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Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that a group of congressmen backed by the nuclear industry are pushing to reopen the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The site has sat closed and uncompleted since the Obama administration scrapped the project. The article goes into the pros and cons of the Yucca Mountain site for storage and also brings up some interesting political issues involved in continuing development. It's also worth noting that there's been a fee on electric bills since 1983 for the building of the site."
About time. We are fussing about whether this will be safe after 10,000 years and meanwhile we store the waste in overcrowded pools spread around the country and continue to burn coal, which is an environmental disaster all by itself, never mind what it does to the climate.
It's not perfect, but dry cask storage in Yucca Mountain is way better than rods in spent fuel pools in power plants.
There's been worry about shipping spent fuel rods around, but the casks are very tough (they will survive being hit by a locomotive), and the worst cases are far, far less dangerous than a failed spent fuel pool at a power plant, as we now know.
Citation needed
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
You can burn the transuranics in a Thorium reactor and extract residual energy from them. Then the hazardous waste will be negligible by comparison. Google LFTR.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Hey, turn off Fox News and open the window up to let the crack fumes out.
US rail needs upgraded anyway. Sound like an opportunity to improve our infrastructure and provide jobs, a great thing to do during a recession.
We are coming for you and those like you. Those we don't keep around to be ridiculed will disappear.
You don't know when, you don't know where.
Sleep well.
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Fusion Engery: No
Fairy Dust: Yes.
There are ways to reduce the amount of high level waste, but as people mentioned they fall afoul of the nuclear proliferation treaties.
There have been "table top" demonstrations of converting low level waste into safe stuff. Basically, you isolate the radioactive atoms and bombard them with neutrons until they fall apart into something safer. You don’t need nanotechnology to make this work – but close.
This is the problem with the US IMO. They lack any long term planning. The political party in power at any given time is only obsessed and focused with getting themselves reelected in four years. Thus, planning is limited to FOUR YEARS. How can one run the last remaining superpower on a four year shedule? It takes 10 years to build a nuclear power plant. How long does it take to build other MEGA infrastructure projects? There are so many unemployed out there, the US should be doing like China and upgrading its ancient infrastructure and laying the groundwork for a high-tech, energy efficient 21st century. I would suggest to raise taxes, but so far that has only made banksters on wallstreet wealthier with zero economic impact. Where is the leadership?
I remember working on some of the Yucca Mountain studies years ago and there really isn't a better place you could store nuclear waste. It's very stable geologically, and the storage medium leeching was practically non-existent, even if you stored the blocks under water.
Most of the objections are NIMBY related and don't represent any realistic threat.
I can promise you where nuclear waste is being stored now, where ever that is, is a lot less safe than it would be at Yucca Mountain.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This is yet another case of anti-nukers actually making the world a more dangerous and costly place. If the anti-nukers would just shut the fuck up and let intelligent people actually move forward, things would be way better all the way around. As is, everything is more dangerous and far, far, far more expensive than would otherwise be required if anti-nukers would simply shut the fuck up.
Well the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't reprocess it's nuclear waste. In fact you guys ship your plutonium to Canada so we can make nuclear fuel for reactors. Seriously? Time to kick environmentalists in the face when they fuck everything up for everyone else based on fear mongering.
Om, nomnomnom...
the price? I suspect the biggest problem with Yucca is that we are ignoring the lost revenue of building another one. And the guys in charge would really love to be able to steer another bazillion dollars to their favorite contractors. Very generous contractors.
Yes, in our country our passenger infrastructure is heavily dependent on our freight infrastructure, which is WHY our passenger infrastructure is so bad.
WIth the average weight of Americans increasing, it could be very handy that passenger rail makes use of the freight lines.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I forget - remind me how many people Fukushima has killed so far?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's going nowhere, Reid is still Majority Leader, it's in his state, and he's still against it. Lotta political smoke, not much fire.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Everyone here is neglecting one of the #1 reasons this project was scrapped. Nevada is being dumped with the nuclear waste of all the other states. Nevada doesn't even have a nuclear power plant. United States against One.
ya know the senate majority leader who happens to be from nevada.
Last time I looked there was only one France and they've had a lot of trouble with reprocessing and haven't done any for a couple of years.
Also for some reason a lot of people have it backwards. The one and only purpose of reprocessing is to extract usable material from spent fuel rods. It is NOT a way to reduce nuclear waste, in fact it actually generates a lot of low level waste due to contamination. The fuel rods are still very intense neutron sources after all so many things that come close to them also become radioactive. Very expensive PR has been applied to make people think like idiots on this issue so don't feel bad that you've been made to think it's magic and not a real thing with real costs inseperable from the benefits.
You still need somewhere to store radioactive waste with or without reprocessing. Yukka mountain is apparently a bit too wet, and if that really is the case it's just a matter of finding somewhere better.