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."

Comments

How About D.C.?

[WrongSizeGlass]

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?

[Lifyre]

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...

Re:Why?

[causality]

Holy fuck no. I mean, I realize you Americans are scared of shit of plutonium thanks to your rabid environmentalists, and carter. But hey, if you want to cut your nuclear fuel supplies in half. Please keep sending your waste to Canada, S.Korea and Japan so we can have cheap, inexpensive fuel. I mean we all really like it.

Or you can grow a fucking pair and jump all over the environmentalists and nimby's for being fucking idiots.

The purpose of the environmentalism is to enforce a kind of soft tyranny. Cheap, abundant, easily accessible energy means fewer people crying out for government to do something about energy, something that everyone uses and everyone needs. The general concept is that government is never going to voluntarily endorse and encourage something that gives people one less thing to worry about. They enjoy appearing to do so because that appeals to the masses, but they do not wish to actually do it. The larger and less local the government, the more true this is. Thus, the local and state governments are not nearly so bad as the federal government with respect to this tendency.

This is from Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince":

Therefore a wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.

Unlike 1984, The Prince actually was intended to be something like a manual.

Ugh

[Xenkar]

Honestly as time goes on my patience for other humans gets thinner.
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.

Re:Ridiculous idea

[slashqwerty]

They've apparently been lead to believe that NIMBY means "Nuclear In My Backyard Yes" instead of "Not In My Back Yard"

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.