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Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go
mdsolar writes with news of a plan to move radioactive waste from nuclear plants. The U.S. government is looking for trains to haul radioactive waste from nuclear power plants to disposal sites. Too bad those trains have nowhere to go. Putting the cart before the horse, the U.S. Department of Energy recently asked companies for ideas on how the government should get the rail cars needed to haul 150-ton casks filled with used, radioactive nuclear fuel. They won't be moving anytime soon. The latest government plans call for having an interim test storage site in 2021 and a long-term geologic depository in 2048. No one knows where those sites will be, but the Obama administration is already thinking about contracts to develop, test and certify the necessary rail equipment.
Exactly right said Gnork the Neanderthaler. Let's not try to invent something like a wheel or anything. Who needs those? Where would you go and what would you use them for??
...there's plenty of money left over to solve these trivial issues. Right?
Then what was running nuclear power plants with no way to get the waste to disposal sites and no disposal sites (and no concept of how to keep a disposal site safe for more generations than have used the English language)?
These same people would be complaining that it was a waste since there was no way to transport anything to the repository. unlike the complaining idiots here, most people are capable of doing multiple things at once. And since there are a lot of people in the government, they can actually work on even more things.
Reminds me of the dystopian themed film "Snowpiercer" in reverse.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17...
Cue all the recent train explosion videos...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
--CF
Nuclear waste is regularly and safely carried by train in other countries.
Here's a video from 1984 of a crash test done in the UK on a train waste container:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It would be cheaper and likely completely safe to warehouse it in the US. The facility they set up to handle this prior to the political problems should have worked just fine.
But no one is going to be reasonable on the issue... so who can you pay to take it off our hands?
Find a nuclear power with capacity and will to deal with the problem. The US used to have this sort of capability... but we're a nation divided. And because of that... we are incapable of dealing with even simple problems.
It all could be resolved with a little mutual respect and consideration. But again... that's not going to happen. We don't respect each other. A large number of Americans hold large numbers of Americans in contempt. And until we let each other live and let live... we will remain at war with ourselves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There is no reason the design of a waste hauling train should wait until a site is identified, thus delaying the removal of the waste from many scattered temporary storage sites. The hauling design and the site identification can proced in parallel.
Indeed: The characteristics of the hauling solution may limit the selection of sites to which the waste could be hauled with acceptable levels of safety. That would argue for the design to PRECEED site selection.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The us/mexican border. ( the unguarded part )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the rule used to be up to 1/8 black (Octoroon) is still black. This may not be current practice. I think almost all "black" Americans are actually mixed race. (Notwithstanding recent immigrants). Maybe it's a "self-identification" thing? Not sure why it should matter.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
government hate.
Seriously. They know they will need something, so they are looking for ideas. They aren't purchasing them, they are looking ahead.
Something the government does rather well, but you knuckle heads can't possible understand that.
Well, the government used to do it very well, now there are fanatics in office that just stop any forward looking planning that doesn't jive with there religious views.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What about reprocessing it on-site? Not all of US Nuclear plants' nuclear "waste" is actually waste.
Long-term: nuclear energy is our species' only real option, especially if we want to get off the planet. The sooner we start making sensible and informed decisions about energy, the better.
Or we could just build fast neutron reactors instead. That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Oh wait, it's MDsolar again.
If we can drill big holes really deep in the desert and explode weapons tests there, I feel it is likely we can also bury waste in deep holes there, just as well.
Seriously folks, what is the big deal?
Oh, right. Politics. Especially right wing nutjobs.
Obstructionism incarnate
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.
Reprocessing's been done, but it's quite messy and there's no demand for the recovered fuel. Making MOX is much more difficult and expensive than making standard uranium fuel. It's cheaper, easier and probably safer to just store the spent fuel in dry casks until a suitable disposal site is found. Fortunately, those casks last a long time.
That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Even with modern fast reactor designs running on metallic fuel, some reprocessing is still necessary, though it's nowhere near as involved, messy and proliferation-prone as PUREX and aqueous processes. The most tantalizing prospect for fast reactors running on metallic fuel, especially for systems which incorporate fission product off-gassing and capture while in operation, is the ability to achieve extremely high burn up, which allows this reprocessing step to only be performed at very infrequent intervals (say once every 30-40 years). This means the power plant doesn't need its own attached reprocessing facility (as the IFR project proposed), but instead the investment in the reprocessing facility can be shared, concentrated into a single, well secured and efficient facility for, say, the whole country.
Reprocessing is an expensive task and I doubt it can be justified money-wise to do it on site for all or most sites.
Achille Talon
Hop!
We need a recycling plant with buffer storage. the whole "disposal" paradigm, including guarding the waste for hundreds of thousands of years, is predicated on the idea that the 95% of unburned fuel that keeps the stuff hot for so long is something that should be thrown away while it slowly decays. It should be recovered and re-used, so that the actual waste remaining after that is trivial. If we used Yucca Mountain as the buffer storage, an accompanying recycling plant would mean lots of good jobs for Nevadans.
While I agree with you, most humans are neither sensible nor informed...
This is the great flaw with democracy and allowing everyone to have a say. Most people have no idea what is going on and frankly don't really want a say, they just want to watch American Idol.
That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Even with modern fast reactor designs running on metallic fuel, some reprocessing is still necessary, though it's nowhere near as involved, messy and proliferation-prone as PUREX and aqueous processes. The most tantalizing prospect for fast reactors running on metallic fuel, especially for systems which incorporate fission product off-gassing and capture while in operation, is the ability to achieve extremely high burn up, which allows this reprocessing step to only be performed at very infrequent intervals (say once every 30-40 years). This means the power plant doesn't need its own attached reprocessing facility (as the IFR project proposed), but instead the investment in the reprocessing facility can be shared, concentrated into a single, well secured and efficient facility for, say, the whole country.
I'd mod you guys up as "Informative" if I could. The info is appreciated, thanks! :)
From what I read when I was into jazz biographies, it absolutely has meaning beyond sociology. There were all sorts of hierarchies within the "one drop" gene pool having to do with trying to be at the top of the non-white heap. Hell, in my lifetime, only maybe 15 years ago, I witnessed a black woman I was hanging with (who had medium-light skin) look across the bar at a very dark skinned man and make an extremely negative comment about it. Her white boyfriend didn't skip a beat and said to her, "Well now, that's the pot calling the kettle black." She was not amused.
It may sound far-fetched, but an electromagnetic rail gun would be feasible. Especially if the waste could be made into smaller units. Just aim it into the sun! No more problem. As a side benefit, the technology learned from this could be used to perhaps shoot material into orbit to build spacecraft out THERE, where the high cost of escaping the gravity well of earth would not be present.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
put as much as possible in Harry Reid's house, fill his bathtub, swimming pool refrigerator, freezer, and leave a note saying "Thanks for Yucca Mountain"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It all could be resolved with a little mutual respect and consideration. But again... that's not going to happen. We don't respect each other. A large number of Americans hold large numbers of Americans in contempt. And until we let each other live and let live... we will remain at war with ourselves.
It's called "divide and conquer" politics. While the voting public is too busy calling each other "teabaggers" and "hippy communists," the politicians are fueling the fire with sound-bites on the one hand, while taking special interest money with the other, and then using this huge distraction and cash flow to systematically destroy our democracy, our institutions, and our government.
It put North Haverbrook on the map.
You want to keep spent fuel. It's not really "waste" - the anti-nuclear lobby just likes to call it that to hype up opposition. Current light water reactor designs use only about 5% of the U-235 in the fuel rods, and only about 1% of the total energy extractable from the uranium. That's why spent fuel remains "hot" for so long - the vast majority of the energy it contains is still there, and is emitted over time as radioactive energy as it decays.
So in essence, the "waste" is really fuel containing 100x as much energy as you've already extracted from it. If you send it to a breeder reactor, it can use the "waste" as fuel thus extracting more energy. The "waste" from that process converts it into a form which light water reactors can use again as fuel. You extract a much larger fraction of the energy from the original uranium, and the end product of all this would only remain "hot" for a few centuries instead of dozens of millenia.
"OMG - this solves the nuclear waste problem! Why aren't we doing this?" Unfortunately, breeder reactors create weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. That's the only reason we don't do it - it's a purely political reason, not technical. President Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. in the interest of non-proliferation (the military still can and does use them).
I won't judge whether Carter made the correct call - that's a political decision. But you can see why you do not want to be selling spent fuel to a country you frequently butt heads with on the geopolitical arena. First, you're selling them cheap energy (that we ourselves choose not to tap for political reasons). Second, you're selling them the means to make more nukes.
WTF are you talking about? The constitution places no limits on freedom of the people. In fact, the US constitution is specifically a contract allowing government to do certain things. They are automatically barred from others but the bill of rights was put in place to ensure some key elements never took hold. Government seems to be wanting to forget that now but it is the entire premise of the federalist papers and the anti-federalist papers which discussed this very fact in detail and persuaded unwilling states to join in.
I would say that when you believe what you just wrote above this, you would not understand why people who have a clue reject your assumptions as an attack on principle. The biggest amount of bullshit about all this is if your way is really better, you can amend the constitution and make it legitimate instead of crying about how inferior everyone who disagrees with you are because they don't magically see or understand something that goes completely contrary to the US constitution and the history surrounding it.
No one should ever compromise the integrity of the US constitution. Amend the damn thing if you think it needs changed.
Yucca became impossible when USGS scientists fabricated data. Now, we can never really know about any of the other science done there. The whole thing has to start over and it can't be Yucca because the temptation would be too strong to try to use some study or other that has already been done. Back to the drawing board. Mississippi says it does not want it. http://www.sunherald.com/2014/...
I live in Conway, Arkansas, and it most definitely NOT a shithole. I'd rather be here than just about anywhere else.
Folks: What would happen if instead of trying to figure out where to send the waste to via rail; we would have a portable vitrification system that can be sent to different power plants via rail. Vitrification (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... for the wikipedia article) could possible be implemented via a portable facility that can be transported by rail. The portable vitrification facility would go from power plant to power plant and vitrify the waste to a glass like substance, which should be safer to handle and store. If all you are railroading around the country is a vitrification plant; there should be no problem with local communities. All you are moving around is an electric (or gas) furnace and associated support equipment. If that derails or is involved in an accident, then it would be no worse than just a piece of machinery such as a lathe or miling machine falling off of a train.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
You evidently haven't read most laws that pass have you? They read more like program patches than full programs. Things like "strike 'the article' in part 24 of public law 93-025 and insert 'the code'.... etc...
To really get the gist you should be going to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) where the real rubber meets the road. Laws are implemented in the CFR. For example, the law that allows FEMA to do what it does is the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Assistance Act (Public Law 93-288) as amended. The CFR that implements it is Title 44 of the Code of Federal Regulations (44CFR). The Stafford Act has changed hundreds of times while the CFR reflects those changes every October. Trust me, you would go bonkers trying to read the law and all the amendments that go with it without the CFR.
Every law that has an implementation (most laws) has a CFR. Want to know about allowable expenses? 2CFR. Department of Transportation workings? 49CFR. The list is endless.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
So we can just let the nuclear waste, instead of people, circle the rail line until a destination is found. Or where ever the train happens to break down/derail. Then that becomes the new repository for all nuclear waste by default.
It is in no-one's interests to have a spent fuel containment accident such as the one threatening Fukushima right now (fortunately TEPCO are working on it) so reducing this threat is a really good step no matter if you are pro or anti nuclear.
Planning infrastructure for long term containment is going to come down to the science of the facility and the DOE has found that Yucca mountain is not acceptable in terms of their 'Defense in Depth' policy to containment. Science conducted by the Australia's CSIRO found that granite has the capacity to capture radioisotopes leaking from a facility via ground water.
Additionally, any long term, development of any future reactor technology will depend on a place to store an manage fuel. This is the type of long term planning required to manage these types of materials and is a real positive step to resolving a critical infrastructure issue. Train lines can be built later when a suitable location for a spent fuel containment facility can be assessed based on good science and engineering practices. Both pro and anti nuclear folk should be supporting these forms of initiatives.
Any development of new reactor technology is going to depend on this form of infrastructure because implementing a new reactor technology goes beyond a flippant "just use xyz' technology". Our generation may just have to face that we have been handed down a few turds in terms of energy technology because they weren't forced into thinking long-term the way our generation has been forced to. The responsible thing to do is for our generation to try to solve those problems so we have additional technology options available in the mix.
There is nothing wrong with using nuclear in the future if it is done properly, but it needs proper infrastructure to work and any honest assessment of today's nuclear industry will reveal that it could be done a whole lot better. In the meantime use of solar, wind and geothermal today are a requirement to develop good nuclear infrastructure in the future.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If it's nuclear waste, it's best if where it goes stays unknown, or a secret to the majority of the population. And there should be many such relatively secret places, so if that one is found out and fanfared all over the place, you still have options to quickly relocate. In fact employees working on one site should not know about where the others are, and knowing all of them should be equivalent to knowing the codes required for nuclear launch sequences, only the very top officials knowing. Obviously these places are in the middle of fucking nowhere, somewhere in the desertous rockies. And they are all military sites, so with that excuse google maps can exclude them, without knowing whether they are air bases or waste storage places, in fact you can have a clown show of an air base put on to pretend for the Chinese spy satellites that it's a different military site than a waste disposal site deep underground.
This is the sort of thing that Tiger Woods got in some trouble over a while back sometimes identifying he was black and other times asian on forms when he was in school / college (he is half black, half asian).
Apropo sex, I saw this awesome hottie on chaturbate, sexy face and lips and eyes, nice hair, awesome tits, but then she points the camera down, and oh, hell no, she's got a dick! Crap, click... It's like I don't care if she doesn't have the nice face, lips, eyes, hair or tits, but she got to have a pussy, dude!
Pale nigga here! Represent. I too am black, except the tone of my skin is very light.
There is something to be said about libertarianism too. As the government and regulations tend to be excessive, without allowing freedom of expression. I worked at a hillbilly like places, that were small and things like OSHA regulations were not present, in an anal retentive way, such as mandatory steel toe boots with metatarsals, mandatory safety glasses, rubber gloves, apron, hard hat, ear plugs, and all kinds of fucked up clown gear. One of the worst thing at any basic job is having to use steel toe boots, and not be allowed tennis shoes. What a fucking waste that is. Tennis shoes make all the difference in how tired you get during a day of standing on your feet, even if you have to dance around chemicals, or nasty things, or even tow motors of heavy objects. As in a steel toe or a hardhat ain't gonna do much if a 2 ton skid of bulk metal drops onto me, it's more important to be able to jump quick like a cat, away from any incident that might happen. Libertarians don't want retarded government restrictions you call "cooperation," as in, the government knows better what's best for you, and charges you too for it. Fuck overbearing government like that. If I had to join any political party, it'd be hands down the tea baggers.
That is the most retarded post I have ever read and I am in a "hillbilly" state too! I would go along with your proposition if you would sign a waver that prevented you from suing anyone or making any claim what-so-ever including but not limited to SSDI, worker's compensation, health care or life insurance. In short, if you took FULL responsibility for your own carelessness. Oh, and when your carelessness causes death or injury to others you will take full responsibility for their costs too right? When your carelessness causes damage to plant equipment you'll pay for that too right? And I figure while you are taking responsibility for your actions you may as well pay for lost production while they are cleaning up the mess you make on the plant floor.
All because you feel uncomfortable in the safety gear you are required to wear for the job, you want to endanger yourself and more importantly, others. OSHA exists because they are needed to prevent companies from endangering their employees seeking profits above safety. Just look into Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in Raleigh County, WV for an example of profits over safety in action.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
...ask yourself this: would you really want 1600 tons of radioactive potential death rolling through your city just waiting for an errant snowflake to land on the line to derail the whole kaboodle?
Say it doesn't happen. Go on. I dare you. Those were just a few I dug out from a cursory google search.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
There were 38 rectors cancelled during construction in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... That is money spent that does not show up costs for power. Now-a-days, utilities are charging ahead of power production then cancelling. Nice scam if you can get the state regulators to go along with it. Federal loan guarantees are ripe for abuse as well.
How about the Bridge to Nowhere?
Table-ized A.I.
The corporations are chartered creatures of government often being given passes by government rather than being held fully liable for their sins.
very effective topics.
Let me tell you the story Of a man named Charlie On a tragic and fateful day He put ten cents in his pocket, Kissed his wife and family Went to ride on the MTA
Charlie handed in his dime At the Kendall Square Station And he changed for Jamaica Plain When he got there the conductor told him, "One more nickel." Charlie could not get off that train.
Did he ever return, No he never returned And his fate is still unlearn'd He may ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston He's the man who never returned. http://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/c...
I love the Slashdot headline "Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go". A most provocative issue of nuclear energy, stir in a bit of Fed-Fumbling with the idea of a ghost train and you have the perfect movie plot and Internet meme.
Drawing on most recent experience with politics in America, the way illegal immigration is being "handled" -- I conclude this announcement means that the Nuclear Ghost Train has Already Left The Station.
It is currently circumnavigating the continent. Soon it will pass through Your Town.
Folks like me who live near the tracks know of ones like it, those trains that pass through in the dead of night and (creepily) did not blow their horns, for you awaken to the low rumble of wheels that seems to go on forever. Yeah, those.
Every night the Ghost Train pulls onto a siding somewhere and dark figures with flashlights roll up and couple another boxcar. By 2015 the Train will be pulling more than half of all spent nuclear fuel in North America, and nuclear plant operators will sleep that much easier at night, since relieving them of this awful responsibility is the ONE thing the Federal Government promised to deliver all along.
It's going through Tennessee tonight. Listen for it. Pleasant dreams. Is this so farfetched? Could some one come up with any other examples of government action just as ludicrous? I see a lot of hands raised here.
I see a few others have brought up radioactive train movies, some of them with plots blatantly obvious and goofy. After all we're talking about a system of containment so secure that even a head-on with another train would roll the casks off the train and dint them slightly, as they wait to be picked up again. Cue up video of protesters dressed like skeletons with nuclear death symbols who caught a whiff of nuclear transport and scream "Not in our town!" as thin-skinned railroad tanker cars of chlorine gas, sodium hydroxide and cresol pass by.
If you're protesting, do not step out in front of the Nuclear Ghost Train. It has been instructed not to stop under any circumstances. Cleanup crews are on standby in all major cities and your bodies will never be found.
The Nuclear Ghost train does exist in a movie, but it's not a goofy disaster movie. It is a Argentinian film entitled Moebius [1996] made by Gustavo Mosquera. "Recent stories, fears and oblivion seen through a metaphor. A 30-passenger convoy vanishes in the closed circuit of the Buenos Aires underground system. Research will be initiated towards finding the cause of this dematerialization. A young topologist (surfaces mathematician) leads the investigation based on some lost maps and technical data sheets. He cannot find the whereabouts of the old scientist who designed the intricate weft of the subway web, until the unexpected aid from a young girl will ease the obtention of the first clues. Everything seems to be futile, but a random event that will risk his life gets him into an impossible train, were he will face up the amazing final revelation." This is an amazing movie though you may need to resort to [extreme] [methods] to see it.
Never mind those too-obvious disaster films. Moebius [1996] is the perfect one to take in while you ponder the meaning of the Perpetually Moving Nuclear Ghost Train.
Which has already left the station.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
We had a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, until the Obama administration shut it down. Billions of dollars and 30 years of development down the toilet, and yes, that is entirely on the Obama administration.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
So we are going to pay for a nuclear freight train to nowhere?
Couldn't we instead use the money to improve the existing rail network to encourage humans to use it?
The rail service in this country is such a joke that most people choose to pay between 3 and 4 dollars a gallon for gas, increasing pollution and funding the arms buildup in the middle east.
Spent fuel pools can go critical. The waste has a high enough concentration.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/new...
"(1998) Beginning in June, the Energy Department plans to haul nuclear waste from 41 foreign countries by rail through California, Nevada, Utah and Idaho for temporary storage at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Plans call for the shipments to begin in Concord, Calif."
At least it was protested against, any bets the trips went as scheduled maybe a little later?
A little more Google-fu and you can read about all the nuclear WAHEADS being TRUCKED around the U.S.
http://www.thegovernmentrag.co...
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
Solve that which makes Nuclear Waste leathal? Then create a process that removes the "Radio Activity?" Just a thought.
Read the post you're replying to.
Long term storage is in dry casks, not spent fuel pools, which are only needed for short term storage.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'd rather sell it to the Chinese or the Indians.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The post has a mistake. The spent fuel can go critical.
Unlikely, and definitely not on fast neutrons which is what's relevant for a fast reactor.
No mistake. I said "You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.". Which is true, without a moderator even fresh LWR fuel won't go critical, let alone spent fuel.
Do you even bother reading comments or just shoot off your anti-nuclear points as often and as fast as you can?
What sort of neutrons do you suppose are involved in a meltdown? Self-moderation of the fuel is always a danger. You don't know what you are writing about.
What sort of neutrons do you suppose are involved in a meltdown?
What happens in a meltdown is irrelevant to my original post, which was referring to use of spent LWR fuel in a fast reactor and had nothing to do with meltdowns of any kind. Stop moving the goalposts.
But since you ask - in a meltdown like Fukushima? No neutrons. It was subcritical and the meltdown was caused by decay heat, as was Three Mile Island. Chernobyl was driven by thermal neutrons - it would have been subcritical on fast neutrons alone.
As you would know if you put a fraction of the effort into researching a subject as you do on talking about it.
That's not what the neutron detector at the Fukushima plant gate says. You wrote "the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical" which is incorrect.
The fact that material with less than 2% fissile content can't go critical on fast neutrons is easily calculated by looking at the well measured fission and absorption cross-sections for U-238, U-235 and Pu-239. There's a *reason* why fast reactors use fuel with fissile content of 15%-20%, despite the higher cost of doing so.
Everything that happened at Fukushima can be explained by loss of AC power -> loss of coolant -> decay heat driven meltdown -> containment failure due to containment pressure & temperature beyond design limits. The decay heat is quite large - tens of megawatts for hours to days after shutdown. There's absolutely no need to invoke criticality to explain what happened, and absolutely no evidence that there was any such criticality. And a detector at the gate certainly couldn't provide any such evidence as the cores were and are inside enough shielding to block the neutrons that result from full power operation. You know, to stop the workers from getting radiation poisoning from normal operations. Any neutron pulse large enough to be detected there would have had to come from a fission reaction large enough to pretty much level the entire site and kill everyone nearby.
And before you mention the spent fuel pools again, the fuel in those has been inspected and found to be intact. So no meltdown there.
The weird thing is that my original post was explaining why a particular nuclear solution *wasn't* a quick and easy answer. I'd have thought that'd be the kind of thing you'd agree with.
In a meltdown, "Recriticality also may be a concern if the control materials are left behind in the core and the relocated material breaks up in unborated water in the lower plenum." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... Neutrons were detected so perhaps you should revise your views. http://news.slashdot.org/story...
citation needed ...
because the broken window fallacy still holds
Indeed.
Using the Obama administration's own numbers, a couple years back, for how much they spent for each job "created or saved", and taking the US median income at the time for the cost->jobs destroyed estimator, I got about a 5:1 ratio. Five destroyed for each "created or saved".
Or more: Thats what would happen if they got the money by taxation. The other options are still worse.
The problem is that the VALUE for the government spending comes out of the economy somewhere else:
- If they tax it, they just suck it out directly.
- If they borrow it, it competes for investment money and real job creators don't get to create real jobs and/or have to close or downsize when their funding dries up. (This has an additional multiplier: They have to pay it back, with interest. So it kills still more jobs later.)
- If they print it, it devalues the other currency. The same number of dollars are spent, but less value is spent. Less jobs are funded as a result.
Unfortunately, the anonymous flaimng lefties only see the obvious jobs "created or saved" and not the "invisible men" laid off or not hired as a result.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
10CFR173, DOT specifications for shipping radioactive material, already has container and routing specifications for shipment of high level radioactive material. It has not been used for shipments of commercial fuel but has been used for shipments of special weapons material in the past. (very much a classified activity for the DoD)
As to where to ship, the answer is recycling. It is criminal that the U.S. does not recycle spent commercial nuclear fuel. There is still a lot of useful material in a spent fuel bundle but a buildup of fission products makes it unusable. Better to remove the useful material and seriously reduce the volume of material that has to be given long term disposal.
And, guess what, the technology is proven.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Fuel-Recycling/Processing-of-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/
Testing specs for a fissile material shipping container contain:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part071/part071-0073.html
A couple of youtube links showing the type of catastrophic accident testing that spent fuel casks must pass before being design accepted for shipment of high level nuclear material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0-hjHDizA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JhruRobRI
Just trying to add some perspective on what would be required in shipping spent commercial nuclear fuel for either reprocessing or long term storage.
Steven
NRRPT/RCT
The basic answer on reprocessing is that it is a proliferation risk that should not be undertaken. Your issue about fissile content is a little mixed up since breeders have fertile blankets in some designs. Probably you'd want to reprocess to make those, but it isn't a fissile content issue.
Elections have consequences.
Because labeling Obama as "black" fits the liberal progressive social agenda here in America. Problem is - 98% of the black vote went to a a president who didn't do shit for his own people once he ascended to the presidency.
Superior? You mean "dominant"? Or, did you mean pigmentation that is dark will tend to show through a lighter shade? Or, was the whole reason for your post to show how political correctness is evil?
--- Say something clever. Pretend it was me. Thanks.
Amazing thread. By amazing, I mean the number of you who went off on the race tangent when faced with a nuclear waste issue. Amazing. It's like /. is only read/posted to by ________ , any more.
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You're right. Nuclear power, or even renewable power as it's happening in Germany these days, may be too cheap to meter in the sense of having a flat fee system instead, once you got the infrastructure in place, just like with broadband Internet or a lot of cellphone services. The limit, in this sense would be the "bandwidth" of your electric wires coming into your house, which sets a maximum power rate, and then you can buy different plans based on the fatness or gauge + voltage (whether it's 110, 220, 330 or 440V) of your power connection, just like you can get different broadband Internet flat rates based on the connection speed. In essence your "meter" is your bandwidth, which puts a cap on the maximum possible amount extractable even when on at 100%, so the setup is not vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons overconsumption issues.
I would love to sign such a thing. Suing employers is very low on my list of priorities, as in, you're welcome not to show up to work, and the consequences are mild - like no job stability history. The only imaginable thing is when you get attacked, but that would also stand in public life, nobody else is responsible if you go around in public and get yourself hurt, but if they attack you, it's different. Similar things of the employer is not responsible for the employees safety would kind of apply, as in if it were a public place, however there are traps and gotchas that employers with decades of experience know about, and you don't, so when they tell you to do something or wear something, you have to rely on them for guidance, else withholding such thing they'd be considered attacking you. It's complicated. But sometimes things are obviously plain and simple. Like how will a hardhat that's very hot in the summer gonna protect you from chemicals or overhead cranes dropping 5 tons of metal on you - if anything they block your vision to quickly react and jump like a cat. Yet some chemical or metal handling employers mandate hardhats irregardless, and you're the one who gets to suffer from the unnecessary and stupid clown gear.
Yeah Obama is like fuzzy logic, gray area, neither black, nor white, but both black and white at the same time. But when it comes to people, we usually don't call the ones in between gray people, but creole, or caramel, or brown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Creolization is the term used with people similar to how perfectly white sugar gets caramelized, and brown, halfway between being pure white crystal sugar, or pure black carbon char. To see pure black carbon char from sugar, watch videos of concentrated sulfuric acid reacting with crystal sugar, like So there too, the intermediate stage between white and black is not something gray, but brown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Pretty neat, isn't it?
Yeah they should amend the constitution on the 2nd amendment part, on that besides the right to possess weapons for self defense, with the possibility of shooting your foot off, they should allow full substance abuse, with the ability to fuck yourself up, but then you don't get into situations like going to the doctor asking for antibiotics, and the doctors deny it from you, instead they send you to the nut house, in their best judgment of what's best for you. Hey even if you're crazy you may not belong in the nut house, but instead should be able to get antibiotics, which is not instilled into law as of yet. If anything lack of controlled substances and allowing full substance abuse would lessen the burden on the welfare state by the retards, as they would fuck themselves up and die quicker. Nobody forces you to fuck yourself up with drugs. There is peer pressure, and bullying, but in general you are in charge of your destiny, you're the captain of your soul, not the government, just like the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh recited it in the poem Invictus at his execution. How many fucking idiots do we have to pay for to keep in prison on a mere "found" some bits of drugs on him. What's the big fucking deal? If he wants to fuck himself up, let him do it, you can deny employment from him over it, but you don't have the right to make the decision of what's best for him, that is fully his turf.
If you're a homosexual male then that might be your thing. And as almost every female is a lesbian - some naturally, some need alcohol - a surprise of a dick from a tranny would not be such a surprise to them, would not be such an instant rejection. I feel for these trannies for being born the way they are, and constant rejection they get, especially from homophobic males, as they are people too and every person in beautiful, but if they learn to hang mostly with the females, females in general have more capacity to love everyone (of course with the downside that they have more capacity to hate and be psycho too.)
I wouldn't. And they don't have to do it instantly, and in large quantity, but make a carrier out of it for some soldiers coming home from overseas.
It's always the retards that moan for laxer controlled substance laws. I say, like Pontius Pilate, give the people what they want, if they wanna be fucked in the head from being constantly high. let them be constantly high. Then you can bitch at them for being so, and harass them with words, but you can't force them with laws.
Or just stick in an simple power limiter which trips a breaker if you go over the limit :) Trouble is, our current energy system originated in the days of yore when we had to consume significant amounts of fuel (and thus cost) to produce a unit of energy. Our energy markets are geared towards it, our grid control is geared towards and people don't like changing systems with lots of investment behind them and which aren't necessarily broken.
If we were building a new zero-carbon grid green field-style, it might well be cheaper to just lose the stupid meters (and spending time reading them, processing them and collecting the varying amounts), put in a simple circuit breaker and be done with it.