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How Yucca Mountain Was Killed
ATKeiper writes "The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which was selected by the U.S. government in the 1980s to be the nation's permanent facility for storing nuclear waste, is essentially dead. A new article in The New Atlantis explains how the project was killed: 'In the end, the Obama administration succeeded, by a combination of legal authority and bureaucratic will, in blocking Congress's plan for the Yucca Mountain repository — certainly for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently.... The saga of Yucca Mountain's creation and apparent demise, and of the seeming inability of the courts to prevent the Obama administration from unilaterally nullifying the decades-old statutory framework for Yucca, illustrates how energy infrastructure is uniquely subject to the control of the executive branch, and so to the influence of presidential politics.' A report from the Government Accountability Office notes that the termination 'essentially restarts a time-consuming and costly process [that] has already cost nearly $15 billion through 2009.'"
end of story
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
1) $15 billion is small potatoes if that's all it's cost through now, not per year. 2) This seems like a fairly iffy idea anyway for any number of reasons 3) If you're really concerned about costs, actually read the goddamned report and see (page 27) where it would cost $41-67 billion more to actually complete.
Cutting off an iffy project that would result in many times its current cost seems like a win.
That's the biggest problems with shifts in power, especially if parties change every four years. One party spends four years getting something in place, or sets some long term goals, and then next election someone else comes in and changes it all. So they spend all the time and money getting one thing spun up and then it gets canned and they spend the next four years doing something else and it may be canned.
Gotta be a better way.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. All power has its cost. Yes, even wind and solar.
Solar panels huge enough to collect loads of energy also cool the ground underneath them; changing climate patterns. And they kill what lives under them. (And if you put them in space, then you have the little problem of transporting the energy.)
Wind farms huge enough to create loads of energy may actually affect wind patterns and temperature dispersal. Plus they kill loads of migrating birds.
And both require many, many resources to build and maintain the collection devices.
Hydro; well, that's an eco-disaster because you have to dam a river to produce it.
Collecting energy from tides? If you did that on a huge scale, I'll bet it would have some major effects on marine life.
Just want to put it out there. I'm not saying nuclear is fantastic. Just want to point out that nothing is.
Not to mention the idea of every morsel of radioactive waste being transported on public highways to a single location (Yucca Mountain) is not that popular. Sucks we still don't have a long term solution to this nasty problem. Oh well fuck it, we will leave it for the next generation - right?
Why can't the nuclear waste be stored in a simple reinforced warehouse instead of a repository hundreds of meters into a mountain? A meter thick wall of reinforced concrete can withstand almost anything less than a military strike and then casks themselves are almost inpentrable. Natural disasters can be taken care of by choosing a proper location. Sure, this is not a good option if we want to leave it without maintenance for thousands of years, but who cases what happens to the waste if there's no humans around? This would in any case imply that something far more serious has happened anyway. Is there anything I'm missing?
Oh my! I realize nuclear waste is dangerous, but if it has the power to bring mountains to life, we really need to be more careful with the stuff. I'm glad we were able to kill it.
No, it doesn't permanently solve the problem, but it's a low-cost, high-payoff way to start.
So instead of storing highly toxic and radioactive waste deep underground in specially designed and very expensive long term storage meant to keep it safe from all kinds of disasters, we can keep storing it above ground in short-term storage pools that we know will fail if they should be exposed to a decent sized disaster. Keep in mind this isn't storage just for future waste, but stuff that actually exists, right now, sitting in short-term storage, and if you read TFA, you'll find out not only is there no other long-term storage option, there isn't even a plan for one. So who are most people going to blame when (not if, but when, unless we do something about it) those current storage sites fail? I'm betting it won't be Obama. Anyone want to take that bet?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
So we can't burn our coal, we can't store our nuclear waste in an affordable way, and if the EPA gets its way we won't be able to continue our growth in cheap natural gas either. All without care for the fact that we still have no-effective base load green energy solution.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The author Adam J White, is a lawyer specializing in fighting federal regulation and is a contributor to the neocon rag The Weekly Standard (founded by Bill Kristol). This piece places the failure of Yucca mountain singularly on president Obama while saying worshipful things about Reagan every other paragraph.
So take this "article" with a grain of salt. Any federal regulation is wrong to this neocon and everything is the fault of the current president. There was plenty of controversy and challenges to Yucca before Obama became president.
It's scary how much president's get away with doing unilaterally these days. They start wars (Libya, Serbia) without congressional authorization. They unilaterally put into effect laws that they couldn't get passed through congress (like the DREAM act). Congress has become so cowed that the only tool they have against the president, impeachment, is pretty much a dirty word.
I wish both parties in congress would start defending their institution more. Congress is supposed to be the source of laws and an obstacle to actions they deem appropriate. The president is supposed to make sure the laws are followed out, not make the laws himself.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"must be stored in isolation for tens of thousands of years"
I find this to be extremely silly and wrong
It does not need to be stored for tens of thousands of years
It needs to be stored until technological and political change turn it from a waste into a valuable material for reuse
Yucca mountain may or may not be a great/terrible solution. Argue amongst yourselves.
Here are the facts:
* Billions spent
* About 14 years late for initial use (scheduled for 1998)
* No sign that it was ever going to get used
I believe we need a solution. But I can't get to mad about scrapping a multi-billion dollar project that looks doomed to failure.
It's interesting that Nevada was quite happy to accept the money, the jobs, the opportunities provided from building the repository. Once it came to actually USING it, there was shock and dismay all around. If they don't want it there after all, I would think it would be only equitable to ask for a refund of the funds spent.
Just another example of how this president assumes and everyone seems to agree that he can do as he wishes without worrying about the rest of the government.
Have a good look at the Executive orders he's written in order to accomplish what he's wanted without getting things approved by the other branches of the government.
Obama isn't to blame for this. The OP ignores the fact that the Yucca project has been in trouble long before Obama was on the political landscape. Use of it was initially blocked before anyone even knew who Obama was. Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit! called "Nukes, Hybrids and Lesbians" which called out all years of different tactics that were blocking the use of the site for its intended purpose. That episode aired in 2007, one year before Obama was even elected into office. Penn and Teller pointed to all kinds of NIMBY groups and the complaints they put forth over the years...like the fact that nobody had tested to see how well the site would do in a flood. (Mind you, it's a mountain...in the middle of a desert.) Did it become official on Obama's watch? Sure. But the funeral isn't where the murder took place. Yucca was dead long before now.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
This rubble belongs on Fox News, not "news for nerds".
The fear of nuclear energy is another case of how the left become anti science crowd.
JAM
My first ten years as a working professional engineer was as a plant staff, NOT CONTRACTOR, Engineer at a two unit commercial nuclear plant. IF you are unwilling to learn about and understand the implications of the body politic on something as important as energy policy, you do not deserve to be included with those of us truly in the nerd status.
[AND yes, I stay anonymous for a damn good reason, I AM still employed in the energy industry.]
this site should exist in the first place? the nuclear chemistry behind reprocessing is viable and has been utilized for decades to convert spent fuel into reusable nuclear fuel. this just sounds like a lobby of large energy companies got together and concluded it was easier to bury the waste and forget about it than it was to handle it like responsible corporate citizens and ensure we arent wasting a finite resource.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They don't care. And they'll make toys and toothpaste out of it and sell it back.
Nevada was selected for the Nation's dangerous nuclear activities PRECISELY because it was barren and relatively unpopulated. Having polluted it with many nuclear blasts over decades, we effectively made it even MORE appropriate that we concentrate all the waste there.
Any civilian who moved there after the testing began in the 1940's has no right to complain; that's like moving into a house next to the airport (which you guy at a discount because of the noise) and then demanding the airport get shut down because it is depressing the value of your home
What could possibly be WORSE than putting all the waste into a single multi-billion dollar containment facility (designed by the nation's top scientists in the field) where it can be guarded and monitored? Oh... let's seeee.... the OBMA PLAN: let it accumulate in various containers at power plants and medical facilities all over the country with dubious monitoring/guarding.
Even if we were to abandon nuclear power (not gonna happen... we will always have nuclear-powered naval vessels) we would still produce lots of nuclear waste in industry and in the medical field, so the current no-plan plan is mind-blowingly stupid and short-sighted
The real problem is that nobody wants nuclear waste because it is... well, radioactive, duh!
This is the core problem with nuclear (fission) energy. There is no way to deal with the radioactive waste. Nobody wants it anywhere. Nobody wants the risk of disease. Everybody is a nuclear NIMBY.
Much better to look at other sources of energy which don't have this waste problem which is qualitatively much different than any other industrial process.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Most US nuclear waste (by volume) is NOT spent fuel rods (it IS by weight, because the stuff's so damn heavy). We produce lots and lots of radioactive waste in the medical field and in various industrial processes and NONE of that is going into a breeder reactor. The Nation needed a solution and pre-Obama we had a national bi-partisan solution into which we poured billions of dollars: Yucca Mountain. Post-Obama, we will need a solution and there will still be no better place. Like nearly everything else the man is "kicking down the road" it will have to be dealt with later (when it will be both more painful and more expensive) ... and, like his bloated spending, it will be the young dopes who supported him who will pay the biggest price in the latter halves of their lives.
Yup.
I followed this closely. To get re-elected, Reid needed it killed. And Obama needed Reid. And it never came up during the election.
By the way, the cost quoted is only the cost of the project. In addition, the USG is on the hook for another 12 B because DOE signed contracts to start taking fuel in 1998. The utilities are suing to recover their costs since 1998. Worst, this last cost does not come from the Waste Fund. It comes from general revenues.
I saw some numbers years ago, and there is a good chance I am wrong, but. I think a pound of uranium oxide was ~$10/$20 per pound in the early 2000s. Now, it might be ~$80/pound. I don't know if this refers to enriched or not. I think French reprocessed uranium oxide was ~$200/pound.
In the last 20 years, solar and wind have underpriced sophisticated nuclear reactors, and will probably underprice any fusion reactor.
It was known back in the mid-80s that the yucca mountain site had potential geological issues.
Yucca Mountain was an expensive non-solution for a problem that only exists because we choose not to solve it. Modern reactors have a very different waste profile, as well as the capability to safely consume spent fuel from existing reactors while producing energy. Spent fuel is not something that should be buried, but rather is a vast energy resource that should be tapped. We need a change in policy in order to allow this, and people need to educate themselves and get behind it.
The Nuclear Waste Fund currently has about $25B intended for dealing with the "waste". If even a small fraction of this were spent developing modern reactors like the LFTR, not only would we solve the waste problem in short order, but we would also be well on our way to replacing fossil fuels entirety. More information about the possibilities enabled by this technology can be found at Energy from Thorium.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAAzBArYdw bird strikes are on youtube.
"The saga of Yucca Mountain's creation and apparent demise, and of the seeming inability of the courts to prevent the Obama administration from unilaterally nullifying the decades-old statutory framework for Yucca"
It's Nevada who is objecting to using the site as a nuclear waste dump.
AccountKiller
Keiper's paragraph and the source artile by Adam White in the New Atlantis fail to acknowledge the central reasons for the failuer of the Yucca Mountain repository project - the site was singled out in 1987 solely as an exercise in political expediency. The Nevada site was picked because, of all the sites being examined at the time, Yucca was located in a politically vulnerable state. Nevada had no clout in either house of Congress. The state had just lost its senior senator, HowardCannon, who lost his seat and was replaced by a freshman in the minority party. Sen. Harry Reid was in the beginning of his first term and had no influence (yet). States with other (and some would argue better) sites were protected by powerful members of Congress (House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, House Majority Leader Tom Foley of Washington, Senate Energy Committee Chairman J. Bennett Johnston of Lousiana, and the list goes on and on). Yucca was singled out in 1987 not because it was the best site or even a safe and suitable one. It was the easiest one from a political standpoint. The prevailing thought was at the time that it didn't matter whether the site was suitable - DOE would just have to make it work. And that, my dear Watson, is what ultimately killed Yucca. Politics came around full circle in 2008, with Nevada having clout in Congress and with an Administration willing to look for a better solution.
Yucca mountain was never intended to be a nuclear repository. Rather, it was a covert black project for the secret undergound tunnel system of the United States. The government does not spend 30 years on something without a purpose in the end. Anyhow, it was great getting those extra funds for the black project officially on the books, but they are a drop in the bucket comapred to the black budget funds that are allocated.
No to Nuclear
No to Coal
No to Oil
No to Natural Gas
What does this administration think the US will use for energy in the future, magic?
Source?
Oh, to live on yucca mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons
You can't be twenty on yucca mountain
Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon
You're leaving there too soon
In the long run this "could" (though admittedly probably won't) be a good thing. Simply taking our nuclear waste and burying it has never been a good idea. From what I understand "Nuclear Waste" can be reprocessed back into usable fuel. A vast majority of what we call "nuclear waste" is still quite usable fuel, it simply is contaminated with elements that make it difficult/dangerous to use. Nuclear reprocessing can remove these contaminants and with some additional steps return the fuel to usable condition. The part of the fuel that can't be used looses 99.9% of its radioactivity after 40 years. It is a tad more expensive than just throwing it in a hole, but it vastly decreases the amount of nuclear waste, newer technologies have the hope of making it cheaper than throwing it in a hole, and it decreases the need for mining. The only issue I believe is that the nuclear industry has been wrapped in so much red tape & politics that it is next to impossible to do in the US, so much so that there has been talk of shipping our "waste" to other countries to have them reprocess it.
For disestablishment of NASA and Departments of Commerce and Agriculture.
And the people rushed into the streets of the hamlets, towns and cities across 'America' in rejoice of the blessed news. :)
Let the nuke industry house the fuel until THEY find a way to deal with it!
This is just another manufactured chicken little scenario, just like the bank bailouts. Create a crisis which can only be 'solved' with a taxpayer-funded bailout.
It's bad enough there is a cap on liability if they screw up.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Um, spent nuclear fuel is not waste. It is actually more fissionable material. Only an idiot would bury it. The french reprocess their nuclear fuel because they are sane, since Jimmy Carter we have been on the other side of the spectrum. When you separate the actinides from the rest you actually will have something that will decay below natural uranium in radioactivity in a relatively short period of time, say 400 years or so. We should use the money to build liquid chlorine fast reactors and burn up the spent fuel to make energy, not bury something worth more then gold per ounce into the ground. Fissionable fuel has this wonderful property that it makes more fuel, it truly has the Midas touch. A light water reactor only burns around a few percent, leaving around 98% of the energy in the fuel. Of course the neutron damage to a solid fuel element means we have to completely remake the thing before we can use it, and all the short half life isotopes mean you have to do it robotically. With a liquid fueled solution like a molten salt reactor you can continuously reprocess the fuel and use extremely high percentages of the fuel.
I never understood what people have against reprocessing. The plutonium from a reactor is pretty much worthless for making bombs. It is not P-239, but usually has multiple more neutrons and is not desirable if you want to make a bomb. I suppose they are afraid that the infrastructure could be re-purposed, but reactor grade plutonium is super crappy for making bombs. I suppose people aren't rational about nukes, so I shouldn't be surprised.
(I'm reposting this as myself, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in)
Um, spent nuclear fuel is not waste. It is actually more fissionable material. Only an idiot would bury it. The french reprocess their nuclear fuel because they are sane, since Jimmy Carter we have been on the other side of the spectrum. When you separate the actinides from the rest you actually will have something that will decay below natural uranium in radioactivity in a relatively short period of time, say 400 years or so. We should use the money to build liquid chlorine fast reactors and burn up the spent fuel to make energy, not bury something worth more then gold per ounce into the ground. Fissionable fuel has this wonderful property that it makes more fuel, it truly has the Midas touch. A light water reactor only burns around a few percent, leaving around 98% of the energy in the fuel. Of course the neutron damage to a solid fuel element means we have to completely remake the thing before we can use it, and all the short half life isotopes mean you have to do it robotically. With a liquid fueled solution like a molten salt reactor you can continuously reprocess the fuel and use extremely high percentages of the fuel.
I never understood what people have against reprocessing. The plutonium from a reactor is pretty much worthless for making bombs. It is not P-239, but usually has multiple more neutrons and is not desirable if you want to make a bomb. I suppose they are afraid that the infrastructure could be re-purposed, but reactor grade plutonium is super crappy for making bombs. I suppose people aren't rational about nukes, so I shouldn't be surprised.
Jeff | MemVance - Memory Advanced | View my blog on memory and study techniques
I'm still annoyed at President Carter. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. Brilliant. Because it's better to have huge stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of huge stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Between burner and breeder reactors, we could solve that in short order. There is enough nuclear waste in the US to fuel our country for 20-25 at current growth patterns.
In fairness, uranium is pretty cheap. Reprocessing it is more expensive (at the moment) than digging up more. If we switched over entirely to uranium based nuclear power for the entire planet, we'd have enough uranium in our oceans (using today's technology) to last us a couple hundred thousand years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
Naturally, the wikipedia article isn't complete. It misses the obvious "more uranium is washed into the ocean every year from erosion."
So with conventional tech, we have known energy reserves to last us a couple hundred thousand years. This ignores thorium, which tacks on another couple hundred thousand years (possibly a couple million, depends). If we can't get fusion or other far-out energy production working within the next million years.. Then yes, we're facing a serious energy crisis. Well, assuming we can't figure out how to economically mine asteroids or whatnot.
I interpret this as a general sentiment against creating long-term (as in, millions of years) nuclear waste that is "simply" thrown away somewhere -- despite substantial and expensive assurances that a good somewhere has been found. And I agree.
So deal with the waste, or don't produce such things in the first place -- though a bit late for that one. Sooner or later we have to deal with the consequences of making all this stuff, like reprocessing it while keeping bomb-grade material out of the hands of bad guys. Live and learn.
In other words, a better model is needed for the entire uranium (etc) life cycle. What's failing is handling it piecemeal, along with the concept that there's an "away", as in garbage throw-away, which is already far too ingrained in our consumer mentality. No wonder there's controversy as we slowly and painfully and expensively learn that this concept doesn't apply to nuclear waste.
I live near-ish the Hanford site and follow the news out here. Part of the problem is in the form of the waste; the stuff that most urgently needs to be dealt with here is radioactive sludge stored in single-shelled tanks, or double-shelled tanks that have started to leak into the second shell. A vitrification plant is being built to turn the sludge into stable glass logs for long-term storage. Once this is done, actually storing it will be simple compared to the liquid waste. Just find a dry cave to seal it in. But the NIMBYs still don't want it, so.. now what the hell do we do with it??
It's much safer to store waste nuclear materials at thousands of sites around the country, including universities. I feel ever so much safer knowing they are not centrally stored, protected by armed guards.
Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed; January 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Hollister, Nadis; 6 Page(s)
On the floor of the deep oceans, poised in the middle of the larger tectonic plates, lie vast mudflats that might appear, at first glance, to constitute some of the least valuable real estate on the planet. The rocky crust underlying these "abyssal plains" is blanketed by a sedimentary layer, hundreds of meters thick, composed of clays that resemble dark chocolate and have the consistency of peanut butter. Bereft of plant life and sparsely populated with fauna, these regions are relatively unproductive from a biological standpoint and largely devoid of mineral wealth.
Yet they may prove to be of tremendous worth, offering a solution to two problems that have bedeviled humankind since the dawn of the nuclear age: these neglected suboceanic formations might provide a permanent resting place for high-level radioactive wastes and a burial ground for the radioactive materials removed from nuclear bombs. Although the disposal of radioactive wastes and the sequestering of material from nuclear weapons pose different challenges and exigencies, the two tasks could have a common solution: burial below the seabed.
Also:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
...thus Yucca Mountain is also a bad idea. Sure, if we could magically teleport the nation's nuclear waste to the Nevada desert, that'd be a great place to store it. If we have to load it up on trains, the sheer number of things that can go wrong for perfectly innocent reasons is huge, never mind that nuclear trains are basically the ultimate cheap terrorist target (get ahold of schedule, sabotage tracks). Additionally, while train transit is cheap, secure transit that has 100% priority to override other trains and yet can't be on a regular schedule is not cheap, leaving the choice of either a drastic price bump or a giant unfunded mandate on the nation's railroads.
Maybe, maybe Yucca Mountain might be an okay idea for Nevada's nuclear stations (if any), or perhaps California's as well. Otherwise, no.
The problem of waste storage is the main objection to nuclear power. Some of our leaders don't want that problem to be solved (either by Yucca or by breeder reactors), because they don't want that objection to be overcome.
Never mind that nuclear power is the ultimate in green energy (no CO2 emissions, etc.); they oppose nuclear power in all forms. (Maybe they had proto-hippie parents who filled their minds with tales of glowing three-eyed fish.) If it's not an anemically low-energy-density source that can never hope to meet the needs of an energy-intensive civilization -- i.e., if it's not wind or solar -- it doesn't meet their definition of green.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You're right, but it's sad. The shuttle (and military programs like the F-35) wouldn't have been so expensive if assembled where it made economic sense to do so, instead of in the districts of the gladhanding-est congresscritters. If we could somehow terminate all wasteful pork projects, it would be such a boon to the economy that even those who directly benefit from the pork would be better off without it.
The other day I heard the umpteenth special interest group appeal to me to appeal to my congresscritter to not cut funding for some "vital" program, and it occurred to me that instead of being individuals that do and create and achieve, we've become a nation of squeaky wheels. (If each of these thousands of special interest groups convinces thousands of citizens to beg for funding, imagine what a nightmare it must be to be an elected official these days. While being bombarded with a constant cacophony of squeaking wheels -- you and your staff must politely listen and acknowledge each squeak -- how can one ever hope to concentrate on making sound policy? You can't, and that explains a lot. Worse, some leaders actually like being the figure to whom the squeaky wheels complain, and they encourage more squeaking.) The adage, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," is true if only one wheel is squeaking. If 200 million wheels are squeaking, the mechanic will rightly say "screw this" and go home.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
May I suggest we pile it there.
He is fully aware of the dangers of allowing the federal government free reign to do whatever they please.
The idiom is "free rein", as in "releasing the reins on a horse, which allows it to choose where it wants to go without the rider's control."
However, remarkably, in this specific context your nonstandard use makes sense, albeit with different semantics.
Is this president and his administration complete fucking idiots? How many more screw ups will this administration cause. The nuclear waste will not be dumped openly in a fucking whole. The waste is already in separate containers and these will go into larger thick sealed containers which are neatly placed inside. It's not like nyc sanitation department dumping the garbage shit all over the ground. We need a place for now to store these until we find another use for these nuclear rods or to build another storage site, yes it's safe for a few centuries. But instead, this community organizer cancels this project and we leave the nuclear waste lying around all over the u.s, how nice, i guess he really want's to be a Russian leaving nuclear material lying around for anybody to take, or ex-kgb selling parts on the black market.
No wonder this country has become such a shithole, considering parts of this country looks like a third world shithole, detroit anybody. STOP ELECTING THESE FUCKING UNQUALIFIED IDIOTS INTO HOUSE, SENATE, AND EXECUTIVE BRANCH!!
1. A friend of mine was on a team that was tasked with confirming the first hydrology study of Yucca Mountain that was used to select it for nuclear waste storage. Their results showed significant risk to the water table over the 10,000 year use period. Their results were tables and another confirmation study was done that looked remarkably like the first study.
2. A relative of mine works at WED - Disney's design firm. He was asked to bid on a project for some branch of the government; I think it was the Department of Energy. The project was to come up with a combination of sculture and architecture for Yucca Mountain that was so primordially frightening that it would keep humans away for 10,000 years even if they couldn't read warning and no matter what culture had evolved.
Just some fun data points for my fellow /. community members.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
to have anything other than "A new article in The New Atlantis"? if you submitted an old article, would they reject it out of hand?
These were just conversation. I have no idea whether NDAs applied or anything. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. But, yeah, the guy who told me about the hydrology said that the first study didn't consider the effects of shear or of water leaching up. Apparently it was a strait static analysis of the statistics of water getting in and out of the storage area based on its current configuration and gravity.
Here's a tiny tip of the iceberg of design work on Yucca mountain: http://www.desertspace.org/wwwroot/warning_sign/index.html. All I can say is that there was money available to build granite statues and icons of demons or whatever might scare the shit out of people. I thought it was a REALLY GREAT idea given a 10,000 year timeframe.
Sorry, I'm not invested enough to get clearance from friends and relations to name them.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
Legislature, Judicial, Executive; this is properly described by a single word: tyranny.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
60 billion for Hurricane Sandy reconstruction.
What if N.J. Oyster Creek Nuke Fukushima'd, (was within a foot of flooding the main cooling pumps) how much would that cost? Stop your nukes before the industry uses its free "accident" card and turns us Japanese.