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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"
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.
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.
What if the rocket blows up?
The idea is rational, the only question is if it's practical. I bet lucrative incentives are more cost effective than fighting legal and political opposition. Something like the Alaska Permanent Fund would be very appealing to poor communities. It makes perfect sense to at least explore the idea.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Rockets have something like a 1-2% failure rate, and you'd need quite a lot of them.
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.
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.
I lived in Las Vegas for 12 years. There was absolutely no way we wanted that stuff stored at Yucca Mountain; it is a geologically active area and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city. All that would be mere hypocrisy if not for the fact that Nevada has no nuclear power plants and derives virtually none of its electricity from nuclear sources outside the state. This is completely orthogonal to whether nuclear power is a good idea, whether it can be made safe, whether fast reactors are better, whether waste should instead be reprocessed or turned into glass or shot into space, and just how bad coal or hydro or other sources are for us and the rest of earth's inhabitants. It's nothing more complicated than the fact that Yucca Mountain is at best a mediocre site, the local residents don't want it, and the waste is generated elsewhere for the primary benefit of people who do not live in Nevada. That should have been sufficient to make the feds look elsewhere 15 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't. That the state won the fight is cheering; that a fight was even necessary is an appalling violation of states' rights. Finding a geologically suitable site in a state with nuclear power plants and residents who trust the government to transport and store the waste safely in their vicinity is an excellent idea. If they'd done that in the first place, we'd all have billions of dollars back -- and we'd probably have a nuke dump, too. But it certainly wouldn't be at Yucca Mountain; the federal government has abused and betrayed Nevadans from the day the state was admitted to the union, and there is absolutely no way its residents will ever trust it with their lives and property. That they gain little or nothing from nuclear power serves only to reinforce their already compelling case. Let those who like the federal government and think it's full of good, kind, well-meaning and competent public servants take the waste from their own power plants instead. It's the right thing for everyone.
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".
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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I guess my point was that there are particular reasons Nevada was and remains a highly inappropriate choice. NIMBY sounds a lot less compelling when you're living next to a reactor and running your gear on its juice.
http://www.zianet.com/web/mcgee.htm
Gimme a link. I couldn't find the photos of which you speak, but I did find an article from "In these times, 1987", in which, in accusatory tones, they describe the denitrating of actinide nitrates, with ammonia and spraying the resultant ammonium nitrate (i.e., sans actinides) on their own farmland. Seems reasonable enough to me, but then, I know some chemistry. To convert your waste from a stream of undisposable nitrates into a solid you can dispose of within the realm of government regulations, you take the nitrate groups off. You then have to do something with the nitrate groups that isn't going to piss people off, despite it's being non-radioactive and fairly valuable fertilizer otherwise. So, spray it on your own lands. Problem solved.
Best I can tell, the cattle thing is a synthesis. If you can link me the photos, I can probably help track down their source. They could be legit, but the fact is there are lots of sources of photos for mutilated and/or simply dead cattle. Hell, my wife grew up on a farm, and her family's entire herd died of a virus one year, ending their farming lives forever. Of course, I'm biased: I've seen some of the more zealous of environmentalists bald-facedly lie about important things; I would not ever put it past them to tell a whopper, even in picture form.
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Have gnu, will travel.
It is not about the waste. Easy solution, you get the power station you get the waste. So only locate nuclear power station where you can deal with the nuclear wastes. One region should not get the economic benefits of a nuclear power station (based upon a new safer generation of power stations) whilst another region gets the economic burden of a nuclear dump.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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.
1) "and every proposed transport route for the waste went through the city"
I don't see how that's even an issue. The containers themselves have been proven to withstand the impact of a TRAIN. And likely much more at this stage. If you're worried about some sort of traffic congestion by a hypothetical influx of waste being transported in - then I'm fairly certain the city can pass an ordinance to allow such materials in the town and force them to take alternate routes.
2) While wikipedia isn't the best source you're welcome to train the citations in regards to the earthquake situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Earthquakes They've already discussed that problem. And again - they'll also be in those containers mentioned above to the best of my knowledge.
Frankly, I don't see the problem. The only sound argument comes from the comment here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Cancelation_of_project
It essentially says that Yucca would work as a good short term (hundreds of years) storage where the fuel would likely be removed later on for uses elsewhere and that better options exist today for permanent storage (non recoverable).
Personally, I'd like to see our nuclear program continue and see the USA get smart with how it reuses waste fuel.