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Volunteer Towns Sought For Nuclear Waste
Hugh Pickens writes "Brian Wingfield writes in Bloomberg that the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has sent a draft report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommending that US communities should be encouraged to vie for becoming a federal nuclear-waste site as a way to end a decades-long dilemma over disposing of spent radioactive fuel and says this 'consent-based' approach will help cut costs and end delays caused when the federal government picks a site over the objections of local residents, 'This means encouraging communities to volunteer (PDF) to be considered to host a new nuclear-waste management facility,' says the commission. Chu named the panelists after Obama canceled plans to build a permanent repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain after the Yucca site was opposed by politicians from the state. 'The United States has traveled nearly 25 years down the current path only to come to a point where continuing to rely on the same approach seems destined to bring further controversy, litigation, and protracted delay,' says the report. The Blue Ribbon Commission cited as a 'success' the US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which has accepted and disposed of some defense-related nuclear waste for more than a decade demonstrating that that 'nuclear wastes can be transported safely over long distances and placed securely in a deep, mined repository.' With the right incentives, 'there will be a great deal of support' for a waste site near the New Mexico facility, says former Senator Pete Domenici."
There's been quite a toxic environment in Washington D.C. for the last several Presidencies. So why not store this nasty stuff in D.C.?
Why not do the smart thing and REUSE all of that "waste"? It's actually decent fuel and if you reuse it it becomes significantly less hazardous...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
The problem is that nobody in their right mind would agree to this as the Federal Government is already being sued for failure to clean currently used sites. They're way behind schedule on work at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and I have no particular faith that this would change in the future.
OTOH if we can get a site in a red state perhaps we can at least get some social justice out of this.
if there is one thing deep mines do, it is flood. where does all the water go? oh, "somewhere else"? Great, now its laced with plutonium, one of the most toxic substances known to mankind.
im sure that nuclear waste can be stored safely, somewhere, some how. but the current nuclear industry is so obsessed with lying, disinformation, and corruption, that i wouldn't trust it to clean the dishes at a restaurant let alone run something like the Fukushima plant.
(which, of course, we were told was 100% safe and not a shitty old design like Chernobyl, and that thered never be another meltdown).
these folks do not seem to understand the basic difference between right and wrong. if you want people to support you, stop lying to them. this plan seems to be exactly the opposite: a PR stunt to make people accept something they dont want to accept.
i.e. instead of reorganizing the entire industry to be based on honesty, and education, and transparency, they are instead reorganizing a gigantic PR campaign to make their opponents 'shut the fuck up', some kind of bizarre Rahm Emanuel strategy.
when the next US disaster happens, it will cause yet another backlash, and we will be back where we were after three mile island. the problem is not about 'nuclear power', it is about incompetent managers and politicians who cannot seem to grasp the concept that they exist to serve the people and to do it honestly, responsibly, and transparently.
We're not allowed to make safer, more efficient reactors.
We're not allowed to recycling spent fuel rods.
We're not allowed to build a secure site to house the waste material.
My fellow humans don't realize that with their unreasonableness, spent fuel rods are being kept in over sized swimming pools on site.
Now you might be wondering what the problem is with this set up. Well our outdated nuclear power plants are conveniently right next to rivers that some people get drinking water from.
I'm not saying something will go wrong, all I'm saying is that if something does go wrong it'll be a lot worse than it would be if we just recycled the fuel rods or had them at a secure holding facility.
This is the major reason why Japan was such a disaster. Outdated reactor design and spent fuel rods kept on site. It could have all been avoided if we just had the guts to decapitate the BANANA's heads and place them on pikes as a warning to potential BANANAs.
But let's say we decommission all of our nuclear power plants tomorrow. The rods need to be kept somewhere. The irradiated reactor housing needs to be put in storage. We can't magically make them disappear.
I know they want us all to go back to living in mud huts but damn it I want electricity in my mud hut.
Check the cost of safely putting a kilogram of payload into a sun-diving trajectory. Check the density of uranium and plutonium, and the total volume of waste just sitting there waiting to be dealt with, forgetting for the time being the stuff that's still to come. Get back to to us with your findings and comparison with the cost of other radioactive waste disposal methods. Show your work.
NIMBY shouldn't even be an issue at Yucca Mountain. It is located on one of the biggest military sites in the nation, right next to the place we tested some 900 nuclear weapons. It is as far from anyone's back yard as can be and right next to a radioactive wasteland.
Let's face it, nobody wants the stuff near them. That's what NIMBY means.
Nevadans don't trust the government? Welcome to the club.
Find another site? Why? The BANANAS will act all butt-hurt no matter where. Let's face it, even if Yucca Mountain isn't the perfect site, it's still a hell of a lot safer than leaving all that crap in pools at reactor sites.
No, see, chemical issue are /actual/ problems. You know, like coal ash, and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, nuclear waste, while mildly radioactive, is an easily contained solid, and is produced in tiny quantities when compared to fossil fuel ash. Someone who actually gives a shit about the environment would do their research on nuclear power (and not from Greenpeace's website), learn what the /real/ safety concerns are, and push for solutions to those concerns. They would not, mind, push to eliminate the smallest mining/waste footprint per joule, lowest fatality count per joule, lowest land-use per watt technology we have, renewables included.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists always worry me: how is it you can be concerned about all the right things and still get such a wrong answer?
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