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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.
Your concerned were discussed in an earlier article. I can't find the /. reference but here is the link to the referenced article. A fun read. Enjoy!
Er... Hiroshima and Nagasaki are currently inhabited, they're not "dangerous" areas...
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.
I Have visited Nagasaki. It's a thriving modern city and the only "ruins" are the walls of an old fortress that were left in place as part of Peace Park a memorial to those who died in the bombing. The Park is 600 meters from ground zero, and is visited by thousands daily with ZERO danger from radiation.
However your post does serve as an excellant example of the mindless fear mongering that that antinuclear people use in place of facts.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
National Geographic runs a story in the july issue, part of the story is online with some useful related links.
http://www.lightparty.com/Light/ForcastForEnergy.h tml
'Wind power ranges from 4 cents to 6 cents per kWh, compared to electricity from coal power at 4.8 cents to 5.5 cents per kWh, gas at 3.5 cents to 4.4 cents per kWh, hydro at 5.1 cents to 11.3 cents per kWh, biomass at 5.8 cents to 11.6 cents per kWh, and nuclear at 11.1 cents to 14.5 cents per kWh. And compared to solar power, wind generation produces twice the energy per dollar invested, according to AWEA. The association predicts a breezy future for the industry: Technology advances will drive the price of wind energy below 3 cents/kWh by 2013 and to 2.5 cents/kWh by 2020.'
wind : 4 to6 cents
nuclear : 11,1 to 14,5 cents
The real irony is Coal burning power plants emit MORE radiation than the Nuke plants! Coal contains traces of uranium. When it's burned the Organic matter is converted into CO2 concetrating the Uranium in the ash. Fly Ash from a Coal fired power plant results in a slight rise in the background radiation. Do a google search for radioavtive ash to check this out.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I don't think the Fed building was designed (for the most part) to account for terroristic truck bombs.
Heck of a lot easier to make a dent resistent cask then building.
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
Excuse me?
/ fasbre.html
m l
Actually half the reason we have as much waste as we do is because of the moratorium on breeder reactors. The U-238 (nuclear waste/depleted Uranium) coming out of traditional Light Water Reactors can be used in Breeder Reactors to generate more power (and reducing the need to store waste materials). This end product of the process, however, is weapons grade Plutonium-239 and some more U-238 (a smaller amount of U-235 is required as an initiator for the reaction).
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene
What alarmists also fail to note is that the resulting Plutonium can be used to fuel yet another form of nuclear reactor. Plutonium Pellet based reactors are not only very efficient, but also one of the safer forms of reactor.
Unfortunately concerns about both weapons grade and reactor grade plutonium (the latter produced in small amounts by standard reactors) being potentially used in nuclear weapons has prevented the widespread construction of breeder reactors and a number of moratoriums for such projects came into being.
Most of the problems occurring in areas such as Iraq caused by depleted uranium dust are related to children ingesting it from untreated drinking water that has become contaminated by UN/NATO forces spent ammunition.
The "military" aspect is also at the root of the public's biggest misconception about plutonium; that the radiation off of plutonium is the "strongest". Plutonium in fact gives off mostly alpha particles which can be stopped by shielding as weak as a piece of normal writing paper or the layer of dead skin cells that covers your body.
Plutonium is however very toxic and radioactively hazardous if ingested or placed on open wounds/etc.
http://www.vnh.org/BUMEDINST6470.10A/Plutonium.ht
Something else that bothers me about everyone screaming bloody murder over the Yucatan and similar storage facilities is this bizzare belief by people that these materials are somehow magical evil concoctions that were given form in a lab. Most people honestly do not understand that uranium is mined from the ground like any other ore. And that the danger posed by nuclear waste is less one of radiation than of toxicity (radioactive damage stems mainly from consumption or absorbtion into the bloodsteam). The concept of shorter half-lifes being more radioactive also seems to elude people.
You are in far far more danger from walking into your house then you are from nuclear storage.
Most people in the US that are getting into a panic over relatively safe nuclear materials being stored in secure facilities many miles away are not even aware of how near they live to a superfund site. Most superfund sites revolve around heavy metals and other exceedingly toxic substances and are far more common than people think.
Nuclear power is (right now) one of the cleanest and safest power sources available. Too many people are stuck in some sort of a terrified cold war stupor and have been failing to do enough research.
And everyone reading this has to go read Zodiac
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Okay, but could I just take a lot of spent fuel, extract just the "pure" U235 and reconstitute it into a big ball of "pure" 95%> U-235?
For what it's worth, that is an INCREDIBLY difficult thing to do. Not impossible, or even implausible, just difficult. It takes some really big equipment - say, the size of an average oil-refinery, and a fair amount of time (the Manhattan project took a couple of years to get enough U-235 to make one bomb). It would certainly be easier now than then. But note that only 10 nations have ever pulled it off. And only one ever did it without outside help.
Besides, if you can do it, what's to stop you from just extracting some pitchblende from the ground and doing the same thing?
If extracting the "good stuff" were a trivial exercise, we would do that rather than store the stuff. After all, the U-235 would be just as useful to us as to a hypothetical terrorist. More really, as we could use it to fuel another reactor.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Do you think whatever container the wastes are put in is going to be subject to the high-energy neutron flux that's constantly bombarding the internals of a working nuclear reactor? That stuff lasts for years under really nasty conditions. The alpha and beta particles emitted from radioactive materials isn't going to hurt much. The gamma's could if somebody sat their ass on a container with lots of "Stay away" signs on it, but I can't say I feel the least bit sorry about someone who does something that stupid.
"Changing the structure, if not the composition" Get real. Do the electrons (beta particles) change the composition and structure of the CRT screens you use as a computer monitor?
As for "accidental criticality", get a fucking clue and stop dramatizing the issue with bullshit. It's more likely two of your brain cells would get together and generate a useful thought.
As for earthquakes, the whole damn earth is subject to those. The most powerful quake on record happend in Missouri, of all places.
Have you ever heard of a place called THREE MILE ISLAND?
I lived downwind during the accident. Number of deaths: 0 Number of injuries: 0
CHERNOBYL?
A bad reactor design that exists in only one place in the US (Hanford), now shut down. No containment vessel, and the accident was the result of utter stupidity on the parts of the operators.
Yes, we do need to be an informed public. That does not mean we need to blatantly disregard the very real dangers of nuclear energy.
Fine. What's your solution to the need for power?
Yeah, nukes aren't 100% safe. Nothing is.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
Modern windmills don't eat birds. They turn too slowly (as they're often the size of 747s.) I suggest a quick Google search would enlighten you significantly. As for the real-estate... Have you ever seen the footprint of a windmill? It's insignificant. They can be placed across farmland, or at sea (there's currently a proposal to build a wind-farm in Nantucket Sound, to power that entire area.)
I have a question. Where did the nuclear fuel come from? Can't we just put the nuclear waste back where the nuclear fuel came from? Like, maybe IN THE GROUND?!
Geologists go around claiming that the Earth's core is molten because of all the radioactive materials heating Earth. That stuff was there all this time. In fact, there are places on Earth where natural events have created natural nuclear reactors, which burned for thousands of years.
"If a canister holding either a whole fuel assembly or solidified waste should disintegrate, even soon after its emplacement in a repository, there is good reason to believe that the fission products and TRU nuclides would not diffuse far into the environment. Strong support for this contention is furnished by what has become known as the _Oklo phenomenon_. Oklo is the name of a uranium mine in the African nation of Gabon, where France obtains much of the uranium for her nuclear program. When uranium from this mine was introduced into a French gaseous diffusion plant, it was discovered that the feed uranium was already depleted below the 0.711 w% of ordinary natural uranium. It was as if the uranium had already been used to fuel some unknown reactor."
http://nova.nuc.umr.edu/~ans/oklo.html
Earth is naturally radioactive! You people are acting as if the world never saw radioactivity before science magically produced it. Do you think it would be healthy growing up in a pitchblend pit?
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
You'll recieve higher doses of radiation by standing along the road to protest than you will from the shipment itself, especially if you live at a high elevation. The containment canisters can handle 90 mile-per-hour head-on (ie, 180MPH) collisons with no damage to the internal canisters (which can also take quite a beating).
There is also a possibilty that any waste that leaks from the mountain will contaminate an aquifer which provides water to millions.
Where does the aquifer run? Underneath the site? I wasn't aware of this -- it would be incredibly shortsighted if what you say is true.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I don't know how much radioactive dust passes through a wind generator :-)
The peak radiation danger takes into account the fraction that is projected to escape the repository. OF COURSE this is after the 10000 years -- none is projected to escape before then!
The absolute quantity of radioactivity inside the repository is continuously declining with time; it doesn't increase to a peak at 400,000 years.
The waste doesn't have to be contained until it is presents zero hazard (after all, the U238 in the spent fuel has a halflife of more than 4 BILLION years), it just has to be contained until it has decayed 'enough'. The 10,000 year figure was determined to yield an acceptably low integrated population exposure.
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.
(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.
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
" If the spent fuel is later reprocessed, it is dissolved and separated chemically into uranium, plutonium and high-level waste solutions. About 97% of the spent fuel can be recycled leaving only 3% as high-level waste. The recyclable portion is mostly uranium depleted to less than 1% U-235, with some plutonium, which is most valuable."
Although, I think those ads that have been running the last week are pretty funny. "Casino Barons", yea, they are the ones controlling everything, right.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts