Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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.
Reasons
- It costs too much (we are talking about thousands of tons here, not a couple of grams)
- It's too dangerious (if the launch fails, oh boy, that's gonna be some firework)
Sticking it in the mountain is probably the cheapest way to go
kawai
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").
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); }
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. ;-)
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
Wow, what a nice step one towards fixing that whole "hated on a global stage" thing.
Right, okey. So, we'll keep all the monentary outlays to ridiculous notions such as the World Court and the United Nations.
It's funny how the US is so 'hated on a global stage' until you need US funding for some earthquake, natural disaster, peacekeeping mission, etc etc... but if you don't want our help, that's fine. Stop asking for drugs. Stop asking for aid. Stop asking for money. I'm tired of subsidizind your asses anyway.
-'fester
This isn't, as you frame it, blatant irresponsibility. According to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, it is the federal government's job to construct a permanent storage site, and to have it operational by the end of 1997.
When the government passes a law binding itself to do something, it may be a little bit naive to assume it will come through on its end of the deal, but I don't think it's too much to ask of Congress to actually build infrastructure their own laws say they will build.
All those pretty lights in Las Vegas? Seems like Nevada shits too
jeeesus, you are just a karma magnet aren't you?
i keep seeing your posts modded up, but you keep attacking this vague group of "anti-nuclear activists" with a strawman -- insinuating that they've "suddenly" changed their stance.
if you used your brain for one second, you'd realize that there is no one group of "anti-nuclear activists" who all think the same and suddenly pulled a 180. There are many groups of people all with their own opinions on the matter. There were activists who think that the government had to handle the disposal of the wastes, activists against a permanent central location in general, activists against Yucca mountain specifically. Not just one big "anti-nuclear" lump. NO ONE is "urging that the people they wanted to handle the waste refuse to do so." You've invented this situation in your mind to make it easier for you to justify your own feelings on the matter. (Besides, even if the "anti-nuclear activists" were inconsistant -- that's NOT an argument FOR yucca mountain at all. It's just juvenile activist-bashing). Think before you write in the future.
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.
You don't have the worlds largest GNP
;).
Out of curiosity who does? I can't find any country that even comes close to the USA's $9.6 Trillion (year 2000 current US$). Japan comes closes with $4.5 Trillion (which is larger than Germany, France and the UK combined). Even the combined total of the European Monetary Union is only $6.6 Trillion.
you're not the leading edge in science or economics any more.
Well I think we have settled the economics side of things so I'll be generous and grant you the scientific leading edge since I'm not exactly sure how to measure that. I'm still not sure who IS on the leading edge though. Europe taken as a whole seems the only likely contender - still it seems that Europe and the US are peers in terms of scientific research and advances rather than one dominating the other.
Except for your oversized bloated miliary you're just an average western industrial nation.
I'll grant you we have a bloated military, in fact we account for about 37% of ALL military spending in the entire world. Then again we can afford it - we only spend about 3% of our GDP on the military which is less than the worldwide average of 3.8%. and significantly less than Russia's 5%. In terms of sheer numbers our military (1,369,000 men under arms) is dwarfed by china (2,310,000) and even Europe's combined total is larger (3,459,000) so despite our massive spending we don't have an inordinately large military just a spectacularly well equipped one
The problem (if it is a problem) is America's hegemony is a fact that flows naturally from the vast size of it's economy. Despite all the resentments and sour grapes this engenders elsewhere in the world we are probably all lucky that it is the USA that weilds such an unbalanced economic (and thus military and cultural) power. There are other nations and other cultures that would not have been so restrained in the use of such dominance. Considered through the lense of history America has been remarkably restrained, if she wanted she has the resources to be an actual empire in FACT not just in her opponents rhetoric. All the weight that is thrown around is only a fraction of what it could be - with military spending only 3% of GDP it could double or even triple without much effort (It was 6% in 1985, at the same time the soviet Union was spending better than 12% of their GDP on the military). Fortunately American culture ISN'T militarised or imperialistic.
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.
mapscience.org Type in your addy and find out how close the waste pass you by.
I get the worldwide average of 2.6%.