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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.?
Most citizens don't even RTFS, figuratively speaking.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Try Springfield, they'll do it and they can use the money!
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"
So, anyone NOT think this group came up with a ridiculous idea? They've apparently been lead to believe that NIMBY means "Nuclear In My Backyard Yes" instead of "Not In My Back Yard". People are supposed to say "we want this here"? How poverty stricken does an area need to be to get local consensus on that? Detroit? Worse? And how many of the folks who later claim they did not agree would be suing because "the nukular caused autism"?
Send it all to China!
How about a day, announced a month or so in advance, where all nuclear power plants in the US are simply turned off? For 24 hours.
How about delivering a 50lb sack of coal ash to every single household in the US the day after, so they can see what the result of coal-fired power plants really is? It would need to include a full-color brochure listing all of the toxic substances that come out of the chimney from a coal plant as well.
If we did these things there might be less opposition to dealing with nuclear waste. Oh, and how about some PSAs showing a huge mountain of materials saying that nobody could go near this for 10,000 years and then show the small trash can that shows what is left after reprocessing.
Instead of doing any of these things we are allowing the pseudo-environmental movement to control the discussion to the point where we will be shutting down nuclear plants in the US, we will be shutting down coal plants in the US and we will have a new electrical system whereby there is power during the day and nothing at night. If you are rich and can afford 100KWh of batteries, you might have lights and TV at night. Maybe, until someone passes some regulations saying that it is discriminatory and unfair.
The US is clearly headed down the path of unreliable electric power with limited capacity. How will this affect future generations? Well, you can bet that computers in the home will not be a big deal in the future - unless they run on batteries that are charged up during the day.
So, Harry Reid, how much "encouragement" will you need to use Yucca Mountain? Another trillion or two do it for you?
What if the rocket blows up?
We don't do that with chemical poisons like mercury and arsenic that will be toxic forever. Why have a double standard for the hazardous materials from nuclear operations?
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.
Afghanistan. We control it. It's remote. A great place to dump nuclear waste.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Put them near the backyard of the CEO/Owners of the Power Station.
If Nuclear Energy is safe and all that, they won't mind having glow-in-the-dark flowers.
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.
Yessirree, proud Texan here.
I volunteer Dallas. It's a nice big city in the heart of real America.
Every Texan would be proud to have this great American tribute to American Americanyness in our backyard.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that a few breeder reactors could solve the problem by running from the waste over and over until whatever is left might make you sneeze. I've wondered about this, but aside from cost (as if permanent storage isn't costly), is there really anything wrong with that idea? I know that breeders can potentially be used to make plutonium, but it's not like the US doesn't have that capability already.
I bet lucrative incentives are more cost effective than fighting legal and political opposition.
Indeed. It's a wonder the federal government isn't using the usual "consent-based" approach to usurp powers that fall to the states, such as setting drinking age and speed limits: threaten to withhold a significant portion of the state's federal funding, which most states are quite reliant on for one service or another.
Or maybe this is a new strategy meant to avoid offending honorable Senator Leghorn when that old trick is used against his state.
Just make sure the wealth keeps rising to the top and there'll be an endless supply of impoverished communities around the country lining up to take this "consent-based" salvation.
Hanford Washington U.S.A. would love the waste sent
their way. That would be listed as the State of Washington
in the article.
Hanford lost out to Yuca mountain many years ago, lost a lot of jobs
over night. They were planning on storing nuclear waste at Hanford.
Even create a religion "OMMMMM do not dig for 100,000 years."
(Yes it was actually put forth as a plan)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site claims
two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume
are located here, so it makes a lot of sense.
Some place has to be found and fast as reactor storage pools
are becoming full and a danger in themselves.
I used to operate a nuclear reactor producing Plutonium for DoD at
Hanford, so know well of the desire of becoming a nuclear burial site.
I've actually wondered if there was any practical downside, other than problems before getting it up, to the Futurama solution: just stick it in a rocket and blast it off in a random direction. Preferably without a return address.
We can build it inside a mountain somewhere so even the fanatics feel safe and then we can start burning nuclear waste!
Then we export the energy as electricity and in just a few years we build up another fund bigger than the oil fund!
Hmm, does nuclear fund or electricity fund sound best? Or maby just e-fund.
Sure it will cost a tad to build the plant, but we'd ofcource charge for receiving the nuclear waste we'll partially use as fuel to offset that...
If the volunteering originates with the constituents: then good.
But if from the politicians: then only as long as the politician suggesting such an arrangement lives just as close to the dump site -- along with their family -- as any other resident in their electorate.
Does American electoral law require that politicians largely reside in the electorate they represent?
currently stores low level waste at ambient temperature, like contaminated tooling. A special on TV said they are not equipped for the heat given off by nuke plant waste.
And where do YOU live, sir? In a state with nuclear power plants? Far away from Nevada? Right. It's just as meaningful for me to say that your basement is the best choice.
With all the NIMBY politics, it seems cheaper to just drop the stuff on the moon. Physical security of the site is guaranteed for the foreseeable future (and it becomes a non-issue when lunar travel becomes trivial). And the fears of exposing our descendants to radiation is also a moot point as you already need radiation protection on the moon. The worst natural disaster would be an asteroid strike, which still presents negligible risk to Earth. The worse human disaster would be a launch failure, but it's still lower than what coal power plants do. Heck, it's also retrievable when we decide that breeder reactors aren't so dangerous, or we could just build one on the moon for a colony.
Some math: the US produces 3,000 tons of high-level waste per year, and our super heavy lift rockets can generally get 50,000 kg to the moon for $1 billion. $60 billion per year would be an extra ($60 billion / 800 TWh) $0.075 per kilowatt hour. Currently, nuclear energy pays $0.001 per kilowatt hour for waste disposal. So, we'd need to get our launch prices down by one order of magnitude before this is economically feasible, which, with 60 extra launches guaranteed per year, might be doable through economy of scale. As for danger of a rocket failing to launch, that'd release about 50 tons of waste into the atmosphere, compared with Coal's 5 metric tons per gigawatt hour (2,000 TWh * 5 / GWh = 10 million tons per year in the US). (Sorry for mixing metric and imperial tons and other shortcuts, but this is paper-napkin math.)
Actually, screw that, if we were being rational we could just burn/aerosolize high-level waste and add 0.03% to the impact of coal. OTOH, since we aren't rational, by dropping it on the moon we get to improve our super heavy launch capacity by pandering to the fears of the anti-nuke zealots.
Have Google sweeten the pot with a fiber optic rollout to the town free of charge - you might have tech startups move into the town that could find uses for nuclear wastes and produce something useful with it, with all the added publicity for the town, the site, and the arrival of a highly-touted ISP program.
The problem is not finding a community that wants the site.
It's that as soon as they say they want it, no matter how well informed they are, interest groups will descend saying "We must save these poor ignorant people who are being used by the nuclear lobby". Or, "We must save these people from being deceived by the anti-nukes"
I'm sure they'd say that about Los Alamos where large numbers of the people work for a nuclear weapons lab and know more about rad hazards than almost any other community save for perhaps Arzamas-16 (Now called Sarov again.) .
I've seen this happen before in New Mexico when I lived there. The chief of the Mescalero tribe started making a deal to have a rad waste site on some of their land. Parts of it are some of the most inhospitable you can find in the US.
All of a sudden, groups showed up saying that the Mescaleros were just too uninformed to understand what they were doing and had to be protected. (It was amazingly patronizing.)
Now, the problem was taken care of by the tribe itself. They put it to a vote and voted it down. That's fine. That's how democracy works.
But you can bet that the carpetbaggers on both sides of the issue will turn up like flies around roadkill.
I'd already suspected something like that would happen with the Mescaleros. My company processed credit cards and such for Ski Apache and Inn of the Mountain Gods, two of the tribal businesses, So, I'd dealt with them a good bit and knew they were no fools regardless of how they decided it.
The Finns store their waste in a rock 500m deep below and fill it with concrete aftereards.
The facility will be finished in 2100 and should last 100.000 years.
They even have plans to communicate with the future beings using symbols in carved rock.
All can be seen in the documentary "Into eternity".
Will take it
That is where the nuclear waste will surely be dumped. Bet on that.
As that is the typical pattern when the decision is made where to dump the waste. Whether it be liquor stores, guns, or crack.
It's only a matter of time. If you live in the ghetto it's time to move.
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?
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Glad I am not the only one who hates New York City. There are people who absolutely love NYC and I have to wonder why it would be. The place is just ugly to be in. And where I live now, many people "aspire" to be like New Yorkers as if they were all more sophisticated and intelligent somehow. I spent a week in New York and that was all I needed to know. It's simply the most frustrating and infuriating place I have ever been and is worse than the Washington DC area if that's even possible.
The place does need a heavy dose of sanity and if it came in the form of nuclear waste, so be it.
Economic boom gets a completely new meaning.
If you are capable of consuming 50 eight ounce cups of coffee in less than an hour, you might be able to ingest an LD-50 dose.
Spread those cups out over five hours and there is no danger to speak of.
Plutonium doesn't work that way.
Would there be any problem with setting it into an area near a subduction zone? In this way the radioactive waste should be pushed under, no more chance of it entering the food chain, taken care of in a fashion that doesn't require 10,000 years of constant supervision. There is even a subduction zone relatively near the coast of US which should make it fairly cheap.
The politicians I think are supposed to reside within their representative districts (state-level anyways) but since the borders of that district are not concrete they frequently get redrawn into the oddest of shapes to try and trap the most supporters of one group or the other.
... and/or establish a second fuel cycle that will consume most of the waste or close the currently existing cycle. Maybe we can make a few more STEN jobs out of the process to lower our high unemployment.
they took raffinate from the processing of Uranium Hexfluoride and sprayed it on the local cattle fields.
that way, they could call it fertilizer instead of toxic waste. saved them a bunch of money.
of course the cows kept dying, but they solved that by mass burial. some "environmental activists", i guess the people you are denigrating, took photos of this and exposed it.
they will chuck a bunch of fuel rods down in a cave.
they will be covered in layers of concrete and metal casings and so forth and so on. there will be monitoring systems. and etc.
and then some day, someone will want to save some money. they will take short cuts. things will leak. employees will be too afraid of retaliation to say anything about it. PR companies will be hired to lie about it.
it has happened over, and over, and over, and over again in the nuclear industry, and every other industry.
the problem with nuclear is that the problem doesnt 'go away' with time. at least time on a human scale.
It has to be a town so Senators can bring home the bacon. And then after a few billion are spent on studies and preliminary construction, the same Senators can pull a Happy Harry Reid and insist that their site is no good, it's got to be put somewhere else. Rinse and repeat.
Meh. Just invade another country and dump your nuclear waste there. It is already done with spent uranium in many artillery shells (tank busting especially). Read about Falluja/Kosovo cancers/birth deformities. However, this uranium affects occupying forces as well, not just inteded victims. War side effects, I suppose. OTOH, it won't bother those sitting in Washington.
Well, Stefon, for one.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Have gnu, will travel.
Haha. Mod parent up please.
Just kidding. (I hope.)
The caverns.
Hmm. Nukewatch has a map. Working Google Maps a little, I located WIPP road.
That locates it well away from the caverns, but within ten miles of Lindsey Lake.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Does this take into account the cancer deaths from Chernobyl (between 30,000 and 985,000, depending on who you talk ask) and ultimately Fukushima, and the land degradation from nuclear fallout in both cases (which might be considered under both waste footprint and land-use-per-watt)? If so, do you have figures to show this (I am genuinely interested)? How do you calculate land-use-per-watt for roof-mounted photovoltaic systems (which effectively don't require developing any more land)?
For the record, in asking these questions, I am not implying that nuclear is worse than fossil fuels. I think they all have to go, and we already have the technological resources to replace them, at least for electricity production. What fossil fuels we have left should be saved for their more long-term uses such as creating steel, plastics, and (until we can get large-scale sustainable agriculture in place) fertiliser.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
The Umatilla Chemical Depot is about empty of nerve gas. Maybe they should store nuclear waste.
Their they're doing there hair.
Frustrating and infuriating? Were you standing in the way while people were trying to walk down the sidewalk or something? Or were you stupidly trying to drive in Manhattan?
I've been there for a couple of trips, and I didn't find it "frustrating and infuriating" at all. Busy, definitely. It's like visiting an ant colony; everyone's in a big hurry to get to where they're going, but they're all moving in unison. As long as you go with the flow, you're fine. But if you're some dolt who wants to block the sidewalk, then people will get mad at you, and for good reason. There's a high density of people there, and that's what it takes for people to get along in that environment. Don't like it? Then stay at home in your small town.
I never even found anyone rude there. Busy and preoccupied? Definitely. But I had no problems when I asked someone for directions. I just didn't pick someone who obviously was in a hurry to get somewhere, I looked for someone more approachable. And I stayed out of the way of others when I was taking photos or otherwise not walking somewhere.
Some of the buildings could use a good cleaning, but what do you expect for a city where everything's over 100 years old?
And if you're an out-of-towner and you attempt to drive there, then you're just an idiot. Take the subway or a taxi.
I have the impression that people here have, on average, a strong opinion supporting nuclear energy, so I expect a large number of them to show up as volunteers to bring the convenience of nuclear power, in physical form, next to their own residences.
Hi, my name is "somewhere in the Outback" and I volunteer to take the entire world's nuclear waste! I do this because I am geologically stable. I do this as a ruse though. The waste will never be buried too deep. Instead we'll just store it in cooling ponds until G.E. finally commercializes the S-PRISM. These reactors burn nuclear waste and could run the world for 500 years just on today's waste! Half a millennium of power is worth about $30 trillion dollars! So Australia could then sell the "waste" which will then be fuel back to the world at a massive profit. So pick me pick me! I'm old and wise and waiting for your nuclear waste! http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/nuclear-posters/
So there was this perfectly useful facility built specifically for the purpose of nuclear waste storage.
...2012 is coming.
So the location was selected based on "data collected for nearly ten years" (Wikipedia). YM was picked since it was already located within a former nuclear test site (i.e. development potential for other types of structures or settlements was limited at best).
The facility was under construction, and proceeding well.
And then the shit hit the fan, in the form of Harry "Screw You All" Reid.
"Following the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections, Democratic Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a long time opponent of the repository, became the Senate Majority Leader, putting him in a position to greatly affect the future of the project. Reid has said that he would continue to work to block completion of the project, and is quoted as having said: "Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen."
Perhaps the most telling phrase in the entire Wiki article is this: "The US GAO stating that the closure was for policy not technical or safety reasons."
So, to summarize: we have a perfectly good facility that is DESIGNED for the purpose of nuclear waste storage. It's in an area that is a former nuclear test site, so there's not much we can build there anyway. It's almost complete, after CBO only knows how many millions of dollars spent. Yet because HARRY REID SAID SO, we're just going to throw it the hell out and continue storing nuclear waste "all over the place".
The political machinations of Reid and Obama vs logic.
The safety factor of storing nuclear waste in a designated, secure, safe, technologically advanced facility vs storing it in small batches in a multitude of sites.
The counter-terrorism factor of having one site to protect and monitor vs the need to protect & monitor hundreds of them.
The cost factor (not that Obama or Reid actually give a shit about taxpayer dollars, but still...)
P.S. No, I didn't just get this info from Wikipedia. This issue has been "on the radar" on several blogs over the course of the last few years. Of course, the mainstream media will never, ever report it, but that doesn't mean that anyone who cares to find out more info can't Google "Yucca Mountain controversy" and go on from there.
Everyone always thinks that NIMBY is bad, until it is THEIR backyard. NIMBY is part of democracy. Either people get a say or they don't but once you give them a say, they are free to say things you don't like. Including, "not in my backyard".
The real problem is that all politicians are so desperate to get elected (not surprising, it is their job) that none dare to say "alright you don't want X so you don't get Y". No nuclear waste? Then no nuclear power for you. Come up with SOMETHING you do want in your backward to generate power or you won't be having any.
Electoral suicide. See Japan that totally failed to invest in alternative energy sources and now that nukes are politically sensitive, they are out of options. They got to restart unsafe reactors because they need the power.
Democracy, letting the monkey's run the zoo by electing the monkey that can fling his poo the best.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Reprocessing only exists to get a bit of extra life from portions of used fuel rods and not this bullshit that PR is dreaming up without any reference to reality.
Reprocessing actually increases the amount of nuclear waste via contamination of the equipment and materials doing the work (it's a tricky, expensive and messy process), but that waste can of course be dealt with far more easily than intact used fuel rods.
Use your brains kids instead of just swallowing the PR bullshit that was designed to try to simply sidestep the waste issue and distract the audience. It makes more sense to deal with the waste problem instead of playing just pretend with things that are there to solve completely different problems.
The bold text is of course there to prevent reactive idiots from missing it and jumping to the wrong conclusion about what is written above.
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
I didn't want to be right when I hypothesized that the reason that Corporate America was intentionally sabotaging the economy of the United States of America was to leave the American people no economic choices other than accepting death on a dish..in the water...on the wind from the Corporations...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
From TFA:
The Obama administration is committed to "restarting the American nuclear industry," he said.
Bullshit!
If there was a commitment to restarting the American nuclear industry there would not be this overwhelming problem of disposing of nuclear waste. Spent fuel from the existing nuclear power plants could be used as fuel in next generation nuclear power plants. There are already applications for building these power plants that are three decades old! Let these people build their power plants and the waste problem would solve itself.
Oh, there is another source of nuclear waste, the federal ban on reprocessing the existing spent fuel. If this ban was lifted then even current nuclear power plants could burn the reprocessed spent fuel.
One thing I learned in my research of this nuclear waste "problem" is that if something is radioactive there is a very high probability that the stuff is either a valuable industrial, scientific, commercial, or medical commodity, or it is fuel for a nuclear reactor.
Sure, there is probably some radioactive stuff out there that just cannot be recycled into something useful. It seems to me that such items are quite rare and will be low level emitters of radiation. If they were highly radioactive then it would fall under the valuable commodity or nuclear fuel umbrellas. This low level radioactive junk will need to be disposed of properly but it should not require some massive salt mine to contain it. For that stuff I suggest bringing it to Detroit, there's nobody left there to complain.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
And Reagan overturned it. Then daddy Bush apparently put it back in place for a cheap way to make some oil donors happy since nobody was doing reprocessing in the USA anyway. Then somebody after that (or perhaps even the same Bush) overturned it becuase there is a MOX reprocessing plant almost completed at Savannah River. Look at wikipedia under "Nuclear reprocessing" to get a clue at least that it is definitely not illegal now.
Also Carter didn't make it illegal simply uneconomic - it was about not spending government money on one aspect of commerical nuclear power. There was also plutonium proliferation stuff which was not an outright ban on reprocessing or breeder reactors - just the methods that produced plutonium. Even that has been overturned.
The panel wants to keep politics out of the decision and wants the Department of Energy kept out of the process owing to the damage it has done already to the reputation of the federal government. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/how-to-pick-a-site-for-a-nuclear-waste-dump/
In my view, it was congress that treated Nevada as a ghetto more that the DoE but there were certainly problems with faking the data under DoE management.
Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades.
Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident.
Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.
The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident.
Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.
thyroid cancer is generally treatable. With proper treatment, the five-year survival rate of thyroid cancer is 96%, and 92% after 30 years, suggesting there may be up to 500 early deaths from this cause.
Source
That's the worst known nuclear accident we have. Compare that to hydro:
The Banqiao Dam was designed to survive a once-in-1000-years flood (300 mm of rainfall per day). In August 1975, however, a once-in-2000-years flood occurred, and poured more than a year's rainfall in 24 hours (new records were set, at 189.5 mm rainfall per hour and 1060 mm per day, exceeding the average annual precipitation of about 800 mm), which weather forecasts failed to predict ....
The resulting flood waters caused a large wave, which was 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) wide and 3â"7 meters (9.8â"23 ft) high in Suiping, to rush downwards into the plains below at nearly 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph), almost wiping out an area 55 kilometers (34 mi) long and 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) wide, and creating temporary lakes as large as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 sq mi). ....
According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected.
Source
At the end of the day, the fact is that by producting large amounts of electricity, we need to handle large amounts of energy. If we fail to handle them properly, Shit Go Crazy(TM). Even with "safe" stuff like water. The trick is in engineering things properly, as mentioned several times before.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Half-and-half, then, with Media Matters.
Claiming that experience in New Mexico shows that waste can be transported safely is quite wrong. It the volume of commercial waste that makes a transport accident inevitable.
If they mean spend $100 Billion over 10 years digging a hole with no intention on using it I'd vote for my town.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The nevada desert is very big, almost too big, they could easily start building special containers for the waste and send it all there with a warning no traffic zone....
sort of what they did back then when testing the nuclear weapons, instead this time, they would get rid of the waste.
There is already storage there. Plus those hundreds of weapon tests. If we can't store it in an already contaminated area what would you like?