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Better Nuclear Waste Storage Plans than Yucca Mountain
NuclearRampage writes "Technology Review has an in-depth article about A New Vision for Nuclear Waste based on the premise that 'storing nuclear waste underground at Yucca Mountain for 100,000 years is a terrible idea.' The article looks at the current DOE plans for Yucca, its shortcomings and what temporary solutions we have to use while a better permanent plan is formulated."
A Slashdot / The Onion Tagteam Special
>"But here's the twist: with nuclear waste, procrastination may actually pay ... ... technological advances over the next century might yield better long-term storage methods.
Sorry, but this kind of stupidity really irks me. If the Yucca plan is flawed, then we should be working constructively to fix it, not criticizing it and offering no solutions. Certainly not assuming that in a hundred years we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space. The problem is here now, so we've got to face it now, with today's technology. It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us.
I think http://www.technologyreview.com/ will work a little better...
As long as we keep it away from a remote, unwatched island. The Japanese already learned this lesson the hard way.
And for the software industry to celebrate this disaster with a name like "MoZILLA" is insulting.
I don't see this as such a big problem as say having thousands of coal power plants churning out millions of tons of poison into the atmosphere.
Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction? Not impossible. So let it lay there for a while.
You can't handle the truth.
If the waster is radioactive, it is inherently releasing energy. I have never understood why no one has tried to take advantage of this with some kind of "dirty" reactor. Alteast, I have never heard of this. It would obviously not be as efficient as the fision process, but there must be some way to capture that energy and redirect it somehow. Even if you put it in a big bunker and have a thermocouple set up, atleast that is something. Beats tossing it into space.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Any new vision for nuclear waste will have a slightly blue color due to the neutron emissions. If things start looking too much like a print of Saving Pvt Ryan, you're probably standing too close.
Fire it into the sun.
It won't hurt the sun. No, really.
I wonder how my neighbors will feel when they find out nuclear waste from TMI (which I see on my way to and from work every day) will be stored nearby!
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Just sell it to the military and let them spread it in fine oxydized particles around the world.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
That must be the most typo ridden, grammar sucking post I have ever written. Bleh!
France must be on the leading edge of dealing with nuclear waste - what are they doing about it? France gets a very high percentage of electric power from nukes. I for one admire their dedication to being free from dependance on foreign turmoil.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The citicenz of Nevada can put up or shut up. If they want to get rid of Yucca mountain, because giving into irrational hysteria is fun, and a good way to run a government, they can buy it. I think a compounded 20% return on the investment isn't unreasonable, and the states with outstanding nuclear problems can use the money to pay for increased security, vitrification, and reprocessing, setting up the reactors to burn some plutonium, and the construction of thermo-electric generators for suitable leftovers.
the whole combining radioactive material and dirt and heating it into glass thing? http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2004/09/26/nnuke26.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/26 /ixhome.html
Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.
If not now, when?
How about we just ship the nuclear waste to the moon, ala Space:1999?
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
There is a poll in the November issue, results in the December issue. I don't remember the exact results but most people don't have a problem burying thousands of tons of nuclear waste under a mountain.
send the crap into the sun. its the most efficient disposal system we have, and for heaven's sake, its only 93 million miles away.
(yes, i know the main concern out there is that suppose the rocket blows up before it leaves earth during launch? that's one giant dirty bomb dumping its load right into the atlantic...).
And hell, it was the sun's ancestor star that made all that junk in the first place, and deep in the core, our own sun is making more of the junk itself, so it won't notice.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Now, I'm no nuclear physicist...
That out of the way, is there some specific reason we don't start feeding this stuff to breeder reactors? That seems to solve two problems at once: what to do with nuclear waste, and possibly weaning us off our reliance on coal.
If the idea is that we can come up with more permanent solutions if we just wait, then why not use Yucca as the temporary solution?
The article predicts it will take 100 years for us to come up with a permanent storage solution, which is about how long these casks are good for. What if it takes 200 years? Or 300? Will the casks still be good?
Would Yucca? So what if it isn't a 100,000 year solution. If it's still a longer solution than anything else, that makes it the best solution.
Wind generators and Solar pannels..
that say that there is no issue with global warming or those that say garbage isn't that big a deal, how about burying it in their backyards?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You only have to store it for the duration of your office (4-8-whatever years). After that, it becomes Someone Else's Problem.
The Raven
i say we nuke it
American Scientist magazine has an article on "heavy metal" reactors that transform some of the nastiest components of spent fuel into a more acceptable range of isotopes.
Is what are they going to do with all the Nucular waste. That's a much bigger problem than this...
Just drop the stuff in an ocean trench and let it get subducted into the crust. It can come out in 100,000 years as part of a vocanic eruption like most other radioactive gases in the atmosphere.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
SAIC and Blechtel can't really be expected to come up with a decent idea for that amount of money, when their friends are getting billions more for not supplying soldiers in Iraq.
Even Republicans should be complaining about those situations...
Why not just press for reprocessing of spent fuel? All the 250,000 year stuff is from material that can be recovered back into the fuel cycle. If you remove the junk lower down on the periodic table (the real nuclear waste) it only will be dangerous for a few hundred years.
On a side note, has anyone heard of the natural reactor in Oklo? A naturally occurring nuclear reaction there produced all the same waste of a modern reactor and it all stayed in place in de-facto geologic storage.
yucca is ready to accept waste, vitrification is mature. I really don't see why Yucca is still a controversy other than NIMBY and ignorance.
Blaze a trail to the New World
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0411.sht ml
Essentially they break it down and then find method to store it in the future. In other words, they don't have a long long term solution yet.
Of course some people have taken to shipping the stuff to Russia and who knows where they are putting it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is. Theres no point worrying about what will happen in milennia if we screw up the climate in this century since if that happens there might not be anyone around in 102,004 AD to have to worry about nuclear waste!
But it is better than a bunch of casks all over creation. These are only good for 100yrs. Send them to Yucca. If a good idea for using the waste material comes up, we can pull it out of Yucca. This stuff came out of the ground. Rain water is percolating through uranium deposits all of the time. I would rather be down wind of TMI than a coal plant. Put wind mills on top of any building over 10 stories high. That would be a middle finger to the middle east.
One, is storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain really a "terrible" idea? Storing nuclear waste in the middle of a major city would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste in a volcano would be a terrible idea. Dumping nuclear waste in the ocean would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste at Yucca mountain may not be the best idea, or a great idea, it may even be a bad idea, but is it really a "terrible" idea? Or is saying it's a "terrible" idea one of those little pieces of hyperbole designed to subconsiously sway an argument.
Second, after about a thousand years even high-level radioactive waste is only going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Not that 1000 years is a trivial length of time, but is saying we can't protect this material for "100,000 years" really a valid argument, or is it another one of those bits of hyperbole?
But I forgot, this is Slashdot, where we're pro nuclear power, but anti nuclear waste.
I know, -1 troll, but I had to say it.
If Yucca Mountain won't be safe for a million billion years, how about you just use *it* as the "temporary solution" before you come up with a permanent one? Say what you will about the long-term stability of Yucca Mountain, consider the pathetic short-term storage facilites and warehouses where the stuff is being stored now.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
How about letting Indian contractors take care of that? We ship the waste to India and let them take care of it.
Too bad there isn't some way to send it to the core of the earth and let it burn up...
But drilling holes that release hot magma generally isn't a good idea.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
I don't like nuclear power. It is very expensive, creates highly toxic waste in large quantities, and contributes to global warming by releasing large quantities of heat into the environment. But nuclear power is here now and we need to deal with all of the waste that has already been produced or the waste will deal with us. Putting the waste in a large centralized cask farm as suggested by the author of the paper is not a safe solution to the problem for even the short term since there are innumerable ways that the containment could be breached by acts of man, acts of God, or by all sorts of accidental 'uh-ohs'.
No Yucca mountain is not perfect and perhaps its containment will not last for 200,000 years but it is a heck of lot better than anything else that has been dreamed up. No, the waste cannot be made safer by encapsulating it in ceramics, even if that were possible today. No, it wouldn't be a good thing if we extracted all of the plutonium out of the waste since the world is awash in plutonium now and the process of chemically extracting plutonium from waste has created additional massive quantities of highly toxic liquid waste for which the only current storage 'solution' is to put it in large underground tanks.
Say no to building any more cask storage pads. Say yes to Yucca. If you don't want to do Yucca, you should have been out protesting against nuclear power plants 30 years ago. Saying no to Yucca now is like getting rid of your cat's litter box. Not very smart.
It doesn't matter, Yucca is a done deal. There hasn't been any indication the govt is backing off of the Yucca plan, any talk now is just pissing in the wind.
The argument seems to be that Yucca won't keep it contained for 100,000 years, so it is useless. So instead, we should put it someplace that won't contain it more than 100 years.
Why not just stick it in Yucca for 100 years, then instead of sealing the mountain look at the available technology for reprocessing, better storage, or relocating. It is exactly the same plan but using the facility that's already being built! And it seems to me that temporary storage inside a mountain is more secure than temporary storage on the surface.
Nuclear Energy Belongs in the Technology Museum
by Hermann Scheer
(This article originally appeared in DIE ZEIT, 32/2004 http://zeus.zeit.de/text/2004/32/Kernenergie and has been translated from German.)
Nuclear energy is still too expensive and too dangerous. Huge amounts of water are needed in a time of increasing water shortage. Uranium supplies are limited. In Europe $1 trillion was spent on nuclear research while renewable energy fell by the wayside.
The end of the fossil energy age approaches. Its ecological limits draw near as material resources are exhausted. The advocates of nuclear energy see a new day dawning. Even some of its critics have joined the appeal for new nuclear power plants. 442 nuclear reactors are now operating worldwide with a total capacity of 300,000 Megawatts. Two and a half times this number will be added by 2030 and four times as many by 2050, says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the bastion of the global nuclear community.
This pro-nuclear argument relies on twofold inhibition. Amid contrary facts, the economic advantages are praised. The risks are minimized or declared technically surmountable. At the same time, renewable energies are denounced as uneconomical, with their potential marginalized in order to underscore the indispensability of nuclear energy.
Trivializing the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl is part of this strategy. In DIE ZEIT 31/2004, Gerd von Randow wrote that there have been only 40 deaths and 2000 registered cases of thyroid cancer. These figures have been provided by advocacy organizations. Independent studies, such as the report of the Munich Radiation Institute, have identified 70,000 casualties that include desperate suicides and the tens of thousands of long-term victims additionally projected.
Comparing these victims with the victims of coal mining and fossil energy emissions is an element of minimization. However, both the massive nuclear and fossil tragedies necessitate mobilizing renewable energy as the only prospect for lasting, emission-free, benign, and inexpensive supplies.
The deployment of nuclear energy is the result of gigantic mechanisms of subsidization and privilege. Before 1973, OECD governments spent over $150 billion (adjusted to current costs) in researching and developing nuclear energy, and practically nothing for renewable energy. Between 1974 and 1992, $168 billion was spent on nuclear energy and only $22 billion on renewables. The European Union's extravagant nuclear promotion efforts are not even included in this calculation. French statistics are still being kept secret. The total state support amounts to at least a trillion dollars, with mammoth assistance provided to market creation and to incentives for non-OECD countries, above all the former Soviet block.
Only $50 billion has been spent on renewable energy. Since 1957, the IAEA and Euratom have assisted governments in designing nuclear programs. By contrast, no international organizations exist today for renewable energy.
After the middle of the seventies, nuclear energy was largely burnt out, due more to enormously increased costs than to growing public resistance. The limitations on construction have become more severe. Uranium reserves estimated at a maximum 60 years refer to the number of plants currently in operation. With twice the number, the available time periods would inevitably be cut in half. The expansion calculated by the IAEA could not be realized without an immediate transition to the fast breeders for extending the uranium reserves!
The history of the breeder reactors is a history of fiascos. Like the Russian reactor, the British reactor achieved an operating capacity of 15 percent before its shutdown in 1992. The French Super Phoenix (1200 Megawatts) attained 7 percent and cost 10 billion euros. The much smaller Japanese breeder (300 Megawatts) cost 5 billion euros and experiences regular operating problems. Making these reactors fit for operation, if that were to prove possible
It's not that these materials are radioactive, but that these materials are composed of isotopes and elements that are *very* rarely found in nature.
Strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium are not materials that one can regularly dig up in anything greater than trace amounts, but we have manufactured at least several hundred thousand kilograms of each. To suggest putting these low-half-life materials into populated regions or atomizing them for atmospheric delivery is humorous folly at best.
If we can actually revert the materials in question to their originals (without costing us *more* energy than we originally received from fission; a task that, just to be clear, is impossible) before burial, then I'm all for it. In actuality, your naive suggestions merely show a lack of understanding of the fundamental problem, but this lack of understanding is not unique. That very thinking likely led to the hatching of the Yucca mountain plan in the first place.
As we depart the steel age and forge into the composite-ceramic age, we stand a very good chance of improving existing technologies that show promise in solving this problem completely.
Before we decide to package these materials as a dangerous slurry in a mountain about which we intend to forget, we should seriously consider investing in technological advances that have been before us for over a decade.
Like an earlier poster said. Glass it all into big lumps of glass. Now that its stable, put a bunch of thermocouples around them, or sink them in a big vat of water and use a similar method to the way they get geothermal energy. If you do it right, you can have a decent energy source that could probably actually profit over time.
Of course, anything 'dangerous' is likely wanted to be buried and forgotten about than used for the greater good of man.
The only problems I see with this are location, stable design, and makeup of whats being stored/exploited, and sorting it all out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I think its a given that everyone hopes that in a century, we will be able to effectively and safely deal with this material...BUT, what if the US is no longer a nation? What if there is some other cataclysm that sets back humanity a few thousand years? What if this new tech doesn't arrive or simply isn't implemented by future generations? Thats why you have to build this site to last, its just to dangerous to underengineer it.
He seems to be te perfect Democratic Underground victim.
Baby diapers. Band aids. Plastic bags filled with individually-wrapped candy. Cereal. Rental DVD's. Wine bottles.
We are a nation of consumables. Use it, discard it, buy a new one. It's good for Intellectual Property, because it allows you to set the licensing period. It's bad for landfills and three generations down the road who would like to use that land for something, but have to clean it up.
Take a look at (one) of your local landfills. One hundred years from now, that will be a job. Thousands of people will have to work 12 hours shifts, right alongside machines and autonomous robots, so identify and sort styrofoam and glass from aluminium and lead. So it can be broken down by genetically engineered bacteria (we'll figure out bacteria that can deal with one specific substance at a time, long before we find some all-in-one bacteria that can eat everything).
Nuclear waste is no different. Find a way to use it rather than sticking it in glass because the treehuggers won't let you build a new plant, in which to use the waste. It's put into glass so the "terrorists" cannot just simply lift the material out, shove a load of C-1 in there, and make an entire region clicking hot for a decade; I understand this line of reasoning.
I'm saying it time to change that line of reasoning. It's time to start conserving and recycling. The 50's and 60's Saturn-5 moonshot mentality is OVAR.
It is time to start engineering for resuables.
So, can Conservatives stop falsely claiming that opponents of Yucca Mountain just complain and don't have any solutions themselves? This saw is getting tired.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
With privatization of space, we'll only need a few more years to have reliable space transport. After that, we can chuck it into the sun.
The only problem with doing that now is things go POP! too often on the way up. Once we have oritbal space planes as safe as the Jetliner is today, (what, 50 years max???) we'll be rid of our waste. No reason to keep it on the planet.
If that doesn't work out there are plans for space elevators...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I can't believe the US government has missed the obvious solution here! Put the toxic nuclear waste in the drinking water and tell everybody it's good for them! Worked pretty well for flouride in most of North America...
http://www.fluoridealert.org/
Somebody wrote about IFRs that will burn up the waste (earlier /. posting). Sounds like a good way to go to me, after converting to plutonium.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yucca Mountain is a long term project that at one time was most of the DOE dollar.
That means Yucca Mountain got many billions and billions and billions of dollars, all along saying they were going to be Yucca Mountain, spewing forth pseudoscience garbage and raking in money.
They wasted all that money that was supposed to be to implement Yucca Mountain, as that money was frittered and hauled away and basically defrauded from the people who aren't nuclear scientists. Then, when the time came for shipments to start, the corrupt officials balked because Yucca Mountain is a corrupt project, and wasn't done.
Yucca Mountain is a big old, how you say, fraud.
Burning coal releases more dangerous radionucleotides each year than would be actually stored if Yucca Mountain had been run and managed correctly, directly into the air, you are presumably breathing and didn't plan any near term trips to Yucca Mountain.
So, when you hear "Yucca Mountain", you should probably be angered.
There are breeder rectors in the United States, and large scale power generation with new types of fission-powered reactors could be a solution to a large part of the oil demand PROBLEM.
2) Don't you think that firing thousands! of rocekts into space might generate more pollution than the problem
3 Holy cow is that gonna be expensive.
Thee needs to e an earth-bound solution such as vitrification (turning into inert glass) or fire a liner accelerator at it to change it into stuff with a shorter halflife.
..........FULL STOP.
IANASG (Smart Guy) but couldn't we theoretically dig a really really really deep hole into the core of the earth and just dump it in there and fuggit 'bout it? Let the magma take care of that?
Live forever, or die trying.
If people could take a step back and apply some common sense to the problem we would see two glaring things staring us in the face. One is, do we really think that storing this stuff above ground is safer than below ground? I, for one, would prefer to have this stuff below ground where some danged fool can't fly their airplane into it, or better yet easily steal it to make a 'dirty' bomb. At least underground access to it is minimized. So we have to watch the stuff for a long time. That fact doesn't change whether it's above or below ground, so throw that arguement out the window. The second thing is, just as the article states, let's reuse as much of this stuff as we can. We are the only country in the world that has nuclear power plants and doesn't recycle the waste. It's called a breeder reactor and it's as safe as a nuclear reactor is. The problem is that nobody wants to build one because they are afraid of what we did to the people who built the nuclear reactors in the first place. We bankrupted most of them by constantly changing the rules in the middle of the game. Each reactor built in this country faced exploding costs as the government made new laws and regulations and changed existing ones as they were being built and forced the owners to change their plans after the projects were already started. Costs skyrocketed by ten to one hundred times the original estimates. Nobody is going to go down that road again anytime soon unless some promises are made, and kept, by our own government. I can't see any politician winning an election on a platform of freezing nuclear safety laws anytime soon, so throw that one out the window.
Common sense says get the stuff underground and watch it the same as we do above ground. Simple 'patch' to a major problem we have, that continually gets worse over time. The recycling issue has too many politic hurdles to overcome to provide a timely answer. We all now how fast things get done in our government.
(disclaimer: I didnt make this up, but I cant find where I originally saw it)
Spread the nuclear waste over the rainforest and other protected wildlife areas.
1. Solves the nuclear waste problem.
2. Keeps people out of the protected wildlife areas.
Perfect example of "thinking outside the box".
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
Synopsis of the Article
Basically, the article says "why don't we just wait... because the current Yucca Mt. plan isn't necessarily great." I see nothing wrong with this idea. The article goes on to say "Well, if we are going to wait, why not choose a centralized location to store all this nuclear waste that is safe and secure."
I wonder why we need to take care of this now. Continue building Yucca... but perhaps build something near Yucca to hold this waste until we figure out a near perfect solution.
I've seen a lot of people post about the cost of sending up waste into the sun/space, but when we have reusable space crafts why not start sending up portions? http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship13.htm Details the prospect of having a large scale nuclear powered space craft that can easily handle waste issues. The key here is that it would be cheap, and we don't really produce that much nuclear waste to begin with.
To all the posters who say 'To the Moon Alice'
and similar:
Getting the waste out of Earth's gravitational well takes MORE energy than the radioactive materials generated in the first place.
Never mind the dangers of rocket exploding on launch. I know!
How about making it safe for launch by making a huge block of (diluted) glass or cement - and vastly increasing the weight that has to be launched out of Earth's gravity well?
How can an article that spends thousands of words advocating against a safe, central storage facility (Yucca) end with this sentence?
If we don't take action soon, however, casks of waste will stand alone on that bluff above the Hudson River--and in dozens of other places across the country.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I think we should dump it all in Ohio....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
If some cataclysm destroys civilization, our descendants will have far bigger problems than anything this waste could ever possibly do.
Now heat can be related in units of hand-held hair dryers
in bed.
Sun, Mass, 1.99 x 10 30 kg
.0003 % of the Sun's mass is Uranium. The actual amount we will put in is insignificant
Earth, Mass 5.98 x 10 24 kg
Convert the whole earth to Uranium, and dump it into the Sun, you get
Now, let's say we are really scared of something happening.... We can just as easily dump this stuff on Venus. Takes a little more math skills, but is doable.
The real reason we don't: It takes more energy to put this stuff into orbit than we generate from the nucular reaction.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
From the article: ...the pursuit of the perfect solution (assuming deep geologic disposal even could be perfected) has ignored a realistic solution. And when the perfect fails, as now seems likely, we will be left with something no rational person would have chosen: waste sites scattered from coast to coast, in places where reactors used to be, each with its own security force, maintenance crew, and exclusion zone.
For these reasons, the author advocates abandoning the only central storage site we're anywhere near ready to actually use. WTF?!
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
As long as it stays in there for my lifetime I could care less what happens to it after that.
People are sketchy enough about putting a nuclear reactor on a rocket. Try telling them that you want to load up tons of nuclear waste on a rocket that could potentially explode. I'm sure they'll go for it.
No, I'm serious about the scary hills. Except that they're called Menacing Earthworks, and they last longer than the current language, and they're designed to isolate radioactive waste for ten thousand years.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
We've been using temporary solutions for the last 40 years while we wait for a better solution. It's finally time to dump it someone elses backyard once and for all and be done with it!!!!
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
...technological advances over the next century might yield better long-term storage methods.
...the political climate [against refining bomb material] ... might be different in 100 years.
...in 100 years, advances in reprocessing technology might make the economics compelling.
...in 100 years, energy supply and demand might be very different. Reprocessed nuclear fuel might well become a critical part of the energy supply...
...we may be smarter at metallurgy, geology, and geochemistry than we are now.
Space-launch technology could become as reliable as jet airplanes are today, giving us a nearly foolproof way to throw waste into solar orbit.
The mysteries of geochemistry might be ... transparent ... which would mean we could say with confidence what kind of package would keep the waste encased ...
Or there might be easier ways to process the waste.
...transmutation, might become more practical in 100 years.
...alternative storage technologies may need only a few more years of research [e.g.] ceramic packaging.
...mixing waste with ceramics or minerals to form a rocklike material ... that are not prone to react with water. With a few decades' grace time, engineers could build samples ...
Ifs, mights, and maybes are not a proposal. They are a wish upon a star.
*N.I.M.B.Y. - not in my back yard
*B.A.N.A.N.A. - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Why not put the casks inside of Yucca mountain?
:P
It's:
* central
* big
* paid for
* already has big gaping holes in it to put said casks
* nobody will notice as it's already planned
* you can leave it there for 100 years just fine
I mean really combine the two ideas! Or send the stuff to iraq
The Acoustic Stirling, a new engine that has been recently been developed, Acoustic Stirling Press Brief, could take the heat energy that is generated by nuclear waste and convert it into electrical energy. When the waste is doing work for you, it's no longer waste.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Ship it off on a star cruiser to the covenant homeworld. 2 birds with 1 stone...
Sorry, it's been a long rough few days. DAMN YOU HALO!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Sen. Reid (and the rest of the NV Congressionals) aside, there is nothing legally that can really be done about the opening. It will open. When? Not likely in 2010. But, it will open.
That being said the DOE has also reiterated a NAS position that a "deep geologic" repository is needed. Fact is DOE already has one. It's called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). While it is only holding TRansUranic (TRU) wastes, I see no reason it couldn't handle Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF), as well. (In fact, some of the TRU waste has radioactivity levels as high as SNF.)
Alas, the DOE has spent so much money and spent so much time with Yucca, that it is what they have to use. On the bright side, it will be interesting to see if engineered barriers can really work. (At least I'll be dead long before they can make this determination.)
That's why I wanted to stop at Venus. They've already fouled up their atmosphere so much, what's a little nuclear waste going to do?
Yeah, I know I blamed it earlier on our Atlantean fore-fathers, but it turns out that I was inadvertently reading some retroactively edited history from the Republican Venusians who were trying to put the blame elsewhere. I'm sorry for ever believing our Atlantean fore-fathers could be guilty of such a crime!
Of course, on the other hand, if we dump it on the Venusians, we'll actually be given them plenty of fuel that they could reprocess into Plutonium, and make nuclear weapons with! Forget I suggested such a thing!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The entire problem in the US stems from the fact that the government wanted cheap reliable fuel and saw nuclear power as the solution to it. Among the consessions they made to get companies to build these hugely expensive power generators (beyond the obvious subsidy's) is that the government would take the waste that was produced and dispose of it. The nuclear reactor's are now calling the governments bluffs (which it was), causing them to scramble for a solution. Yucca mountain was the ideal location. It is remote, [sarcasm]who lives near a giant mountain in the nevada desert anyways? [\sarcasm]. Everyone knows people live in either Vegas, Reno or Carson City. (yes i do live in nevada as a warning). The problem with this solution is a couple of things. Transport of the nuclear waste. You have large sites of waste from the east coast that would have to travel to the west coast. The idea was to use the rail system to transport this. However, you will go through many many residential and commercial area's along the way. If you were to have a train derail or a vehicle hit and turn over the boxcar holding the waste, you could have a huge spill in a highly populated area. Secondary, there is no way to guarentee that you won't have some of the radiated water from yucca seep into the ground water. This ground water is pumped up by farmers and used to spread on crops. Thus you will have radiated food being fed to your people potentially. Don't you want to eat food that glows at night? Finally, you have earthquake falts in the area. San Adreas being the big one. Its the transition of the pacific plate to the North American plate. From research data, its long overdue for a big earthquake. Something bigger then the 7.0's we get periodically in california. Yes, the fault is some hundreds of miles from the site. But then you get a 7.1 earthquake 60 miles north of Big Bear and you feel a 6.7 in San Diego. So you would have the possibility of a huge quake (not sure how big. I believe it was stated somewhere at least a 8.0 if San Andreas was to go off), traveling this significant distance and shaking up a mountain filled with radioactive waste and fluids, above a aquafer that is believed to stretch well beyond the limited area of nevada (something like to the midwest). Now, those people who say that it doesn't matter store it there...i don't want to see it. Do you want the consequences when something happens along the way, or at the site. That will effect you in some way?
We ship the waste to India and let them take care of it.
It unfortunately IS the current practice.
Link1 Link2 Link3
There is a lot of argument about how the Yucca mountain facility will stand up to 10,000 to 100,000 years, but this is an abstract question. Given current environmental degradation it is not clear that the human race will be around in that time frame. More importantly, nuclear waste is currently stored near urban centers in improvised waste storage arrangements. Even if the waste were transported to Yucca mountain in ordinary trains and trucks, which is absolutely not what is being proposed, the result would still be safer than leaving the radioactive waste where it is in facilities that were not meant to last even a century let alone thousands of years.
Breeder reactors might be another approach for handling waste, but they have the same problem of transporting the waste. Also, breeder reactors have spotty safety records. Breeder reactors in both the United States and France have leaked Sodium, and a reactor accident in Japan killed workers and exposed much higher rates of wear than expected which means safety and cost both have to be reexamined.
References to Chernobyl are pretty far off. That reactor and others like it are only found in the Russian Federation because those are the only people crazy enough to build graphite core reactors. Modern designs such as pebble bed reactors have inherently high safety and few failure modes all of which are relatively benign. Graphite core reactors explode if they are run too hot or too cold. Those graphite core reactors that have been built would be shut down in favor of other means for power generation if that were within reach for those who depend on those plants, but bad economic conditions make replacement nearly impossible at this time.
"High-energy particles can interact with surrounding materials, breaking them down or causing them to give off hydrogen, a gas that can explode or burn."
so this might solve the hydrogen economy. Quick we need to use more fuel to help the economy.
What kind of drivel is this that gets a 5, Insightful?
There's a difference between criticizing a problem, and constructively criticizing a problem. The former is usually done by the uninformed and underinformed, who feel that they are qualified in some way to offer an opinion, without knowing the extent of an issue. The parent's point was that instead of blathering on about a problem, how about taking a minute off from complaining to research the problem, and actually become informed about why some options are "solutions" and others are "opinions".
You want to know how you inspire confidence in a technology? You start getting people educated about the benefits and drawbacks of a technology. Slashdot tends to be populated by those of a more educated bent, usually by those who took their physics and chemistry in college, which tends to give them a more complete view on the whole nuclear process.
Yes, its dangerous, but we've had 20 years time in designing new failsafe reactors. Have we been able to implement any of these designs? Not on a commercial scale, due to politics and public ignorance of the available of better designs. Why do we have a problem with stored waste? Not because we don't have a method to recover the waste (see Breeder reactors), but because the method was outlawed by uninformed politicians.
What the launch-it-to-the-sun philosophy has going for it is that it rightly assumes space transportation will get cheaper and easier in the future. Nuclear power itself could be the key to getting rid of the waste. For example, here is a detailed article about a rocket design using a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor engine that emits no radioactivity itself. [It's a 12-part article. Skip ahead to Part 6 if you just want to know how it works.]
The rocket he describes, based on the Saturn-V form factor, would be able to lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit. For comparison, the Space Shuttle carries 30 tons. Such a rocket, capable of hauling up an entire space hotel in one go, could easily carry along a few hundred pounds of encapsulated nuclear waste as incidental cargo on each trip. Once the stuff is in orbit we could periodically send bulk loads to the sun. There's always the possibility of something falling to Earth, but the author mentions that it would take many such incidents to equal the amount of nuclear material released into the atmosphere in a single 1950s bomb test.
Getting nuclear waste away from the planet is not an insurmountable problem, it's just an engineering project that eventually will be tackled and accomplished. Our storage goal should be merely to keep the stuff secure until then. Dreaming up ground storage schemes meant to last thousands and thousands of years is a big waste of effort.
The Yucca Mt site was originally proposed as a permenent site. But I don't see any particular reason why casks could not be stored there temporarily. The arguments about dry climate and geologically stable structure apply just as well to temporary sites as they do to a permenent site. If we find a better place, the casks could be moved. If we find a better technology, the materials could be removed from the casks and processed using that better technology. We can minimize the badness of the solution by increments, instead of insisting on a perfect solution or nothing.
If we don't find either a better place, or a better technology, then the temporary (secure, dry, and geologically stable) place might turn out to be less temporary than anticipated. But even in that case, it will still be the least-bad of the solutions that are available at that time.
Nuclear waste snuclear waste.
After a few trillion years of decay, the sun swallowing the earth, and the universe coming to and end nobody will care.
*******
Mod this -1 lame +1 funny
Perhaps /. readers could explain the problems with this plan.
uh, a rocket burns hydrogen and oxygen, provided its not using solid fuel.
the number one polutant of that combination is water.
i think we'll live.
the rest of it is the rocket boosters themselves, some of which will burn up, others can be dragged along to the sun for the ride.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
That would be this one. Notice how Nye County, the one where Yucca Mountain is located, went 58-39 for Bush.
Yes, there were many other issues in the election besides Yucca Mountain, but it seems surprising that people who don't want toxic nuclear waste in their backyard would support the candidate that wants to put it there by 19 points.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)
A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.
Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)
Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)
Why not just pass a piece of legilsation called "Clean Waste Act". Say the waste is actually better than before and just plant the stuff in your local landfill or school yard?
--JayR
This sounds like talking about solutions to me. One of his main points is that the Department of Energy is ignoring alternatives at all costs, that's why it seems like there are no other solutions.
His main point is that Yucca is taking so long that by default such a low density staging area is coming soon to a big field near you! Wouldn't it be better to do that all in one place far away from population centers?
The artical stated that the DOE reports on Yucca show it won't work. I went out and read a couple of these reports and the definatly support Yucca.
What is he talking about?
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume
...or on the order of 4 petajoules.
How much energy in burning Libraries of Congress could a phone booth of nuclear waste produce?
If we assume that only the books are burning, and that they weigh a couple of pounds each (say 1 kg), and that they give off the same energy from combustion that an equivalent weight of carbon would (very rough approximation), we can estimate the BLoC energy unit as about:
115M books * 1 kg/book * 390 kJ/mol CO2 / 0.012 mol C/kg
Let's assume the phone booth contains about 2 cubic metres of nuclear waste. Let's assume that it has a density of about 10 g/cm^3, as it's oxides, and that virtually all of this represents the weight of the heavy nuclei. We'll take a value of 10 MeV as the total decay energy of each heavy metal nucleus as it traverses the decay chain down to lead (or some other stable isotope, if it starts off lighter than lead, though most of the fuel rod will still be U238). We'll assume an atomic weight of 250 AMU for each nucleus, to make the math easier. As 1 AMU is approximately equivalent to 1 GeV (i.e. mass of a proton or neutron), we have a rest energy of each nucleus of 250 GeV, meaning 1/25000 of its rest mass is converted to released energy.
The phone booth contains 2 m^3 * 10000 kg/m^3 = 20000 kg of material. This has a rest energy of about 1.8e+21 J, meaning we get about 70 petajoules out if we wait long enough for all of its constituent elements to decay.
So, a phone booth full of nuclear waste could produce about 18 BLoCs worth of energy.
In practice, you'll only get around 1% of this out in any reasonable timeframe (short-lived isotopes, vs. the U238 that you'll have to wait a few billion years for unless you stick it back in a reactor).
Long term solutions are hard ... and this is looong terrrrm. What I see in IT sometimes is short-to-medium term solutions, that are better than bandaids, that need tweaks and patches, and maintenance, and THOSE are what pay the bills. I see the same thing here with the casks. For humans, now, the casks stored NEAR THE ORIGINAL SITE are the "best" solution ... sure, they need maintenance and perhaps enhancements ... but that is the idea. Plus, keep them in our backyard because dammit, that is where we wanted the reactor so we are going to keep the long term costs visible which forces us to keep it safe.
While the time waiting for it to cool off is a legitimate argument, the cost relative to mining uranium ore is not. Why? Because the costs for short-term and long-term storage have not been applied.
If you reduce the volume of waste by half, you have already saved a huge amount of money in the long run. Cooling pools are expensive. Spent fuel caskets are expensive. Homeland security measures for all the spent fuel is expensive. Yucca Mountain is ridiculously expensive. Reprocessing so that the fuel can be used again is cheap by comparison.
Fast neutron burner reactors. We've already got the waste, and burner reactors reduce the volume of waste while simultaneously producing large amounts of power thus reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Why is this even an issue anymore?
Because we're waiting for close to 100,000 square miles of solar cells or millions of new windmills to be built? Please!
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Drop it into a subduction zone. It will then be returned to the magma. By the time it comes up again it should have decayed away
I say we make it more valuable than Gold and Plantium and people will start making large medallions and covering their teeth with it. Pretty soon all the nuclear waste will be used for Bling Bling and we won't have a storage problem anymore!
It seems to me we need to keep this stuff somewhere. Yucca mountain is about the best we can com up with for now, so just do that job as best we can, and plan to put the space elevator http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/2 8/0223259&tid=160&tid=98&tid=1
at the mountain. Then, once we have it established and working safely (~50yrs), we put canisters of this garbage on it and sling them safely into outer space.
Now that's a genius idea.
JNE
My plan is that we just shoot it into the sun. What bad could possibly come from that?
The simple fact remains, that once the costs of mining, and disposal of radioactive materials are accounted for The ONLY WAY that a nuclear power program is economical, is as part of a nuclear weapons program.
Also, while the powerplants can be considered comparitively safe, in operation. The whole chain - mining, production, transport, use, transprt, disposal. is NOT as low risk as initially considered.
Are American's arrogant enough to believe, in all certainty, that their government and economy will be stable for the next century?
Think of what can happen politicaly in 100 years. In the last century the US has faught a war with Japan, which could have resulted in invasion, and come close to a race war in the 1960's. It's economy has colapsed once (1929). And it's government is more unstable now then it has ever been in the last century.
Worldwide, think of the changes. Who would have thought 30 years ago that the USSR would colapse? Who would have thought the fouth reich would last less then 2 decades?
For all the faith many of you have in technological progress, do you have the same faith in political stability? What if some technology rendered centralised goverment impossible?
Believe it or not!
Currently hooked on AMP
Let me start by confessing that I did not read the article. It may be very informative. Nevertheless, what always seems to get missed in discussions of nuclear waste disposal is that fact that the problem is miniscule. The amount of high-level nuclear waste generated is millions of times less than coal waste for the same amount of energy produced. And -- hold on -- the nuclear waste contains less overall radioactivity than the coal waste!
If the U.S. went completely nuclear for all its electric power, the amount of land needed for waste disposal over the next 10,000 years would be about the same as it is now for two weeks worth of coal ash!
Click here for more information.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
As pointed out in the article and by another poster, the problem is that Yucca Mountain was selected because proponents thought that it's a dry place.
It's not. The ground is quite moist, and about a year ago (or two?), they found water leaking through the tunnels. The problem is that water will cause corrosion in the caskets that store the waste (again, as pointed out in the article).
Imagine that thousands of caskets are stored in a chamber, and water leaks through the chamber's ceiling. It intermixes with the caskets and carries away pieces of radioactive material. The water then escapes the facility through leaks in the floor of the chambers. That contaminated water then enters the ground water and eventually spreads through the ecosystem.
It's a disaster waiting to happen. 10,000 people every month are moving into the Las Vegas metropolitan area to live.
The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is.
The climate has changed radically in the last 10,000 years having nothing to do with the activity of man. It will continue to change. There will be new ices ages, there will be warm interglacial periods. It is been that way throughout geological history. The climate transforming effects of fossil fuels is nothing compared to: continental drift, meteorite impacts, volcanic outgasing, planetary dynamical cycles, or Solar variation. Please stop with the sky is falling stuff about CO2 and fossil fuels. 3 Billion years ago when cyanobacteria first began emitting oxygen in large quantities you would have sought to exterminate those poor microbes to avoid climate change! Fossil fuels or no fossil fuels climate change is here. It has always been here. Wide scale variations in climate cannot be avoided, and certainly not controlled, just adapted to.
an ill wind that blows no good
well, actually i just liked the used of the phrase "Ty-D-Bol blue"
Let's all dump it on Microsoft's campus. IT CERTAINLY is a USELESS site
Why, if proximity to radioactivity is so bad, are there people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why are scientists able to open and enter the cavities of some of the first underground nuclear tests with minimal health risks? Why are tourists allowed at the Trinity test site?
The answer is that nuclear detonation doesn't create the huge quantity of heavy, long-lived daughter radionucleides that are created in the "slow, low-temperature stew" of nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors, by their design, won't allow any high-temp combustion because the spent-fuel would be a radioactive slurry making it much harder (if not impossible) to handle and dispose. Obviously, nuclear plants can't be designed to operate by way of nuclear detonation but such detonations do provide a solution to the spent fuel problem.
I propose this solution for the nuclear waste issue: As suggested in the article, reprocess the fuel rods to retrieve the valuable components of the rods (or not, as the economics and politics dictate). Dig a deep hole in the Nevada nuclear test site. Lower the unsalvagable waste to the bottom and line the cavity. Add hazardous biological and chemical waste for good measure. Lower an outdated nuclear weapon or the newest model fresh off the showroom floor or, perhaps, even design a device particularly suited to the task. Have a dramatic countdown. Detonate.
The overpressures and heat will reduce the high-level waste to much lower-level radionucleides. The bio and chemical waste will be an elemental vapor. Your long-term storage problems are solved. Terrorists are a non-issue because the area is virtually unreachable. The issue of ground water contamination is solved because the heat fuses the silicates in the cavity creating a glass enclosure.
Since one of the issues of the Yucca Mountain debate is that they'll be taking a radioactively pristine area and fouling it with some very nasty stuff, those contamination issues are minimized at the Nevada test site because it is already "crapped up". It's unlikely you're going to do much more radiological harm than already exists. Politically, I see a much more agreeable path for this disposal method.
Economically, this disposal method would require only a few of these detonations to eliminate all of America's waste. Ever the entrepreneur, I say go commercial and charge foreign nuclear nations a hefty fee to take care of their nuclear waste in this manner.
Quite frankly, I'm at a loss as to why this idea has never been proposed. But, then, this solution doesn't provide a multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the politicians campaign "donors".
Comments?
for enough treehuggers to die off. I'm hoping Osama sneaks one good one across the Rio Grande, and drops it in Hollywood or New York.
We could do the same thing ourselves if we organized the miltias and sold treehugger hunting licenses at Walmart.
Meet God halfway, and all that. Engineered Natural Selection.
Yes, we have progressed much in the last two centuries, but that does not automatically mean that we progress by the same amount in the next two centuries. There are no facts to support that we can do this, nor can anyone forsee the future.
You know.
You do have a point. It was the "bling-bling" that really drove the idea home.
We have a completely fool-proof method of managing nuclear waste in Ireland. We don't create any to being with!
That's the simple question I have. If it cost that much to take care of it on earth, with so many environmental problems. Why can't we just send it to the SUN? It would certainely take care of it.
Sure, space travel is yet 100% sure, but why not invest in technology that would allow to do that in a safe way?
just an idea?
...except they're not called dirty reactors. They're called fast neutron breeder/burner reactors.
And I wish people would stop mentioning outer space dumping. Why are we going to toss it? Because it's bad for our health and the environment, right? So how good for the environment do you think rockets are? All you need to do is look at a rocket's exhaust pipe to know how good an idea it is.
I know you were joking, but people actually think it's a good option. That needs to stop.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
So there incasing all this nuclear waste in platinum, a precious metal. What happens when 500 years from now a civilization starts harvesting the metal encasing and unearths this crap making everyone sick.
To those claiming that the waste from "nucular" reactors is trivial: Strontium-90 is analogous to calcium, the element essential for bone tissue. When strontium-90 is taken internally, it tends to replace calcium in the bones and accumulates radiation in them. This element cannot be removed from the body...it will cause its damage by emitting beta and gamma radiation. http://uecb.by.ru/eng/belarus/chernobyl2.htm Strontium-90 has a half-life of 29.1 years, meaning that an earthquake near Yucca mountain would render the area entirely unsafe for 140+ years. Unless storage designs have changed in the last year? (weaknesses were due to cost-saving, not technology. 100years won't help with that!) Nuclear waste causes lukemia, bone marrow damage, and cancer. When it gets into our atmosphere (nuclear weapons) it affects quality of life everywhere. There's documentation that links current raised cancer rates with nuclear weapons testing, you want to stop the cancer problem, you'll just have to out-wait the fallout. I'd like to see some definite specifications published on how it will be stored, and I'd like to see some independent international inspectors (UN, anyone?) come in and approve any storage facilities. Because I fear shoddy workmanship more than lack of technical know-how. We already understand radioactive substances well enough, we just don't fear them enough.
Changa hates change.
BUT, what if the US is no longer a nation?
My understanding is that Yucca Mountain requires guarding. If the US is no longer a nation, implying a lack of government, somebody can dig up Yucca Mountain and make all the dirty bombs they want.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"Chernobyl's problem was not the release of radiation into the atmosphere. That is disapated very rapidly by prevailing winds and does not affect the surrounding area significantly (not from a single event such as that). The problem with Chernobyl was that when the top blew chunks of radioactive debris like pieces of the graphite cooling system rained down over the surrounding countryside and got into the ground and the water supply." Which all could have been avoided if they had constructed a containment building like every other nuclear plant on the planet. All other plants have a reactor building usually 7 feet thick steel reinforced concrete. Chernobyl had a stucture not constructed with containment in mind.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Because orbital mechanics mean that it's harder to send stuff into the sun than it is to send it into interstellar space.
;)
We're in no rush. Get it out to the Interplanetary Superhighway and wait. Exit around the sun and fall in.
And send some MacLarium along for good measure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The main problem is, that not only the surrounding area was affected, basically the fallout was blown over half of Europe. Living in Austria, I still can remember those days, we suddenly had radiation peaks in several areas and it was not recommended to go there. Same went for the radiated rain which went down, there were warnings to avoid them. Eating musrooms even was a huge problems several years after the desaster (nobody knows how the situation now is, people simply don't care about it anymore) Well there are not too many statistics about that in our area but given my personal impression on people I know and have seen, the cases of styroid problems definitely have risen since then.... (dunno about cancer over here) Now in fact lets have a look, Austria a country several thousand kilometers away from the desaster area still got the fallout and all the problems, I don't wanna know how bad the situation is in the areas in Belarus and the Ukraine affected by the desaster. (or even in the baltic countries)
Let's do the math together.
First, we take the solar constant, 1.367kW/m^2.
The average output per panel over an entire day is approximately 0.2kW per m^2. In other words, the sun provides direct light an average of six hours per day averaging 0.8kW per m^2 each of those six hours. I think that's a fair estimate.
Solar cells that are currently mass produced and have a reasonable lifetime (30 years or more) max out at about 15% efficiency. But I'll allow for incremental improvements if this was to roll out. Let's say 18% to be generous. 0.2kW/m^2 * 0.18 = 0.036kW/m^2.
Multiplying by 24 hours (since we already made an average based on the whole day) gives you 0.864kWh/m^2/day.
Multiply by 250 days (no place on the planet has 365 days of perfect sunshine, and yet I'm being generous) and you get 216kWh/year per sq. meter. Divide 3.848 trillion kWh by 216kWh per sq meter and you get 17,814,814,815 sq. meters. Divide by a million to get sq. kilometers. That comes to 17,815 square kilometers. Quick unit conversion leaves 6,878 square miles.
Now let's reflect. In this best case scenario where you have plenty of sunshine, better than the best mass produced cells available today, the cells are kept clean, no major earthquakes, no tornados, etc., you still need 6,878 square miles of the stuff. Last I looked, I see that a square meter panel costs about $500 -- and solar is federally subsidized! Even if you factor in economies of scale whereby subsidies are not necessary and street costs are slashed in half, you are talking about $4,453,703,703,704. Just so we're clear, that's $4.453 trillion dollars. Even if you reduced the price of panels by a factor of ten from what they are today, you are still talking about $800 billion. Also don't forget that this was a forgiving estimation.
More realistic estimates place the land necessary at 10,000 square kilometers and do no expect such huge drops in price. Remember, this would be a government contract. Nobody will be bidding particularly low.
And I haven't gotten to the best part yet. You have to replace a substantial amount of cells every thirty years or so as the cells wear out and are damaged (how do you protect thousands of square miles from acts of sabotage?). Oh yes, let's not forget that overall demand is increasing, not decreasing.
If this sounds reasonable to you, I think you have a problem with your brain not being screwed on tight.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
No problem - the US taxpayer will provide - but that shouldn't matter becuase nuclear power is so "cheap" and "clean". All that high tech equipment and safety gear? No it's cheap we say, and you'll have to take our word for it or that will violate national security.
Several thousand square miles of the stuff.
And what do you do during the rainy months? (The northern states have a lot of those.)
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
The so-called nuclear waste problem is a bunch of bullshit perpetrated by liberals with an intransigent anti-industrial agenda. Nuclear power plants produce over 20% of the U.S. electricity demand (80% in France- ever wonder why their foreign policy is so much more independent of energy considerations than ours ?). These plants produce radioactive waste. Who gives a shit? This waste is "long-lived"- radioactive emissions decrease by a factor of ten for every seven years the stuff ages. Did you ever ask yourself how long the chemical waste from alternative sources of electricity (like coal) lasts? Mercury, arsenic,etc? It NEVER goes away. Chemicals are forever. Even if the stuff is not emitted into the air as currently is the practice, it goes into some solid waste stream that has to be buried on land (where it can be leached out by rain) or buried in the sea, or whatever. Nuclear waste is VERY SMALL in quantity. A coal fired plant produces thousands of tons (hundreds or railroad cars) of (slightly radioactive) chemically contaminated ash every year. This shit has to go somewhere. Currently most of it goes into the ocean. A nuclear plant producing the same amount of electricity produces less than one truckload of highly radioactive waste per year. Disposal is in fact MUCH LESS of a problem for the nuclear waste. Bury it in Yucca Mountain and forget about it. The statements in the cited report about how delay in finding a permanent repository for spent fuel waste is good are pure horseshit. Would you rather have this highly radioactive shit sitting in 120 parking lots around the country (expanded fuel storage sites at nuclear plant sites are typcially located in their parking lots) or buried 1000 meters underground in a rock mountain like Yucca? This is a no-brainer, and the opponents of Yucca Mountain are a blend of ignoramuses, political opportunists, and traitors.
I'm going out on a very long limb here, because I don't know how much it costs to maintain Yucca Mountain and its support resources. I'd imagine it's well into the billions of dollars, but again, I don't know.
Anyway, supposing a multi-billion dollar budget, why not just launch the waste at the sun? If it already costs loads of money to stuff the crap in the ground, why not spend loads of money do develop/construct rockets to get nuclear waste way the hell out sight? As long as you get the rocket into space and pointed in the right general direction, gravity takes over. Granted, you run into big problems if your rocket laden with nuclear waste doesn't make it out of the atmosphere, but for the most part, the world's aerospace technologies have been extremely reliable.
Humans couldn't produce enough waste in a million years to impact the sun even a tiny bit. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I don't see why it isn't a reasonable option. Yeah, depleted uranium is heavy, and yeah, rockets are expensive, but with privately owned aerospace programs operating on relatively small budgets (SpaceShipOne, for instance), I think it could happen.
Decay heat can account for a significant amount of your actual heat at the end of a fuel cycle, up to half. That heat quickly goes away after you shut down the reactor as all of the short lived isotopes decay away.
The amount of heat that's produced after time is not much at all. Not one single load of fuel has ever been sent to a fuel dump and almost all of it sits in spent fuel pools on site at power plants. Twenty years worth of fuel, amazingly, does not take much cooling and does not boil water. No boil, no power.
That does not mean it's not dangerous. The dose needed to kill you is only a few joules per kilogram, which would raise your temperature a fraction of a degree if your body were unable to compensate. That such a small energy so distributed can kill is devilish.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
According to this important Yucca Mountain article:
"The name "Yucca Mountain" is synonymous with danger and excitement. It's so much more than some single-industry desert town with a lot of unusual buildings--the entire place surges with activity and pulses with the thrill of the forbidden. The eerie luminescent glow lights the Nevada sky all through the night. Everyone has heard stories, but no one who hasn't visited can truly understand Yucca Mountain. Why's that? Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility.
I can tell you firsthand: There's no place like this in the entire country. The instant you see the strip--the one they pin to your coverall to measure your exposure to radiation--you understand how high the stakes are. Yucca Mountain isn't for the faint of heart. You never get used to the surge of adrenaline you feel watching the Geiger counter whirl, or the frenzy that fills the lab when someone's number comes up...
Face it, there's a reason they call this place Synthetic-High-Radiation-And-Weapons-Research-Bypr oduct-Disposal City. You can try to sell it as a safe, clean site for the long-term storage of 80 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste all you want, but the truth remains that humans have certain desires. The desire for more electricity ain't going to just disappear overnight, and neither are its byproducts. As long as there are people, there will be a need for places like Yucca Mountain. And you didn't hear any of that from me, friend.
We don't like to talk about what goes on at the nation's first geological repository. It simply isn't wise. Even so, stuff gets out. We don't know how--mind you, we'd love to find out. When we do, I can tell you this: There are a few tattlers who'll be sorry. Very sorry. Not that anyone believes the leaks anyway. They're just legends and fragments of tall tales told by loonies found wandering the Mohave with no memory of how they got the burns on their bodies and lesions on their faces. Stories of roller-coaster rides on the wings of probability, people betting it all on a wink from lady luck and one number of the Periodic Table, and then spiraling down into a pit of despair and reinforced concrete when it all goes wrong. Well, believe what you want. No one at Yucca Mountain is talking..."
Carter cut back on Atomic power despite being an advocate for it because it was the best thing for the country at the time and the AEC knew they couldn't try to fool him on the issue - and you certainly couldn't blame the "greenies" for anything back then.
The current level of atomic power is that of 1950's white elephants and a promising little prototype in China that doesn't output enough power to run a town of a few thousand people.
If we paid the Russians I'm sure we could get them to build a test reactor for a small fraction of what it would cost in the US. Maybe that's what we have to do... outsource our nuclear R&D. Heck, S. Africa is ahead of us in pebble-bed HTGRs, we might as well concede research to our NIMBYs. :/
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Thanks for the info. I had trouble believing they would store the waste in containers that would corrode so easily.
I've done a little independent research on this issue for a class -- one of the options we could opt for (although currently banned by some sort of London Convention of 1993 which expires in 2018) is http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/about/oceanfloor.shtm l/sub-seabed disposal. A method whereby you place waste canisters in some sort of projectile and let it bury itself beneath the sea. The pros of this is that there's TONS of space (although there are certain depth requirements) and that it's damn near impossible to proliferate. On top of this, storage is cheap. On the flip-side, if you want to get it back for reprocessing, it's a costly operations and I'm sure there'd be some heated political debates over this.
A novel idea I think. Of course I have oversimplified the issue. There are many things to take into account like retardation rates and the geology of the ocean floor.
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
However, the majority of other rocket launches contain componds other than just LOH and liq H2. See this list of commonly used rocket fuels.
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www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/articles/polluti
..........FULL STOP.
In the long run, its cheaper to make Elecricity/Hydrogen from green renewables (Wind, Solar, Tide etc) than from Nuclear or Oil, because of long-term environmental costs. ie: Off-shore wind power delivers at £0.03/kw/hr, and falling..
Wake up america!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Who needs better places than Yucca Mountain? Bush wants a radioactive Yucca, and Nevadans want Bush. Together, they can go fuck each other forever.
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make install -not war