uranium glass or pitchblende samples and play with it, notice the everpresent background radiation that occurs in nature, measure how fast radiation falls off when you get just a few inches away. Read about the history of radioactivity, Mme Curie, prospecting, etc. Otherwise you're just a clueless puppet of an even more ignorant leadership that show your lack of knowledge with every empty-minded protest. Democracy only works with an educated public - that's why people who know what they're doing are so frustrated by an ill informed public who start wearing black skeleton suits and mushroom clouds at the mere movement of a railroad car.
Here you have over 40 thousand people perish in the US 'automobile holocaust' every friggin year and nobody ever protests that - but take an industry with an incredibly safe track record and the mere mention of some activity brings out the placard waving idiots in droves.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/1 1/011235&mode=thread&tid=99
I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada.
Amen to that. And it got me thinking again.
It's funny in a way. All across the world the same thinking is prevalent (I do not accuse the previous poster of thinking like this). "Nuclear power is good and safe and perfect, but don't even think of storing all the waste near where I live!"
It kind of takes the edge of people's strong position for nuclear power. Accepting risks is always easy when it's not yourself taking the risk.
I personally do not oppose nuclear power. It's better than the current alternatives (no pun intended ;-). But there is a way to lessen nuclear waste: save power.
From what I've seen from here across the pond, there doesn't really seem to be a strong discussion in the US whether nuclear power (or any other power for that matter) is good or bad. People just simply consume enormous amounts of electrical power because it's there in the socket and just waiting to be consumed.
At least in Sweden, low-power lamps, TV:s with negligible stand-by power consumption and other similar products sell. Saving energy is something positive, something people want. Consumers can even accept a slight price increase if it means that we save energy. And part of that is that people know there's no way of disposing of nuclear waste.
The US seems to be dominated by a) big power companies that tells people to consume and b) overzealous protest groups that nobody takes seriously. And that's really sad, because the US is such a large country...
Not least was this visible, of course, when the neighbouring global problem with carbondioxide emissions was discussed recently. About every nation except the US (which by itself makes something like 25% of the worlds CO2-emissions if memory serves) accepted taking steps to reduce the emissions. The US had powerful oil companies which saw a potential risk of losing profit, and refused. Of course the public argument was something like "we won't reduce emissions because X won't", where X is your country of choice. Weak argument in the eyes of global climate.
Perhaps we can hope that the same oil companies will be put out of business because of creative bookkeeping. That would be a win for the world. ;-)
I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Cmdrtacos basement.
Good information here:/
Summarized statement of problems:
Groundwater Contamination - A freshwater aquifer lies beneath Yucca Mountain.
Earthquakes - Since 1976, there have been more than 600 seismic events of a magnitude greater than 2.5 within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain.
Transportation - Whether the waste is transported by truck or rail, it will be carried in transportation casks. These casks have never been fully tested. The most recent analysis indicates that this deadly cargo would pass through 44 states and the District of Columbia en route to Yucca Mountain.
Even if Yucca Mountain proceeds, it will be 60 to 100 years before rising spent fuel inventories at reactor sites are substantially depleted. As long there are reactors operating, there will continue to be spent fuel stored above-ground all across America.
By the time Yucca Mountain is filled to its design capacity in the year 2046, there will be at least as much spent nuclear fuel stored at reactors across the country as there is inside the mountain, even if no new plants are built.
Yucca Mountain will contribute nothing to the our nuclear waste problem, but will only compound that problem as new plants are built.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
This guy found the link! In addition to the Salon article, it also has a link to the government report (summary-complete pdf which is also well worth reading.
Don't for a minute think the politians are voting for what's best for this country. They are only voting for the selfish goals of their respective states. If there's nuclear waste in Texas, you can bet the politians there will vote yes to get it out of their backyard.
They don't care about the consequences of having just one concentrated area of HUGE nuclear waste, a potential world-ending pile of fuel that can be set off by a huge earthquake or some terrible accident. They just want it out of their state god dammit!
eTrade SUCKS
The problem is the waste, radioactive material that will be active for hundreds or thousands of years, where do you leave the waste? Nobody wants it in their backyard and how do we safely transport it and savely store it until it is no longer harmful?
In my opinion this is why we need to look for alternative sources of power, so eventually we will no longer have to use nuclear power. The best thing to do is stop using it now, so the amount of waste will not grow anymore, simple math: when we stop using nuclear power in 50 years from now, we will have at least twice the amount of waste we have now(nucelar power is around for about 50 years). But stopping to use nuclear power now is impossible and imho it will still be around for the next 50 years.
The solution? Keep the powerplants we have until their designed lifetime is up, and keep looking for alternatives, nuclear fusion might be one, but I don't think that will happen this century or ever (because we won't need it anymore->read on). For alternative powersources I'm putting my money on the fuel cell, the cleanest form works on hydrogen but that still has some storage problems. Running the fuel cell on natural gas(GM already has one of 7kW that can be installed at your home) is easier (natural gas is already available in many homes) and a bit saver. However, eventually we need to run the fuel cells on hydrogen only, it is widely available(water) and the "waste" is pure and clean water. In the meantime we need to create a way to safely store and distribute hydrogen, this certainly can be done in the next 50 years or so...
Oh, and by the way: the efficiency of the average fuel cell is already at 40% and can still increasing.
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
For $58 billion, I think it may be feasible to send the waste into the Sun. The Sun takes care of the rest...
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
This discussion prompted me to do some reading on French solutions to the problem, given that that nation is almost entirely dependent on nuclear power due to a near complete lack of coal, natural gas, oil, and I guess very little hydroelectric.
Unfortunately, contrary to the insistence by the Bush administration that we merely have to follow France's example, they are in much the same pickle as we, both in terms of having a permanent storage location (they don't), and in terms of public perception of permanent storage (the rural folks over there don't like the idea any more than the folks in Nevada).
A May 2001 article from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
And a transcript from a 1998 Frontline show.
The conclusion suggested by these articles is that the French have adopted nuclear power not out of a preference for it, but out of a lack of options. And, that rather than having figured out a reliable and acceptable method for dealing with the waste produced, they are now struggling with the consequences of decisions made out of desperation 30 years ago.
You don't have the worlds largest GNP, and you're not the leading edge in science or economics any more. Except for your oversized bloated miliary you're just an average western industrial nation. And one that's heading down the drain at that. So stop acting like you were still the world leaders, and grow up.
We already have a leaking toxic waste facility that is slowly destroying most of the Adirondack Park. Sulfur dioxide levels have built up so high in the atmosphere that natural rainwater is actually acidic and has destroyed hundreds of lakes in the park by making them toxic to the fish and wildlife that depend on them.
Oh wait, we're just pumping that into the atmosphere directly. Never mind. Definitely continue with that. But nuclear, now that's bad news.
</rant>
Seriously, though, consider for a moment if we actually attempted to contain the 13,000,000 [short] tons of sulfur dioxide alone we produce each _year_ (a number semi-intelligently pulled from a DOE report from 1998.) 77,000 tons of solid waste doesn't seem all that difficult to handle by comparison, even considering how much of a pain in the butt it is to handle nukes.
By the way, as for "how do you label something so nobody will open it after you've been dead 1,000 years?" The answer: don't. If we put all this stuff inside a big pyramid, every archaeologist and their brother will be drooling, chisel in hand, to bust in--especially if it's got exotic looking warnings. Stick it halfway through a mountain and put some sticks over the entrance and you might get lucky and nobody will touch it by accident. No icon stands up over time ... when was the last time you saw the skull-and-crossbones warning on a bottle and assumed there was treasure inside?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Is that it may not be 50 years before we can culture some cells from your body and make you a brand new immune system (by causing the cells in the culture to believe they are actually immune system stem cells rather than skin tissue or whatnot and start producing the appropriate cell line contained in their genetics).
Since that's the biggest, most immediate effect of severe radiation poisoning, well, there went that problem.
As for treating the hundreds of tumers that might pop up, there are lots of possible treatments for this as well. Perhaps we can program your new immune system to destroy all tissue in areas designated somehow, essentially attacking tumors without surgery or side effects.
In truth it should hopefully take less than half a century, but we all know how technological progress always seems to occur at half the rate we want it to.
In addition, the vast majority (95%+) of the radioactive isotopes contained in the waste have half lives of decades or less. The stuff cools down a LOT in the first century or so. Besides, coal and other mineral miners bring geiger counters along....assuming the civilization 10,000 years from now has the equipment to dig deep enough to reach the waste, they are going to have the equipment and hopefully the common sense to make sure they haven't hit a uranium deposit.
If they have the boring machines you need to chew through solid rock, then they should be able to recognize and deal with any problems they encounter.
Obviously, if our descendents are somehow dumber than this, or have less technology than we have today...I think they deserve to get irradiated for their stupidity. After all, what's the point in raising the next generation if farther down the line our descendents do something stupid or just get dumber? Seriously people, I don't think we should worry about our descendents accidentally stumbling upon the dump and poisoning themselves. If they are that dumb, they deserve their fate....for not advancing in 5000 years.
First of all, yes, it's nuclear waste, it's dangerous stuff. But, we know a lot more about it than the old days. Keeping the waste at regularly, and calculated, separated intervals there is no real danger. The danger lies in leaving it too close so that individual containers can charge each other up and potentially cause an explosion. That won't be happening in Nevada.
The reality is, we have to put the waste somewhere, and under the desert floor is as good as any (and better than most). Except for the waste, fission is an incredibly safe form of power. Properly disposed of, the waste can be pretty benign. Yucca mountain is a good place for the waste, and were I to live near there, personally, I wouldn't worry about it. But that's me, knowing what I know.
Once we can safely and cheaply launch it into space, we can simply fire it off at the sun where it will do nothing. Until that day, we need a place here to store it.
Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:
So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.
But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:
There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.
So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.
The waste that will be stored in Yucca mountain also will be waste generated in hospitals, manufacturing plants,etc.
look,I know the waste is here and it has to be dealt with. But there is also the waste that is not yet here and that _we_ _are_ _about_ _to_ _produce: The decision to keep going is one that we make continually.And once all the existing waste is "safely" buried in the desert, those in charge are _much_ less likely to feel inclined do do anything about this untenable situation that has, much to our shame, been going on for decades.
And of course, the money that goes into building this should turn up on your electricity bill.
_where_ _else_ -- so much for nuclear energy being
economically attractive.
Now I know we can not switch to running no the power of wind and moonshine by tomorrow. But
saying more could have been done to provide
alternatives, or that that the industry is at all
prepared to show interest in improvement would
be a blatant, hm, euphemism.
the bottomline is that, yes, it will have to be buried sometime. But not before we have taken the responsibility to take a course so that production of nuclear waste will cease in the forseeable future.
They send us their oil and we send them nuclear waste material. Or, if they prefer in 'pre spent' form on the tips of missiles. Seems fair to me.
www.inel.gov
Naval Reactors Facility
The accident report archive. SL-1 info at the bottom of the page in pdf format.
the problem I have with this is the transportation of the waste. Yeah great it's going to be buried for thousands of years. You have to get it there safely first! What with possible train derailments, obvious terrorist opporunities(domestic or otherwise), or who knows what else. I don't know how comfortable I'd be about this stuff being carted through my backyard so to speak on its way to Yucca.
I visited yucca several years ago. Climbed up from the blm side and left some citizan action bumber stickers for all to see. Got chased away by a helicopter and some guys in a jeep.
Anyway, the valley that yucca borders was used for such strange things as a reactor on a stick (really a tower) and nuke rocket testing. The gov's are just bound and determined to make that place a radioactive wasteland.
Let's just hope that ITER (iter.org)goes well, and in Clarington mind you...
... thought you'd just spread it across the countries where you fight wars or somesuch
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
When I was in college I worked a couple of summers as an intern at a nuclear power station.
At the time, I naively bought into the propoganda of "clean energy, more radiation comes from the sun than a nuclear power plant," etc.
Even then, though, I'll never forget the response of one of the managers when someone asked "what about the waste?"
The reply was (paraphrased) "We can store about 20 years of waste here, on-site, but it's the government's job to find a perminent solution."
Unbelievable. An entire industry, creating some of the most toxic materials ever created by man, whose attitude was basically "don't worry, the government will clean up our mess." These are probably the same people who bitch and moan about "big government" and want less regulation, and frankly the entire nuclear storage facility is a huge government subsidy of a dangerous and economically unviable industry, demanded by said industry at the point of a radioactive gun.
As you might have guess, over the years as I've grown older, and wiser, my opinion on nuclear power has changed 180 degrees.
You are right, we have only our "decision makers" to blame for this, but lets not forget that most of those decision makers are not government politicians so much as CEOs of large utility companies that have neglected their own, most basic responsibilities throughout this entire process.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Oh I forgot, SOME people with Mod points use them to try to keep others from reading posts they disagree with. Well attempted Censorship is easier than replying with words.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
But the half life of the fuel is something like 8 DAYS, not 10,000 YEARS.
science is a religion
10K years is a long time. The stuff is emitting particles and radiation which will change the structure, if not the composition of anything containing it. So what's gonna happen when the big one hits and the now brittle storage drums rupture? Can you say "accidental criticality?"
It's the infrastructure of the reactor chamber and everything around it. It gradually becomes radioactive. Still, in a sense you are partly correct. The half life of the materials may be able to be chosen to decay in years, rather than hundreds or thousands of years. But there's going to be constraints, and some long-lived radioactivity is extremely likely IMO.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"All Your Nukulear Waste Are Belong to Somebody Else
Perhaps the glass can encase an aluminum wire lattice to give it strength and prevent shattering.
This would make transportation much safer as well - if the vechicle is in an accident, at most you have a big chunk of radioactive glass sitting there on the ground rather than the material spreading all over the place and leaching to to streams, ect.
Then put in in Yucca Mountain until a safe way to shoot it into the sun is developed. Hopefully by then we will also have fusion reactors also!
By the time the glass degrades the radioactivity would be just about gone.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
In his flatlander books, Niven suggests that humanity began shooting nuclear waste at the moon to get rid of it - only to start mining the waste 100 years later to get all those incredibly valuable transuranic elements.
In any case the idea that someone will trip into this site in 5000 years is kind of lame - IIRC, Yucca is a salt mine, salt is soft and mallable and the tunnels slowly collapse over even a single human lifetime. Thus, one of the advantages of YM is that any intrepid idiots would have to do a lot more work than picking a lock to get at the waste.
Clear, Dark Skies
Ahem. Read the parent. He was talking about radioactivity of the reactor vessel, not the fuel/waste product.
...rockets crash. And then we have a bunch of waste falling into the ocean... or perhaps on our roofs.
At the time of the study, lift technology wasn;t reliable enough for this to be a viable solution - and this is still the case.
Not only that, but it is not even close to being cost effective (which unfortunately is a factor.)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It just proves to me that states don't have a say so anymore. Then again isn't that what the Civil War was fought for...
I think DC would be a good place to store it.
O-Well
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
I see, so if one state doesn't want something but the other 49 gang up on them, then they're gonna get it. What a wonderful system we have.
Interesting too that Nevada doesn't have any commercial reactors, yet they get stuck with the waste. In fact the bulk of the nuclear material and programs within the state are federal.
Yup, the waste has to go somewhere. So in this case someone shits in New Jersey and it ends up in Nevada's back yard.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
They have to transport that stuff. Preferred method is rail which puts it thru my area about 10 miles from me. If they go by truck it's on the PA turnpike. Either way it has to go thru PA. of the two I'd like to see it go by train. Unless they close the turnpike down when they ship it.
It'll be tied up in litigation for years-long enough for terrorists to scope out the transportation routes. Not that I have any better ideas about what to do with the stuff.
Maybe this explains what really happened to the scientists discovering the tomb of Tutanchamon. The tomb might have been used to store the nuclear waste of the Egyptians.
...a calm day.
Nuclear Waste is a myth. There is really no need for a nuclear waste repository. The solution to waste is a "fast breeder" reactor, which converts spent fuel into new fuel. Uranium is converted into plutonium, which is then burned to produce uranium and other lighter elements. The Uranium can be burned in conventional nuclear power plants. The process does produce waste, but waste with a half life of 10's to 100's of years rather than 10000. Why dont we have any breeder reactors? Politics. Because one of the intermediate steps is plutonium, everyone is worried about proliferation. Polititans worry that if we do it, then hey, north korea will look at it and say "You guys are making plutonium, so can we". Heres a clue, North Korea will do it wether the US does or not, same with all the other rogue nations out there. The only thing youre preventing is a solution to the waste problem.
But the half life of the fuel is something like 8 DAYS, not 10,000 YEARS.
Which makes it about 500,000 times as radioactive.
Remember that long half-life radioactives are long-half life because they aren't really very radioactive.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Frankly, complain to your internet provider -- I'm not getting these issues, nor are many others. You're having transitory service outages which is causing the form to expire.
And there are people to contact - the first thing I would suggest is clicking on the "bugs" link in the upper left (if you haven't rearranged your page).
Wouldn't a modern breeder reactor (of which we have none thanks to the goddamn hippies) produce about 10% the waste of the older plants? I think I saw that on an episode of the Simpsons once...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nuclear waste, even high level nuclear waste like used fuel assemblies CANNOT be made into a fission weapon. Spent fuel is maybe 1 or 2 percent U-235. Bomb grade material is >95% U-235.
but I am sure glad they are getting it out of my state.
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
The a-bombs used on Japan were airbursts, which generate little fallout compared to ground-bursts (mostly parts of the weapon itself, most or all of which is vaporized depending on the yield). Nuclear waste is worse for three reasons:
1. There's a heck of a lot more of it.
2. It tends to be composed of unusually long-lived isotopes. The fissionable stuff used in weapons has a much shorter half-life (though by-products can still be pretty nasty). The stuff we take from reactors is not as radioactive but is much longer-lived.
3. The particular isotopes is nuclear waste tend to be high in stuff like strontium-90, which the body mistakes for potassium (not a good thing).
Remember, the Chernobyl explosion was several orders of magnitude worse (in terms of contamination, obviously not in terms of the blast itself) than the Hiroshima-Nagasaki weapons. Fortunately, Yucca seems to be less risky than most spots -- but if someone managed to blow it up (don't ask how) it would create a terrible catastrophe.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I will accept that Yucca Mountain is better than what we have now - waste stored in smaller bits in thousands of insecure and not stable places. That said, why not get rid of the problem permanently? Shooting into space is way too expensive, but why not dump the waste into the planet's core, whence it originally came? Seal the stuff in ceramic (that is, make a ceramic with the waste embedded, then put that into a damage-resistent cask, etc), then ship it to a subduction zone and drop it in. In a small (geologically) amount of time, the casks get drawn under the earth, and melted into component parts in the mantle. Then they are no more dangerous really than natural radioactive substances in the ground.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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Fusion emits free neutrons that alter materials about the reactor. These tend to be lighter materials than fission byproducts. Lighter radiactive elements tend to have shorter half lives, but are also more readily absorbed into the biological cycle.
Fusion and other alternative energy claims are like the early days of fission- "free power". EVERY energy source has pollution potential, especially when they are scaled up to the amounts society uses. Society could cut energy use by 90% without much pain. Tooo many 3,000 square foot houses and SUVs.
In 10,000 years either humans will be gone or we will have shot all the stuff being stored in that mountain into space probably into the sun. If we are all gone what does it matter. Think of this as temporary storage. It's almost like cryogenics. Let's just stick it somewhere till we can cheaply get rid of it forever. And as for terrorists i'd be more worried about biological weapons then them hijacking a train and some how creating a dirty bomb from those overly proctective rail cars. I mean where would they go with it!.. they are on tracks!.. by the time they had it ready they will of been bombed by the air force since the containers wouldn't even dent if you dropped a bomb on them!
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They're not the rent-a-cops at the mall.
.38s loaded with wadcutters, about half the guys carry MP5s (the guys at the gate have them set to 3round, apparently Real Men don't use safties), and they have four M16s in the gate booth. and that's just what they let you see - and we aren't even a weapons lab, there's zip that terrorists would be interesting in stealing from here. if you've seen this month's national geographic, you've probably seen the DOE guard with the plutionium locker at rocky flats - i expect nothing less (M16, body armor, cold steely glare) from the gurads at Yucca .
damn straight - at my old college, the "guards" carry pepper spray and sticks...at the lab, the police all carry
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
This /. article said Earth will be dead by 2050. Don't you think this is just going to speed up the death of Earth? Damn congress... I don't know about them, but this 21 year old had planned on living for another 50 years.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Vermont lobbyist groups were putting out radio ads advocating this, citing that Nevada is the place for nuclear waste to be stored, and not Vermont. Seems like it worked, but it had a lot of Vermonters really worried for a while.
Nevada is already home to one of the worlds most toxic and hazardous dumps: Area 51. The only public record that even mentions the existance of this top secret government facility is from a lawsuit where workers at Area 51 sued because the
y were forced to burn toxic waste without adequate protection. Don't believe it? Here's a post from CNN.
At least this time the public is being told up front that toxic waste is being stored in their backyard. Or maybe some things are best left unknown?
Don't become a slaver by the way. Way bad karma.
The only valid argument that I've ever heard (and I don't know how much research has gone into it) is the potential for earthquakes. While I was living in Las Vegas (1998-2000) there was an earthquake about halfway between us and LA, I believe it was around 4 or 5 at the epicenter. The fault was supposed to be inactive. If I'm not mistaken one of the advantages of the Yucca Mountain site was it's relative stability, so even this argument is a moot point if the governments geologists and designers did their homework and studied the fault lines in the area, and properly designed the facility to withstand a significant earthquake.
There is a summary of the article at their web site.
/. about server uptime. Some people were saying that extremely high uptime is not worth it, but others pointed out that the nature of the application matters. One astute reader mentioned a pacemaker as an example - while not really comparable to a computer server, it shows an application where a device must work 100% of the time or someone DIES. Nuclear power is much more complicated than a pacemaker, and I think only a fool would guarantee 100% uptime - or "safety" in this case. So something will eventually go wrong, just as it would with any other complicated power system. It seems to me, however, that a nuclear mistake is likely to cause a lot more trouble than a mistake with any other technology. Even if a coal plant blew up catastrophically, the danger is over when the fire goes out. Even if all the wind turbines fell over on top of people picnicking under them, it wouldn't be the ongoing liability a release of radioactive matter into the atmosphere a Chernobyl-like incident (or worse) would cause.
:-)
I have the mag and the article makes for sobering reading. It's written by a former marine who is certainly no tree-hugging hippie, but he admits he was disturbed by much of what he found in his series of interviews and investigations across the country. In short: there's a shitload of bad stuff out there and there's more being produced every day.
Before reading this article I felt like the poster who ranted about activists making mountains out of molehills and ignoring the many advantages of nuclear power. But afterwards I wasn't so sure. Sure, a lot of the crap out there now is due to mismanagement, ignorance and lack of foresight (all alarmingly detailed in the NG article). But even if it was perfectly managed all the time, are the risks still too high? This question reminds me of an earlier discussion on
Perhaps I'm talking out my not-very-scientific arse, and the potential failure consequences aren't that high. However, it's not like we don't have alternatives. Sure, they need money to be developed. But how much money are we really spending on nuclear? We are told Yucca will cost 58 billion to build, but what of the ongoing costs of transportation and security at the reactors and military facilities all over the country that Yucca will continue to get new stuff from? I suspect that would buy a lot of wind/solar/fusion/hydrogen/fart power research.
As for Yucca Mountain itself, the basic principle seems sound. The waste we have is here, we can't get rid of it, so it might as well be stored in one single facility with the best technology and security available. Of course, it must be transported there, but this a risk we'll just have to take to get it safely (whatever that means) stored. Of course, if we keep using nuclear power, this is a risk we must continue to take every day.
Note: I live in Australia, so I use the we pronoun above to mean humanity in general, rather than the American populace
Yucca Mountain is not a thoroughly safe site. There is both more water and more seismic activity than was originally thought many years and tens of billions of dollars ago. It's the bureaucracy of the DoE, much like the bureaucracy of its predecessor, the AEC, that causes bad scientific and technological choices to continue until people get sick and die.
Furthermore, the purpose of the rush to vote is so that (a) the process of building Yucca can start - this will take years, given all the lawsuits that will pile up, and (b) the fact that Yucca is being "built" can be used to answer one of the biggest objections to additional nuke power plants - that there is nowhere safe to put their waste.
The truth of the matter is that there will still be nowhere safe to put the waste, especially of new plants. Yucca's capacity will not be enough to handle the existing private and government waste sitting in buildings all over the country. So they will need another site. Tell CmdrTaco to keep his basement available for the next 30 to 50 years.
Another point I've seen here. 10,000 is not even the low end of the required isolation period. The DoE recommendation to Bush used 10,000 years because (a) even 1,000 years is impossible to contemplate from an engineering perspective, and (b) Our President can't count that high. The actual required isolation period for the heavy radionuclides is more like 40,000 to 100,000 years. Heck, I don't even know if they had lawyers 100,000 years ago. Oh wait, they did have lawyers and politicians then. The hookers came later.
So, my dad has been acting as an anti-yucca mountain activist, meaning i got all the dope.
Here's what I've learned:
It would cost a THIRD the cost of the yucca mountain plan to build bunkers on site in which to put the stuff. This keeps it within highly controlled centers. With guns to protect the stuff.
They will be shipping for thirty years, all across America. I live 2 miles away from a highway it'll be passing down. You can find out how close you will be at:
www.mapscience.com
Apparently this stuff is so radioactive that exposure for two minutes is a lethal dose.
It will be shipped all across the country, even across states that have no nuclear power, in trucks that would be utterly demolished by a rocket propelled grenade. Which would spread heavy metals across a several-mile area.
In case anyone doesn't know what heavy metal do to the body... they kill. Inhalation of a hundeth of a gram is good to get cystic fibrosis. Much more than that and you die. Rather painfully and quickly.
I'm from Oklahoma. Five years ago the Murrah Building was bombed. After September, how can anyone actually support the idea of transporting deadly radioactive waste all across America for the next thirty years?
Oh, and the best part -- when its all over, the amount of waste at each current dump site would have been reduced by about 10%.
Pardon any grammatical or spelling mistakes, I am not used to being awake so early.
Chris Nichols
This will prevent Osama from hiding in the mountains for some decades.
All work and no play makes me a dull boy
It's time for Nevada to assert its rights as a sovereign state and tell the Federal government to go to Hell. Nowhere in the Constitution is the Federal government given authority to demand a state accept ANY thing (be it postal mail, electricity, Cheese Doodles, or nuclear waste) from another state. And before you Federalists out there pipe up with "but what about the Regulation of Interstate Commerce clause?" stop and think -- it's not commerce if one party is deprived of the option of saying "no" to the deal. No different that if I dumped my garbage in your front yard against your objections and then threw you a five dollar bill as "payment" and called it commerce.
If Nevada wants it fine, but if not, the other states must accept that as a final answer. Failing that, the Nevada government should call the National guard and give them orders to use whatever means necessary to stop these shipments.
I don't understand why we need a mountain, Why not just build a "Core Waste Dump"? That usually took care of all my pollution needs and freed me up to making death stars with the super happy fun beam that made planets into asteroids.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
yes, it was political...there were supposed to be three sites studied in the 1970s Nuclear Waster Policy Act... Texas and WA state were the other two. They were eliminated on pure political considerations, ignoring whether they would be better on a scientific basis. Nevada had the least political pull and a large amount of desert and got the short straw. But, it is a lot better than letting it pile up in local reactors where there is limited and not so safe storage. The shipping containers are VERY strong and very safe and have been tested in extreme conditions.
just how blinded by their own righteousness some people on slashdot can be. Now, I know that I will be modded down for this, but what the hell: Nuclear reacters are incredibly safe, clean, and efficient. They are the second cheapest form of energy that we can produce (coal is first). Looking simply at the alternatives of coal versus nucelar power, we can either release tons and tons of greenhouse gases and other untold poisens into the atmosphe, or we can create a comparativley small amount of waste, and stick it in a 58 billion dollar fortified facility underneath a mountain in the middle of a dessert. There is an INCREDIBLE amount of protection at this facility. It is amazing how some people can claim to be enviromentally concious and still bash nuclear power. Sure, it is not a wonderfully comfortable feeling to have nuclear waste in your back yard, however it is already! By consolidating our nuclear waste into a very well designed facility, we can ensure it will be protected. Or we can simply burn more coal. (and dont try to claim that solar or hydro electric is the wave of the future - as long as there is coal to be burned, they will because it is incredibly cheap)
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 in perspective.
(Various disclaimers: Yes, the Steve Milloy's JunkScience.com site does usually have a politcal agenda. However, that does not, in itself, make their claims any less true. And yes, you should take into account alpha vs. gamma radiation. And for what it's worth, the radiation study was made possible by a grant from Citizens for the Integrity of Science. An opposing viewpoint can be found here.)
-- null
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The current issue of National Geographic has a nice article on nuclear waste. I'd provide the link but for three times in a row, my Win2000 box here at work has bluescreened when I click on the link. Hmph.
Anyhow, I see people getting moderated up for saying that the 10000-year life span of the Yucca mountain facilities was determined by half-life.
Not true!
The 10000-year service life of the Yucca Mountain facilities was decided upon by the fact that there likely won't be a DOE to monitor the site or a government, as we know it, to control it. In a nutshell, "After 10000 years all bets are off" was the decision.
As a rule, a radioactive substance has to go through 10 half-lives to become harmless. The higher the radioactivity an element has the shorter its half-life. The converse is true as well. Plutonium has a half-life of 24000 years. 24000 x 10 = 240000 years before it becomes harmless. Uranium is less radioactive than plutonium (but still incredibly deadly) so it has a much greater half-life.
So really, for plutonium were looking at an additional 230000 years after the facilty might/will fail before its contents are harmless. Longer for the uranium.
Don't fool yourselves into thinking the facilty will be safe after its design life has expired. In fact, the Yucca Mountain facilty is only designed to last for 4.17% of the time period when the plutonium stored there will be deadly.
Too damn bad this isn't one of those.
Who did these numbers, Arthur Andersen?
Nuclear power is the first time we went into an energy source with a good idea of exactly how dangerous. The same statement very probably can't be said of any other powersource.
How about that clean hydropower. Then look at what it does to fisheries, and the fact that the salmon no longer take their nutrient-laden bodies back up the river, where the bears catch many and fertilize the forests. Look at the silting problems in dams, and the lack of that necessary silt below the dam.
How about fossil fuels and global warming?
At this point, I don't even know about trusting either solar or wind power. Extensive use of solar power may well change the albedo of the Earth, or something odd like that, affecting the climate. Extensive use of wind power could conceivably affect climate, in addition to killing large numbers of birds.
I'd prefer we learn to live more efficiently and control our breeding.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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If a terrorist had a TOW missile, he could do a lot more damage than firing it into a nuclear waste dump into a big metal container holding old inconel valve parts or worst case a few gallons of "contaminated" water (the quotes are there because some stuff labelled "nuclear waste" because it's been in a nuclear plant is cleaner and less radioactive than the water in the river running by your house. And that's the truth - been there, done that. Ever not how radioactive radon can build up in houses - that has nothing to do with nuclear power plants.)
On the Yucca Mountain issue, I wonder whether other Western sites would be worth considering, like the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming... nothing there, nobody lives there, and Interstate 80 is near enough to get the waste transported there. Maybe the geology's wrong, or Wyoming's politicians are too strong for it to happen ;)
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Surely for that ammount of money we can invent a mass driver that can shoot all this nuclear waste somewhere save, like outer space or the sun. Just contain it in something cheap like aluminium or a magnetic material if you want to use some sort of magnetic mass driver, but also to stop radiating the atmosphere. For the rest just jam it into the sun or somewhere else people don't care (excluding Redmond.)...
Hate me!
I know it would probably be expensive, but... Is there not some practical way to load the waste into mass-produced, unmanned, disposable rockets, and just shoot the whole affair straight into the sun? It would certainly solve both storage and environmental concerns.
Like I said: Expensive, yes. But how expensive is it going to be to safeguard stuff that's going to be emitting lethal levels of radiation for at least the next 10,000 years?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Having done a great deal of research on this topic I think it's important to understand the dynamics of what is being proposed.
t .pdf
The current plan requires nearly 96,000 truck shipments of hazardous waste, crossing 43 states in transit. The potential radiation exposure from mearly sitting in traffic next to one of these trucks is estimated at 40 mrem, the equivalent of smoking 16 packs of cigs simultanously. When you look at the drivers exposure the number goes way up.
This is not to say that we shouldn't undertake this project. However knowing the risks going in certainly helps.
If you are looking for some good reading check out the nevada impact report.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/impactrepor
Matt
--too bad, it sits smack dab over the largest aquifer in the southwest. No biggee, just it's a desert and it's where the bulk of the water comes from there. The government's (lets call the electrical monopolies the government as well, there really isn't much difference anymore) track record on hazardous waste is dismal, check hanford or savannah or oak ridge for some clueskis.
It also amuses me when the rush limbeau crowd disses solar as being "tax payer subsidised" when there's a tax break for some poor homeowner someplace, when nuke power has been developed, subsidised and maintained as a corporate/governmental/fascist cartel monopoly with billyuns and billyuns and billyuns of dollars for over half a century now. But, that don't count.
Nuke waste needs to be stored in the folks backyards who use it, then maybe we'd get better technology. Nuke power is old, dirty nasty tech, developed for weapons, slighly adapted for mass electrical distribution. It creates severely juicy terrorist targets, targets for nations with ICBM capability (imagine what would happen if a running nuke plant got hit with a nuke bomb), has gone to enrich a few private companies. Centralised monopolies are never good, centralised electrical distribution is a notion who's time has passed in this terrorism age. Smart people have redundant servers, they don't have one big server that if it goes down cripples or stops their website. Same deal with electric, even the distribution network we have isn't all that robust, they SAY it's robust, but watch what happens if a lot of plants go down or get taken out, poof, all of a sudden millions of people outta juice, and a lot of the juice is needed for critical applications.
I wouldn't shut down the nukes or coal plants, let them run out their service as designed, but to me the sanest thing to do now is to put a moratorium on mass electrical production installs using nukes or fossil fuels and do mass millions of individual plants all over to feed into the grid and for use on-site. Solar, wind, methane gas, small scale hydro, etc, and whatever other new tech might show up if there was a smidgen of interest in anything but tax payer subsidies for these energy giant companies. That and MASSIVE nationwide retrofitting and buildingcodes for a SANE amount of insulation in buildings. R-18 was OK in gramps day, it's stupid beyond belief now. Try R-55 for a better insulation standard. The bulk of the buildings in the US are severe energy hogs, bigtime, no arguing, it's just just reality. Insulation is the least-sexy and best "energy" dollar spent right now. But, no one wants to do it, and still millions of new homes going up with 3 inch thick walls that leak heat. it's lamer, but banks keep loaning money on them. Why, no idea, but there ya go. Current insulation norms if it was plumbing we'd still have two-holers in everyone's back yards, it's that archaic. If it was cars they'd be getting 6-7mpg and need a tune up every 2 thousand miles. If it was computers we wouldn't even be to the 286 stage yet. If it was airplanes we'd still have open biplanes.
p.s. I run on solar, seems to work just fine. Efficiency? Certainly puts out more electric than the latest wrestling show or doom video gore release. Puts out more juice than that new bassboat. Puts out more than that new 2,000$ big screen Tv and home loud noise system. Asphalt shingles or PV panels, which put out more juice as your wasted space "roof"? And funny, I don't seem to need tax payer funded security to guard my panels from terrorist attack either.
Staring at my monitor and computer running on solar, got some fans running, refrigerator staying cold, and etc. We use these things called "batteries" to store it up so it "works" at night. Solar might not be the end all be-all, but if there was 1/10th the amount of R&D put into this and similar tech as has been spent on nukes-well, who knows what we might have now?
I was watching a bit of the senate discussions on this issue on CSPAN2 yesterday. Apparently, there will still be a lot of waste at nuclear plants around the country, because spent fuel rods must be kept in water to cool for five years after being removed from the reactor. Moving these still-hot rods before cooling, which contain about 97% of the original radioactivity, would be a Bad Idea(tm).
Additionally, with the many routes of transport throughout the country for getting the material to Yucca Mountain, many major cities are at risk of potential accidents, and with such a large number of shipments, the possibility of an accident has also increased.
(Not that I worry about that too much. I live within a mile of the intersection of two major interstate highways.)
Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen
Does anyone seen the irony that it is named "Yucca mountain?
Another important point to consider is where the waste goes by. I live in Utah, and it affects us inmensly, because the waste might come through utah to be deposited in Nevada. Other states need to consider that waste might be going through their back yards.
First of all, Nevada (my state) is storing the nuclear waste for everyone else (which we don't produce). Just because NV is a desert and doesn't have as much population as another state shouldn't give other states the right to make NV their trash bin. Second of all, I don't care how secure yucca mountain is when the main problem is getting the waste to yucca mountain in the first place. It doesn't take a genius to realize "security" isn't just based on the potential for waste to leak while in yucca mountain.
Granted, the safe long-term disposal of nuclear wastes IS a serious problem, which I personally don't think is solved by this action (though I *do* think it's an improvement to have one long-term site rather than hundreds of short-term ones). However, it is also worth considering that conventional fuels produce toxics that NEVER go away. A careful analysis of what energy sources to use should take that into account and choose the least harmful option (conservation, anyone?). A nuclear physicist of my acquaintance has an interesting viewpoint:
1. I can EASILY detect radioactives at harmful levels with a radiation counter; there are chemical poisons I CANNOT detect that are lethal in microgram quantities. Those worry me LOTS more.
2. Radioisotopes decay, but arsenic is forever.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Folks, it's simple. The stuff has to go somewhere, it has to go soon, and the best place at the moment is Yucca. Something a lot of people are forgetting is the fact that just because it goes to Yucca does not mean it has to stay at Yucca.
C'mon. We're a race of intelligent, efficient, innovative people. You can't honestly look me in the eye and say that within 10,000 years...no, within 100...within 10 YEARS we won't have a better idea of how to handle this.
How old is nuke power? 50 years? (I'm guessing) Have we not gone from being complete and utter morons about it (can you say sticks of uranium in a pocket to ward off disease?) to doing some very intelligent things with it?
I, for one, have complete confidence in our ability to revisit this issue, research and design new solutions and approaches to the problems of nuclear waste, and to come up with better solutions and maybe even uses for the stuff.
Nevada, quit whining like a chastised toddler. Be honoured; the research that has gone into finding the best place to put this stuff has probably benefitted you in tremendous ways...would that all our states' geography get such a thorough examination. Suck it up, it won't likely be there forever anyway.
Blog,Twitter
In addition to the blindness shown by regulators in approving a dangerous Yucca Mountain site, another issue is at stake: the United States doesn't legally pown Nevada:
Stealing Nevada
No conspiracy theories, just good old-fashion adherence to what is supposed to be the law of the land.
And for those who don't care about the long-standing problems of Indians: Where do you think the U.S. government learned how to steal people's rights? If you want to defend your rights, defend those of others.
All about me
The EPA says that the containers only have to last 10,000 years, but the peak radiation danger is in 400,000 years. That's fucked up! That means that this stuff only has to be contained for less than 1/10 of the time that it's dangerous (It'll be dangerous for perhaps 1,000,000 years. Granted, it needs to go somewhere, but with time frames like that, we should put it in outer space or something.
I'm not sure if they handle nuclear, (I think they do) but they handle mustard gas, biological weapons etc for sure.
8 78 68f18148ca623_1.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/em/020509/47bad0ee6b55c27c
IMO?
Opinion has nothing to do with it. Hard science has the answers, and the answer is: BZZZT! Wrong! There is no "relatively" long-lived waste from Fusion.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
To quote the original poster: "I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada."
You make it sound like Yucca Mountain is a bad thing...
Most people in the state actually want the depository here. They recognize that the wastelands of this state are the best place for nuclear leftovers. And they also recognize that this project will be one of the largest public works programs in history and will bring BILLIONS of dollars into the state's economy.
The only people that don't want the depository here are the stupid politicians. They say they object because they care about the safety and welfare of the people, but that's bullshit. They really are only interested their 15 minutes of fame on a national stage!
Or where ever Evil is present?
This
I hear a lot of people saying that they're glad they don't live in Nevada. Why? What's the difference? If something goes wrong with the storage, wouldn't it affect a lot more than just Nevada? I mean, if there was a leak, wouldn't the entire western half of the US be in danger? And please don't tell me it's all foolproof, because nothing is. Any time someone says that it reminds me of a discussion my class had in 6th grade with some nuclear waste disposal expert:
Expert: So, since nuclear waste is so dangerous, we are planning to seal it up into containers and drop them to the bottom of the ocean.
Student 1: What about the fishes?
Expert: Don't be stupid, the containers are sealed, there is no way the nuclear waste could get out.
Student 2: What if the container breaks?
Expert: It can't break.
Student 2: But what if it does?
Expert: It can't.
Student 2: But, what I mean to say it, what if it does break?
Expert: But, you see child, it simply can't break. It's a foolproof system.
Uh huh...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Don't know that I agree, at least by "nature's perspective." I don't disagree in the slightest that nuclear waste is bad, but it's also "point contamination" and affects limited localities. Even considering leaching the area is still comparatively limited. Even if it is radioactive, part of nature's perspective is more like tens of thousands to millions of years. That's enough time for decay, and in the meantime there will be mutations and evolution-fodder, conceivably a good thing. It's only on puny human time scales that it's really a problem, and presumably we should be able to handle it over our own time scales. Part of the objection was, "What happens in a thousand years?"
For comparative damage, look at the Pueblo Indians. According to an NPR report I heard several years ago, they lived in a lush forested area. They overcut the timber and without the trees shading/transpiring, etc, the water table dropped and the area turned into a desert. It's still a desert a good part of a thousand years later, and doesn't show signs of becoming lush again any time soon.
In the long term (Nature's time) I'd be far more worried about the biological impoverishment now being caused by global warming and other human activities. Genetic diversity is Nature's toolbox for recovering from catastrophies, and that's where we're doing the greatest damage.
Perhaps we should do nature a favor and put out radioactive caches to increase the mutation rates and improve diversity. (tongue slightly in cheek, here)
Did you know that canola oil (2nd best to olive oil) is "genetically engineered"? Prior to WWII, it contained a few harmful substances, and was used for lubricaton. After WWII they began bombarding seeds with radioactivity and sifting through what popped up. Eventually they came up with a breed that produced edible oil that's also relatively non-unhealthy. Enhanced diversity in action.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Aren't we already transporing the radioactive fuel TO the various nuclear power plants?
This certainly stinks for the residents. Regardless of how remote an area might be, who knows what the landscape will look like 5,000 years from now. How will we tell people what they are digging up? Why don't we send it into the Sun?
In the country where I live (Sweden) a safety timespan of a mere 10000 years simply wouldn't work, due to the political climate around here. So, our authorities set the goal to several hundred thousand years. Why? Because simply leaving all that dangerous stuff for later generations to deal with is not very nice. Or at least that is what lots of European voters believe.6 4669826924/howdispose.pdf)
(see more: http://www.ski.se/dynamaster/file_archive/010822/
"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand..." - James Randi
...unlike the half lives of radionucleides, there is no limit to how long lead, arsenic, asbestos etc. are toxic.
i'm not fond of vegas, but i'm not a yucca mountain supporter either. unfortunately, our government chose a state with 4 electoral votes to be the dump site. there's nothing we can do but hope that the "terrorists" don't target nuclear waste transports. now that we've gotten that out of the way - who needs a vacation? the rooms are cheap here...
This has to be the biggest argument against nuclear power. Forget the operational safety aspects. We just can't guarantee the long-term safety of the waste.
The alternative is fossil fuels, and we can guarantee that fossil fuels are not safe on even shorter time scales. Global warming is already happening. It's not a hypothetical thing like nuclear waste leakage 10,000 years from now. If we keep on releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it's very likely that Holland and Bangladesh will be underwater. It's very likely that agriculture will be disrupted enough to cause billions of people to die. It's very likely that tropical diseases will start occurring at the temperate latitudes, where the population has no resistance. All of these things are high-probability events that we should expect to start happening relatively soon because of fossil fuels.
Find free books.
Transportation is a concern, but even if somebody blows up a container (which is hard to do), it would contaminate a small area. Remember, high-level waste is mostly heavy metals that are alpha emitters. You have to eat or breathe the stuff, and it settles to the ground.
Bear in mind that there have been above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada without much effect on the people of the state. Yucca Mountain is far less of a hazard.
I'd rather live near Yucca Mountain than near a coal-fired power plant. I've lived near a coal-fired power plant. Before bag houses and scrubbers. Blech.
I think it's hilarious to see people freak out because of the 10,000 year design life 'need' of Yucca. As if things today are going to be exactly the same 10,000 years hence. You know, in just 100 years they may decide to store the waste on a Moonbase. Or in a thousand years we may all live in a ring around the planet or Mars. In far less time, probably 50 years we will come to our senses, put our ignorant fears of all things atmoic to rest, and just 'burn' the waste for the great nuclear fuel that it is and have NO more by products.
I would like to point out that the radiation dose from going to the beach w/o sunscreen or simply from the cosmic radiation you get on an airplane trip is going to pour you with far more radiation than something emitting so slowly that it has a 10,000 year half life - most of which is alpha particles (read Helium nuclei) which can be shielded by your clothes. In other words, if you want to be safe from radiation, stand around a few tons of alpha emitters in Nevada; but DON'T go to the beach. Luckily, there are no beaches in Nevada, so at least the governor doesn't have to worry about *that*.
What's ironic is all the paranoia surrounded with the safe storage of nuclear waste, when there are far worse things affecting the earth as a whole. The paranoiacs in this thread seem to have overlooked the problem of environmental destruction and overpopulation, which is a far worse issue than a few thousand (or hundred thousand--who cares) humans dying. Perhaps we should consider the issue of wiping out most of the life on the entire planet?
The waste that will go to Yucca Mountain is right now sitting in open ponds next to reactors all around the country.
You're glad you don't live in Nevada? You probably live a very short distance from one of those ponds.
Nevada is naturally radioactive. Yucca Mountain's radioactivity will be lower than background. Less than sunshine.
Transporting the waste will be a non-issue as well. The containers are massively overdesigned.
Mod the original article -1, Troll.
--Blair
duff writes-----
The government claims that the area is a seismic (sp?) dead zone. Yet there was an earthquake at Yucca mountain about a month ago and a major fault line about 300 miles away.
-----
If you think 300 miles is to close, how about 30ft? The Diablo Cyn. Plant in central CA is on an active falt. Because of this the sight was never licensed for long term storage. At the moment casts of spent fuel are sitting out in the salt air less then a quarter mile from the most pristeen coast in the lower 48.
In my (not so) humble opinion, 300 mi from a fault and in the middle of no where is a far sight better then 30ft from a fault 900 yards from the ocean.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
NIMBY shortsightedness? New Hampshire and probably even Vermont (think of all the cows in Vermont too!) have a higher population density than Nevada on average, no to mention the fact that you would have to deal with the relatively large population of Massachusetts that would feel uncomfortably close to such a disposal facility.
Having lived with my father who was in the nuclear business for well over 40 years, I got do do lots of projects on how to dispose of and handle waste. He gave me the most convincing evidence that I have ever heard to say that Yucca mountain is in fact quite safe.
Back in the early days of atomic bomb testing, after above ground explosions were ruled illegal, they had to find some areas of ground to bury them in. And, surprise, guess where over 500 tests were done? That's right, Yucca Mountain range. If the mountains are good enough to contain all those active blasts, they are certainly good enough to hold a few barrels. Look here to see a history of some of the tests there
The point has also been made already, but it's worth saying again. There is no perfect solution - but there has to be A solution, else the temporary sites used at power plants now will just continue to leak.
Nuclear power is, by far, the cleanest realistic way to make power, and so we need to find a way to make it work. Some will argue wind, water, etc. are better. But to those, I suggest you take an economic theory class and a power system distribution class as I have before you profess those ideas too much. They work great in some locations, for some needs, but on the whole, they just can't cut it.
Check this out... Kinda interesting ya?
The URL will tell you how close the nuclear waste will pass from your house. Something like one in five people will have nuclear waste within five miles of their home...
http://www.mapscience.com/
"Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund."
-- F. J. Raymond
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Yucca Mountain has been presented, both in Congress and by many posters here, as a solution to the problems of nuclear waste. Putting all of our nuclear waste in one place makes sense, both in terms of safety and security. Right?
Unfortunately, that isn't what's going to happen. Nuclear waste currently has to cool for five years after it is produced. So all the current sites will always have a backlog of fresh waste sitting around.
Second, Yucca Mountain can't even come close to handling one year's production. I believe it is intended to handle 2000 tons per year; unfortunately, the current reactors produce 3000 tons per year. So it can't even keep up with current production, let alone cut into the stockpiles.
This vote is the worst of both worlds. We've added one more site to protect and manage, and thousands of convoys to guard.
Okay, hang on. Folks have been working on two fusion designs for many years, at the expense of billions of dollars already. Fusion is not nearly as easy as fission (convenional nuclear power) though, which is why it is taking so long to develop. The conditions that must be present for a sustainable fusion reaction to take place are extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
One major design calls for gigantic magnets the size of a large house to help hold the plasma in place. Another calls for a massive laser to help things along (football field sized). Not quite the simple designs of putting some uranium together and watch the water heat up.
The gist of this we might be able to get a viable plant, but the likelihood that it will be a better solution (read: bang-for-buck) than a conventional plant is not promising.
See, there was originally a plan to bury the waste in southern New Jersey. But if that were to have gone through, then they would have had the waste to the south and NYC to the north.
That was just too cruel to contemplate, so the plan was scrapped.
How many of you actually have a college degree in Nuclear Engineering? I know I do. Just wondering - some of the things I've read here are just plain wrong.
...Don't do much to stop waste from seeping into the groundwater - Which is probably a bigger concern.
Okay, first off, Yucca is the best alternative we have, period. The government is *gasp* meeting it's own law, if late, a law sponsored and supported by the Anti-nuclear movement in the first place. The government of AZ, including most of the people now trying to stop Yucca from opening, were all to pleased and helpful when the US Governement announced the construction project.
The AN movement has managed to engineer themselves into a corner, IMHO... they got the place built and now are using FUD and Scare tactics of the day (terrorism) to stop it. Has this been their agenda all along? Probably, only it will most likely backfire if people look past the word nuclear and at the meat of the story.
I worked for several years at Clinton Nuclear Powerstation. I am very familiar with the security of the DOE and the standards set for these plants. I am also familiar with the onsite storage of waste materials as well as the nucleological standards.
1) Folks, first off there is now chance of some hill folk terrorist walking off with materials in transport. The majority of the tonnage to be shipped is low level waste that would not be disasterous if released in an accident or packed around a bomb to be scattered in the explosion... We are talking many millions of tons of bags, cotton gloves, etc... all with little or no real radioactivity with the exception of a random single particle that set off a detector... often times the materials in question have less radiation than background in the Rockies or in a pack of smokes.
2) The containers are built to be unbreachable in disaster circumstances. Six to ten inch steel (case hardened at the ends), a ceramic then lead liner, as well as a crushable material for impact absorption. It would be easier to breach a WWII crusier's hull than these shipment containers folks. An RPG won't do it. A small plane will not do it. These things can take a combined total of 120+ MPH in impact energy without breach or failure. They weigh many tons so they can't walk off either. Simply put, they are secure, as secure as our manufacturing and technology can make them.
3) Terrorists - You disillusioned people who think the terrorists are real commando killing soldiers are sadly mistaken. Some have recieved training, including how to make low and high order explosive devices. Quite a few have basic infantry weapon training, a few tactics for urban combat. Alot of terrs have open field combat training, but of a gurilla and irregular nature. Intell service training (CIA for example) focused on reputation, image making, scare and commando tactics, and intel gathering/reporting.
IRL, most terrs couldn't shoot there way out of a fight, lack the technical knowledge or means to steal or break these containers, and are in general too easily identified (at least now with heightened security) to gather in significant numbers to no only overcome a DOE point team but also the DOE STAR response team should they attack.
It would take a coordinated, large group with explosive specialists, combat infantrymen, advanced communications, and heavy weapons to even consider tackling one of these trains (and trucks) carrying waste to Yucca.
Their best result would be a small breach of the container and a local spill that at most would only put a few hundred at risk for a very short time as DOE would be able to clean up and contain within an hour. They would die as a result, and yes, get some air time with the media, but the results would not be spectacular at all.
One more thing... every try to hit a moving, and secretly routed (at least in terms of timetable and location) train moving at 45 - 60MPH with a passenger jet (as one idiotic poster commented)... not possible, and given the design of the containers, not likely to result in a breach anyway.
4)DOE guards and STAR teams are highly trained, highly motivated, and almost exclusively made up of former 'commando' US soldiers from SEAL, Ranger, Force Recong, Green Berets, and Air Commando/Para Rescue. They are good shooters, mostly with college degrees, and know what they are doing. They would be a tough force for a large regular military unit to take on, let alone a bunch of rag head terrs. STAR teams can be onsite anywhere in the US with 20 shooters in 30 minutes... thats fast, leaving little time for a terr cell to actually manage to beat a DOE guard team and set up a breaching charge(s) of focused or shaped charge explosives that will do any good.
Yucca is our best chance to clean up the mess the liberals created after 3Mile Island. If you can think of a better system or place, fire away. Alaska is out due to the distances involved for getting it there, no other country should be involved, and much of the rockies is very unstable rock. Where to kids? I don't think I want it hanging around at the NucPlants or other radiological facilties until the concrete temporary storage units fail... no thanks.
Energy Amplifier
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I live in Ireland and in the evening news about 2 weeks ago they did a story about this and one of the major objections was that the mountain has streems running through it. Now what their storing down there won't be safe for ten thousand years, there is no way to predict what will happen to the area within that timespan. Will water seep in and croad the containers? No? what about a thousand years from now, can you say that they still will be safe? and those mountains are changing over time, who can say what will happen to them and the stuff that they are holding? what if the waste got into the watertable? I don't feel that those questions habve been answered with certinty. It just seems that because we have had anylitical science for about the last 400 years, and it has done alot for us (me science guy, ugg!), it jsut seem like complete arrogence to say that we will know exactly what will happen to this stuff (taking into account error calculations and guessing at uncertinty....). We need to take a step back and think about this for a moment, is this the kind of christmas (or whatever) present we want to leave for our children. All american readers, think about this and let that decide how you vote in november!
This is not a test, it is just a distraction.
(Full title: Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia Report SAND92-1382 - UC-721)
It serves to remind me that people may quote statistics in an attempt to support their positions, but in the end, they're just statistics.
The report as a whole is interesting, I suggest you read it - but remember that the authors forgot the cardinal rule of 'scientific' study: never interject your opinions into research. Even if it doesn't color your results, it will give the appearance of bias.
How about cutting the radioactive waste with the mining tailings and putting back where they found the Uranium/Plutonium ore in the first place.
I believe that the majority of people in the United States has an extremely skewed perception of Las Vegas. Most people (I think) have the idea, based on film and television portrayals that The Strip is Las Vegas. I think the public would benefit from a more in-depth understanding of the community of Las Vegas--a city of 1.5 million where people are born, go to school, go to work, grow up, raise families, and live their lives. There is much more to this Metropolitan Area than Show Girls and free cocktails.
In my life, I have seen LV grow exponentially...I have watched the home my mom grew up in deteriorate in the shadows of downtown gaming properties. My family has 8 mm film of "mushroom clouds" taken by my grandfather sitting on the roof of his home as the US government conducted nuclear tests that were promised to be perfectly safe. My grandpa died from cancer at the age of 72.
I have never deluded myself into thinking that we would stop Yucca Mt. from being jammed down our throats. 5 Electoral votes just don't have enough horse-power.
For anybody here who has tossed out glib comments along to lines of "oh well, its just ugly desert anyway", I suggest you think twice, or once for that matter before dismissing the gravity of this decision. And, a decision had to be, and was made. Now, I must decide if my wife and I are to stay in a place my family has called home for nearly 3/4 of a century, or to move where my children won't be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.
Now, I ask you this: Why should I have to leave my home because other places are producing waste products that are dangerous?
--
"I'm don't know exactly what an AS/400 is, but I'm pretty certain I wouldn't want one up my ass" --Lou
1) It's had 2 earthquakes in the last year.
2) It has water running through the caverns.
3) It's by a dormant volcano.
It's not a 10K year stable site. There are much better sites in Nevada.
Now as for the 90% energy cut without pain. Ignorance is not strength. Most electric usage is industrial. Try cutting it off and see how fast the entire economy falls on it's ass, and you go hungry! SUV's use NO electricity, execpt in their production. The Japanese are showing us how to reduce that by building vehicles that do not die in five years. All the 3,000 square foot houses in the country don't consume that much more electricity than so many greenhouse condos in the sky. They also produce a much nicer micro climate than the blasted steel, glass and concrete inner city that is the alternative. Paris is well built, Manhatan and the cities on the coast of Yemen Manhatan resembles are not. American suburbs are not so bad, though most need more unified road planning.
There is NO reason to cut back on cheaply produced Nuclear power, and every reason to make more of it. Air conditioning, refidgerators, modern medicine and laundry equipment are all tremendous quality of life enhancers. Nuclear does it without emmisions that are changing the whole planet's heat balance with the sun and stars. We need MORE not LESS. Only those who want to gain power over their neighbors would create an artificial scarcity. The only use for such power is further abuse. Get lost. You will not degrade my standard of living. I will make such improvements available to others.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This is one of the great PR victories for companies/public relations people. Framing people caring about their own community as VILLIANS. In this age of complete apathy, we should be happy that some people care about their backyard and want to make their section of the world not suck.
Kinda silly to see "NIMBY anyone" and then see "glad I don't live in Nevada" in the next sentence. "Doublethink anyone?"
Tell me more. I was thinking in terms of cardiovascular health. I know peanut oil is an oil of choice for high temperatures, but is there more to it than that? What are the properties of grapeseed oil?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Hazardous waste shipper certified in the Military and Civillian world, two years working at Clinton Nuclear Power Station, as well as a plethora of college BS level physics classes?
My comment is above, about FUD and AN Lies, have a read... if you are in the industry, you know that my scattered writting comes from experience in shipping the waste and having generated some of the low level stuff that is the biggest portion of the problem (if the not the worst radiologically speaking).
I've sampled some of the responses here and just want to know 'Are you guys for real?' Yucca Mt is located over both earthquake faults AND an aquifer, will not be finished for years, and by the time it _is_ finished it won't be able to hold the additional nuclear waste generated in the years the site is being built. One of the fundamental problems is that most of our existing nuclear reactors are very inefficient, resulting in a low energy generated/lb of waste ratio. Of course the Nuclear Energy Industry has lobbied against any mandatory upgrades to their systems that would reduce the waste since it would obviously eat into their profits. Since security is a concern I am sure there are operating military bases in the Western US that have the right geological profile to provide a stable facility as well as both buffers to population and to threats (the big AFB in western Utah springs to mind - Groom Lake?) I live in California and don't want Yucca Mountain built - I don't have a problem with a single facility (even in CA) to store all of our waste but I want SERIOUS thought put into where it's going rather than the knee jerk reaction that's going on - this stuff is going to be around for 10's of thousands of years, so let's do it RIGHT.
What does the research say on the likelihood of an impact like the 1908 Siberian one? - in the next 1000 years?
Without nuclear power plants, we wouldn't have to worry about the waste. Humans don't need nuclear power to survive (or electricity for that matter). The native americans survived without technology. The Dogons in africa have been living without technology for about 3,600 years.
Estimated percentage of the inhabitants of the contiguous United States who have been exposed to nuclear fallout : 100
Shipments of nuclear waste to be trucked cross-country once Nevada's Yucca Mountain dump opens in 2010 : 96,000
Annual number of "accidents or incidents" that Nevada estimates these trucks will be involved in through 2048 : 54
I am not afraid that the "Evil radiation monsters are going to get me!" I've studied, and I know what's dangerous and what is not. I am afraid of what our government has done in the past, especially when this much money is out. This is potentially a huge problem, and I have a feeling that after they show off a bit, and do the PR thing to alay our fears, they will hand this off to the highest bidder, standards will drop, profits will rise, and so will the potential for accidents. If they don't mess around and just eat the cost, this seems like an ideal place. No one wants to live in the middle of that desert, so it's really not n anyone's backyard. The staff of people to support, maintain, and protect it would have to be around I would imagine, but the place is a desert wasteland already... why not get the stuff out of the dozens of more populated areas where it is now, and use a wasteland for what it is for?
Personally, I like the idea of sitting these next to a subduction zone on the bottom of the ocean. Send it to the chewy, nougat filled, radioactive core of the earth. Does anyone know if this is a viable solution?
I'm sick of people burying their nuclear wastes.
.sig
I say we force them to put it back where they got it from.
-- this is not a
A few years ago, on a tour of the site of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, we were shown an odd building with no windows for the first 12 stories, and then an office-like structure for several stories above. The story was that the Yard had some work to do involving bombs (construction, deconstruction, storage? I can't remember) and there was worry that the public would not believe this could be done safely in downtown Brooklyn. So they built the bomb facility, and then built the administrative offices of the yard directly above, to demonstrate how much faith they had in their safety procedures.
Initially the government criteria for site selection was that the site itself should provide the majority (I think they said 90% but look it up) of the containment with casks providing additional backup. Once it was discovered that the site is actually porous enough to move water 2000 feet deep in 50 years, the DOE changed their 17 year old selection criteria by simply removing the the requirement for the site itself to perform containment.
Second, decaying radioactive materials produce heat. Can anyone say what kind of heat buildup will occur inside the cave with 77,000 tons of material? I don't know the answer, but I assume the effect is not insignificant.
Therefore, if the site itself is not performing effective isolation of the material, and the containers are in an environment with water and eleveated heat levels, how much can we trust the containers not to corrode?
Again, I do not know the answer, but I am made distinctly nervous by the way the DOE keeps lowering the standards to meet the site's flaws. I makes me question whether they are serious about actually solving the containment problem or are just trying to get it built whether or not it causes problems for the next generations.
You're missing something very important: policy makers are not very concerned about the risk of widespread nuclear contamination resulting from an attack on the cars; this is unlikely considering the protection that they will receive. The grave danger is in the public terror that would result from an attack on a nuclear waste-carying car. The media would have a field day -- you can imagine all the major tv news networks broadcasting what-if doomsday scenarios. The DoE knows that terrorists attack us to make us fear first and die second; that's why they always attack symbolic targets. There are many people still alive who lived through a time when fear of radiation or nuclear attacks permeated their experience. The wise ones can tell you that when the first attempted attack on one of those cars happens, the gas masks will be flying off the shelves -- and thats exactly what the terrorists want.
(why gas masks? why did people buy guns for y2k? same reason: hysteria/stupidity.)
"ha! website." -homer simpson, episode 5F21 from snpp.com
I'll see if I can talk with the guy who originally told me about it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Table of Plutonium Isotopes
First of all, Plutonium-240, 241, and 242 are produced in very minute quantities and are not much of a factor in waste storage.
Plutonium-239 has the half-life of 24000 years that you were referring to. However, Pu-239 is the most common fissionable isotope, used for reactor fuel and weapons. It would *never* be shipped to a waste storage site. It is simply too valuable.
Plutonium-238 is the common "waste" isotope, and it only has a half-life of 87 years. Even at 10x that duration, it is far less than the 230000 years that you are using as FUD.
- SEAL
As bad as it is for citizens of Nevada, I feel even worse for the Shoshone, who absolutely don't deserve having our radioactive shit stored in their sacred land. Hey, maybe we should start stashing some waste in Canada. I mean, it's not like the Canucks could do anything to us.
http://www.indiancountry.com/?1022253815
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
not thinking about the costs of shipping and all... but what would happen if we launched all our waste towards the sun?
The idea that the waste must be sequestered for 10,000 years is frankly ridiculous. The sheer idiocy of it is astounding. I predict that within 50 years (or at a minimum of 100 years) that we as a culture/society will have found uses for all the fission byproducts that we currently classify as nuclear waste. Clearly reprocessing, were it not politically infeasible at this point in time, would transform much of the higher level waste into reactor fuel. Note that the level of radioactivity of the various waste components is generally inversely proportional to the half-life (the shorter the half-life, the higher the radioactivity).
One hundred years ago, gasoline (petrol) was considered a waste byproduct of fuel-oil production.
As far as it goes, one can now dive on various wrecks in the bikini's, and they were destroyed by nuclear testing of quite large multi-stage weapons within the last fifty years.
Ever heard of the fact that it's impossible to put all the earth that comes out of a hole back into it? But maybe some of the stuff could be put back where it came from. You just have to be sure all air-shafts etc. from the mine are securely sealed.
(Better still would be not to use nuclear energy, if you want to know why, take a peek at www.alternet.org, if you want to read something more than the Big Boys from the nuclear industry want you to know.)
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
This is all BS, as a fellow Nevadan, I'm appalled at this decision. But, they way it goes, the Screw Nevada law is finally in effect. I don't really have any power to do anything except hope for the best. My theory is that if the Energy Dept. is going to store all there waste here, they need to pay up, and pay up good. New roads, higher education (if I'm correct, NV has low education), more govt. grants/scholarships, etc. We should see something then just getting screwed. I'm mostly concerned about this because I do live in Las Vegas, and it's 75mi's from Yucca Mountain, but I could be wrong.
mapscience.org Type in your addy and find out how close the waste pass you by.
First, they have to build Yucca Mountain. The House Promised Utah officals that if they vote for Yucca, they will not store materials in Utah. As soon as Yucca passed they then announced that they will store Nuclear Material destined for Yucca mountain in the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, about 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. They say this is "Temporary", but I'd be willing to bet they can't store all of the waste at Yucca, and it gets stored at Skull Valley. How nice is that, storing Nuclear waste within 40 miles of over One Million People. There is also a proven track record of poorly and under secured problems with all the nerve gas they have been burning. I would like those who voted for this to move out of their DC area homes and come live where the people they are now killing and destroying their lives live and be the ones hurt by this.
For all the money it sounds like they have spent on nuclear disposal research, they could have installed a large number of solar cells and wind power units that arn't radioactive.
Here are some facts I have gathered.
h tm
3 .htm
The canisters that ship the waste are impact tested and yadda yadda yadda. They have to withstand heat, drops, etc. all sorts of stuff.
Used up nuclear fuel wont go critical. The k effective of all the waste to go in the mountain must be 0.95 or lower. The cores must be designed such that they wont go critical.
Here is more:
The effective multiplication factor (keff) is less than or equal to 0.95 under assumed accident conditions, considering allowance for the bias in the method of calculation and the uncertainty in the experiments used to validate the method of calculation
For all techies, read this:
The science and engineering report
http://www.ymp.gov/documents/ser_b/index.
Here is an FAQ of almost every possible question i could think of that anyone could ask.
http://www.ymp.gov/documents/feis_a/index_v
I hope these words have sparked your intrest to read on.
I would suggest reading these materials.
Sums up all type of accidents. Very short reading.
0 1. htm
http://www.ymp.gov/documents/ser_b/tables/tbl3_
Why are ppl blaming Bush? If Carter would have let us reproccess the stuff.. we wouldnt be in this mess
True.
But so what? Just don't go near the damn reactor structure for the time it takes to "cool down", and as that does not take very long time, it doesn't matter.
10000 years or more _is_ a geologically small amount of time. 1 million years is, geologically, a blip.
The "why not do this" includes:
1) If you think it's hard to haul waste to Nevada by train, try putting it on a (easily sinkable) boat... _after_ hauling it to the port on a train.
2) "Dropping" it in a subduction zone means setting up drilling operations in a geologically active area of deep water (miles deep). This is not cheap nor easy.
Why drilling? The ocean floor is really two layers: ocean crust, made of rock that will subduct; and sediment, made of lots of stuff that won't subduct (not dense enough). While the plate subducts, most of that sediment just piles up (the term is "accretionary wedge"). So if you just drop waste on top of the sediment, guess where it's not going? You have to drill pretty deep and be absolutely sure you've stuffed the waste into ocean crust, not sediment.
Dollar for dollar, building a facility underground in Nevada is probably cheaper than setting up deep water drilling - outside any U. S. border.
1 pound of plutonium released into the atmoshpere will give every man, woman, and child lung cancer.. I could care less, put it 90 miles or 9000 miles away, if it's on the earth, then the risk is pretty much the same. Only good thing for the people closer, is they don't have to suffer as much or as long.
The real solution is to recycle the so called waste. Separate the high activity waste, primarily 50 y half life material, from the significant amounts of Pu, U and other fissionable elements. Stick it back in the reactor and start over. Better yet use breeder reactors that are designed for this. Even some of the high activity waste can be used as power sources in RTGs - hey ma, no moving parts.
Also this 10,000 y number is pretty much a joke. After 500 to 1000 years the annoying fission products will have decayed away leaving a slightly impure material more valuable than gold. And this is probably before the primary containment barriers have been breached! So in a sense it's just long term recycling. The fiasco with Yucca mountain will stand in the annals of history as monument to the manipulation of a willingly ignorant public. If Nevada politics had any sense, and as a local I find that highly improbable, they would demand deed to the 'waste'. Five hundred to a thousand years is beyond consideration for the individual but for a state thats a valuable investment, something that increases in value as the laws of physics clean it. Of course you need someone in position to think beyond the here and now.
As far as H fuel cells, sure H is abundant out in space but so is solar energy. Where do you propose to find large quantities of free Hydrogen on an Oxygen rich planet? It takes just as much energy to free H from water as you get back plus you pay on the entropy. Natural gas, even in fuel cells, still doesn't solve the CO2 problem. Not to mention obtaining and transporting the gas. How many people have died in the last 5 years to gas explosions? Compare that to how many have died in NPP mishaps.
Given that nuclear power is the cheapest power out there even with a significant portion of its costs going to fees for the repository, insurance, overregulation, etc. I don't see nuclear power going away for a long time. Management has finally realized that a safe power plant is a profitable one. Plus the design process has continued. The pebble bed design claims to be melt down proof, have online refueling and non-proliferation friendly. Even when the current reactors reach their end-points expect to see a new reactor built on site, if not sooner.
It would also allow us to launch space missions cheaply as well.
It would also probably cost about as much as the money spent on Yucca mountain already.
I'm sure there are plenty of sutable sites in Mexico, like around the mountains in the Sonora dessert. Use the 58b to build the facility in Mexico, probably at half price, give the difference to Mexico as an incentive. Then just keep paying a "rent" money for every shipment that crosses the border. This way all states are happy and the Mexicans... well... they'll get the money. :)
DISCLAIMER: I'm Mexican myself.
As a resident of New Jersey, all I have to say is ... YAY!!!
(clarification: NJ has a high population density, scarce and expensive open land, and four nuclear powerplants. Nevada has a desert.)
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
What goes around, comes around. DO something about it, or get over it.
All about me
A previous poster had talked about the "elite" ex-military guards who "know what they're doing" who will guard this Yucca Mountain repository from terrorists and other assorted vermin. Several posters have also made reference to the National Geographic article on the subject.
The dead tree version of the article carries a picture of one of the "elite" guards. Besides looking like a bit of a dork, the M16 rifle he's carrying has a red tab protruding from the ejection port. Ex-military people will recognize this as a chamber plug. Yes, these "elite" guards, supposedly the best and brightest that our military has to offer, are guarding scads of weapons-grade plutonium with unloaded guns.
Sure makes me sleep easier.
Utterly stupid.