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Safety Review Finds Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site Was Technically Sound
siddesu writes: The U.S. Department of Energy's 2008 proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was technically sound, a report by the NRC says. However, the closed-down project is unlikely to revive, as its staff has moved on, and there are few funds available to restart it. "With the release of the final two volumes of a five-part technical analysis, the commission closed another chapter on the controversial repository nearly five years after President Barack Obama abandoned the project, and more than a quarter century after the site was selected. While the staff recommended against approving construction, the solid technical review could embolden Republicans who now control both houses of Congress and would like to see Yucca Mountain revived."
Even if the Nuclear Waste Repository was located on the Moon it would be too close for some people. This was an opportunity lost.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That is politics for you.
Fact is no one wants the waste near them and distrust government and experts. Thank 3 mile island, chernoybl, and even the non nuclear deep water horizon. Promises of safety and advances for all 3 yet failures with lasting consequences create a boy crying wolf scenario whether justified or not.
http://saveie6.com/
Nuclear waste disposal isn't an engineering problem, it's a social and political problem.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
What a lame excuse. So billions have been sunk on this project only to have it shuttered over Harry Reid. Its not like the nuke waste has another home to go to. Open the damn thing already.
Unlike many foreign countries including china and india, the US has no civil reprocessing plant for its nuclear waste. Our literal approach to high level nuclear waste is to entomb it in some sort of living grave in the desert and hope for the best; its irresponsible but creates a handful of jobs in Nevada. It also takes pressure off nuclear power companies to invest in reclamation and reprocessing technologies and frees them to simply consume fresh nuclear fissile materials without concern for their total lifespan. The management and operating contractor as of April 1, 2009 for the project is USA Repository Services, a consortium of government contractors, URS Corporation, Shaw Corporation and Areva Federal Services LLC. Yucca mountain was nothing but pork, lemon socialism for a handful of government contractors and the effort could be put to better, more sustainable projects.
The NRC report is correct! this project was technically feasible. But ethically and morally irresponsible in the 21st century where the vast majority of nuclear generating facilities, including those in russia, operate on a reprocessing model that ensures high-level waste is kept to a minimum. When the Kremlin decided to decomission the Russian navy's 4 story tall akula class submarine, its reactor cores were recycled and its coolant filtered for fissile material. What the state of nuclear power in America means is that if and when we decomission our cold-war fleets, the reactor materials will spend thousands of years idly decaying in some cave in the desert, hoping the next government shutdown doesnt affect them. And if that doesnt concern you then it should be noted in america we import 100% of our nuclear materials from Canada, Khazakstan, or in the past converted russian nuclear munitions as part of a bilateral disarmament treaty. our nuclear infrastructure is not energy independent by any means.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It is unlikely a brief review could really check for additional fraud beyond what was already discovered. http://articles.orlandosentine... The existence of systematic fraud in the project indicates that no confidence could ever be placed in it.
The best kind of correct is technically correct!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Graham Pickren wrote an excellent Ph.D thesis in 2013 "Political ecologies of electronic waste: uncertainty and legitimacy in the governance of e-waste geographies". While it isn't about nuclear waste, per se, it rather brilliantly describes how industrialized nations apply a "fetishism" to material which tracks downstreams but not upstreams. http://www.envplan.com/abstrac...
The point of the article is that the dirtiest recycling (or most questionable Yucca storage) is practically always better than the cleanest extraction (mining).... and this applies to the risk at Yucca (for storage) vs. mining uranium in the USA Southwest. Nevada's strangely among the most willing states to allow in situ mining, even when mercury effluent (from gold mining) turns their extraction points into Superfund sites. 14 years ago Nevada and NM legislators were trying to provide the private sector with $30 million to develop environmental restoration technologies for in-situ leach (ISL) mining of uranium. "In a statement from his office in Washington, D.C. Domenici said he decided to remove the ISL provisions from his comprehensive nuclear energy plan in order to calm fears stoked by "substantial misinformation about the legislation." (Gallup Independent, Nov. 10, 2001)"
Treatment of Planetary Environmental health oddly follows the same "waste centric" obsessions of western medical history. Western medicine is pretty great today, but went through a couple of centuries of giving mercury as a laxative, and being always focused on what comes out of the body rather than the nutrition stream. Closing the "waste deposit" while giving tax incentives to mine uranium is "anal retentive" environmentalism.
See also Pickren et. al. at AREA Waste, commodity fetishism and the ongoingness of economic life http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Gently reply
This thing has to be built. And there is a district somewhere that would have it. Put it in Alaska if you really want to put it out in the middle of no where. Possibly on the Aleutian islands if you really need to go nuts with it. There are islands out there that no one lives on. We have many places in the US where no one lives that could host a storage facility. We have nuclear weapons test sites for example that could be used. Might they be as ideal as the yucca mountain site? Possibly not but no one can claim they're going to make once pristine land a nuclear waste dump if the site was literally nuked... repeatedly.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Permanently mothballing LWR waste is a bad idea. Only about 5% of available energy is 'burned up" in LWRs.Technologies in development, such as FBRs and TWRs, can utilize much more of the energy contained in what we now call "waste," in turn reducing the amount of high-level waste that needs to be put in geologic storage. (Of course, the hazards associated with reprocessing spent fuel to ready it for use in the new reactors is another facet of this.) Onsite storage at plants seems a viable idea until large-scale deployment of next-gen technologies occurs.
This is why I do NOT believe in FUD spread about Global Warming. If it was really a problem; the President Barack Obama abandoned the project. Tim S.
Why wouldn't Chernobyl be an ideal place to park nuclear waste? A large "exclusion zone" around the plant is already cordoned off with some degree of security. There have also been ongoing efforts to consolidate the waste and construct dry storage containment facilities for it. Just expand the construction project so that it has more capacity.
The USA recently gave an enormous aid package to Ukraine, maybe they should return the favor by taking and storing some USA nuclear waste?
Would it be too dangerous or risky to move it across the ocean and over/through Europe to get it there? Otherwise, why not?
In 75 years all of the low hanging fruit reserves will be mined out... according to current estimates that leaves 125 years of increasingly harder to get (i.e. more expensive) ore.
Then what? I guess develop the clean energy that we should be working on now.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There's a better explanation for what's going on here, but without a 3AM hour of NightWatch, there's not much we can correctly say about this.
Ideal for DOE folks, now we need a new plan so we can get more money.
Suggested new, 'safer' plan:
How about instead of putting the bad stuff inside and the folks outside,
we can do the reverse for a few important folks.
I can think of a few I'd like to put at the head of the list.
Broken for the rest of us:
This isn't about absolute safety.
Aside from putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle, there isn't any such thing.
The safety report says the mountain meets DOE standards.
That means it is probably safe, just like the rest of our nuclear program.
There will always be some residual risk.
The NIMBY's won against putting this small but concentrated risk near them.
So instead, the rest of the country has to bear a much greater distributed risk in a stop-gap on-site storage plan.
Proper government is partly about balancing the needs of the few against the many.
Consider that many of the NIMBY's have family near these forced storage sites.
This result does not optimize the needs of either the few NIMBY's or the many.
Aside from job security for a few DOE folks,
it mostly optimizes the re-election needs of a very few politicians.
as someone with familiarity to the project, i think there would have been a greater push for this project if all of the judges involved didn't make comments on my boobs and scare away other female appointees.
At least radiation has a half life. CO2 is there forever, until geological processes or pipes rust or a terrorist releases it. When that leaks out in mass, a lot of people are going to be missing their O2.
Yucca was designed to sustain being abandoned. Pumping CO2 in the ground with active monitoring isn't. It's far more dangerous, and an eventual inevitable catastrophe.
But, it doesn't have that scary 'radiation' word associated with it. It does however have that scary 'death' word associated with it. Lake Nyos was tiny compared to the CO2 death traps we have already created in the USA.
The best alternative is power from Thorium.
And I'm not talking about the questionable claims about 100 year cars.
Take a few minutes to investigate the potential.
There are some really good videos on youtube that explain it from simple terms, up to as technical as you wish.
1/200 the radioactive waste as current uranium power plants. And that waste is only dangerous for 300 years.
Over %99 efficiant, in contrast to uraniums %2 efficancy.
Almost unlimited supply located all over the world. No new mines are required because enough is produced as a byproduct of current mining to supply the worlds power needs,
Etc. Please have a look at it. Seriously!
I'm not too impressed with the reasons why the program "can't" be restarted. The thing is, someday this will have to be done somewhere. When the politicians and scared public finally get their thumbs out of their 4ss3s they will have to designate funds, hire a staff, and deal with NIMBY syndrom. All of this is true regardless of where they put it.
Here's a location where the studies have already been done. Call it a restart of the old program or call it a new one.. either way it will make more sense to just finish the job at Yucca.
'The name "Yucca Mountain" is synonymous with danger and excitement. It's so much more than some single-industry desert town with a lot of unusual buildings—the entire place surges with activity and pulses with the thrill of the forbidden. The eerie luminescent glow lights the Nevada sky all through the night. Everyone has heard stories, but no one who hasn't visited can truly understand Yucca Mountain. Why's that? Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility. '
I just love their writing. http://www.theonion.com/articl...
Nuclear reprocessing is one of the biggests myths proponed by nuclear advocates.
Only the plutonium, which is less than 1% of the spent fuel rod, can be really used again as MOX. However the process to seperate the plutonium is a extremely expensive and dirty one, involving pumping low level nuclear waste into the sea.
The rest of the uranium in the used fuel rod is uneconomical to reprocess because of contaminated with U232 and U-236:
"No use of reprocessed uranium in French reactors in the near future
The uranium recovered from reprocessing of spent fuel in France is not expected to be used for the manufacture of nuclear fuel in the near future. French utility EdF rather has made provisions for long-term storage of the reprocessed uranium for 250 years. This was revealed in a report of the French Court of Auditors on the decommissioning of nuclear facilities and the management of radioactive wastes.
Usage of the reprocessed uranium (REPU) is problematic for several reasons: since the REPU is contaminated with the artificial uranium isotopes U-232 and U-236, special precautions are necessary during processing: the U-232 and its decay products cause elevated radiation doses for the plant personnel, and the U-236 as a neutron absorber requires higher enrichment levels to achieve the same reactivity. In consequence, use of the REPU is not very attractive at present market conditions: conversion is three times more expensive than conversion of natural uranium, and enrichment cannot be done in France's sole enrichment plant (Eurodif gazeous diffusion plant), since the REPU would contaminate the plant's circuits. "
http://www.dcbureau.org/201406...
There's zero reason to contain this waste in a repository. We should instead be developing generation IV reactors that are not only safe (low pressure, molten salt, pebble bed, thorium, etc) but that also use this so called 'waste' as fuel.
It would then be a relatively simple process to build a nice fat reprocessing center near a set of these reactors, and simply ship the waste from the older reactor's cooling ponds to the reprocessing center (something that we were going to have to do anyway to get the waste to Yucca).
Obama was a fool for cancelling the thorium reactor program.
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
They are also one of the best birding areas in the world. I'm pretty sure some ecologists and wildlife people might object to that location also.
But my question is, was the facility truly needed? As has been covered by others before, if there wasn't so much ridiculous red tape about 'burning up' the nuclear waste in the reactors themselves, the final amount would be a tiny fraction of what is actually produced nowadays.
Perhaps we could drop it off at Harry Reid's house?
"pushed the nuclear button" (he used a rules-breaking simle majority, overriding even the ruling of the nonpartisan parliamentarian, vote to change senate rules and eliminate the fillibuster on some issues). Previous Republican majorities run by establishment Republicans always refused to do this on the argument that "if we do it, some day a Democrat will run the place and do it to us". At this point, the conservatives in the Senate feel betrayed and would happily ram-through Yucca Mountain just to "go nuclear" on old Harry IF there was somebody in the White House who would sign it; Obama would simply veto it, and the moderates running the GOP-led senate do not have enough votes to override.
Of course, they always *could* do like Nancy Pelosi did in the House on Obamacare and use a simple majority to "Deem it" passed/overridded (even though there's no such Constitutional procedure) and declare Obama's veto null (as she declare Obama's ACA to be on his desk for his signature) ... all they'd then need is ONE federal employee to act like the veto was overridden and then a lawsuit before a sympathetic Federal judge to throw this into Constitutional choas land. This will never happen, though because the right is simply no good at using tactics of the left; you'll likely never see a modern GOP president trample all over the Constitution and daring congress to stop him while a simpering moderate Democrat congressional leadership cries and whines and declares itself powerless.
This is fun. Any time a conservative or a Republican opposes something even related to science or applied science for any reason, the Daily Kox, HuffPo, MSNBC propagandists dig-up the Democrat 2004 campaign tactic of yelling "ANTI-SCIENCE!!!!" and implying that anybody who is not a leftist is a knuckle-dragging stone-age barbarian. Much of the most-damaging opposition to scientific things, however, have come from the left: Opposition to ANYTHING nuclear, Opposition to GMO stuff, Opposition to desalination plants, Opposition to vaccines (yeah, I know, Michelle Bachman tripped on this by trying to pander to a mom in an audience, but for the most part this is a lefty hippy position), Opposition to supersonic flight, Opposition to cost-benefit-analysis on ANYTHING related to "green energy" or "global climate change" etc
By supporting Harry Reid and the left's freak-out over Yucca Mountain, Democrats DID NOT ELIMINATE THE WASTE PROBLEM... they made it far worse and more dangerous. Instead of all the nation's nuclear waste going to one remote isolated and well-guarded repository overseen by guys with PhDs in lab coats, it is all accumulating in largely unguarded and unmonitored (depending on the type) sites in cities all around the nation. It's not just spent fuel we are talking about - there's radioactive waste produced at hospitals, and in certain mnufacturing as well (which most people never even think about)
Nothing has changed about Yucca MT relative proximity to the Colorado River, the source of drinking water for most of Southwest & West Coast.
Engineers can't fix how close Yucca MT is to Colorado River.
Depending on who you talk to, nuclear waste must be sequestered from 200,000 to more than a million years before it becomes safe.
It is completely absurd to claim that we have any sort of technology to do that. Remember that Engineering (as opposed to a lab experiment) is based on merging mathematics and physics with practical experience in getting real world results. The basic cycle is build, analyze, then factor the results back into the design process. A real world example is integrated circuits. We started out in the 60s with a couple dozens transistors on a chip and iteratively improved the design until now there are any millions of transistors on a chip. In terms of building long lived structures, some of the oldest lived man made structures on the planet are the pyramids: In round numbers, they are 5000 years old and failed at their intended purpose in prehistoric times (not to mention that the design data for them is long gone). Designing a waste storage facility to last a million years is like starting from scratch in 1960 with a chunk of silicon and immediately trying to design a 12 core, server class, CPU in the first design iteration. We are so inexperienced in the long term nuclear storage space we don't even know what the problems are!
The only way to get rid of the Nuclear waste is to recycle it (not reprocess, really recycle into something safe). AFIK, nobody has a clue how to do it or is even looking into the problem.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us