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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"
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.
At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem is that the storage of nuclear waste isn't passive, it requires active processes to keep the genie in the bottle.
This is only true for the first 5-10 years after the fuel is removed from the core for the last time. There are dry fuel storage sites all around the country where used nuclear fuel sits in steel casks in concrete bunkers, and is completely cooled by the ambient air and natural convection. This fuel, incidentally, is supposed to be in Yucca mountain.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
While most of your post I would disagree with, this part is especially wrong. The reason why power companies do not invest in reprocessing and consume fresh fissile material is because by federal law bans it. Remember Jimmy Carter's Non-proliferation deal? Yeah.
Okay. Idiocracy is a movie. A funny one, with something valid to say, but a movie. If the world got to the point where it even resembled that, civilization would have already completely collapsed or it would be subsisting on automation that the previous generations built. In either case, you have bigger problems than some radioactive waste leaking a little in Nevada.
Much of Nevada is a marginal place for humans to live to begin with. If there was a catastrophe that eliminated a lot of people, those people wouldn't go living in Nevada near the nuclear waste site. They'd move to the places it was easier to live. Just like before the Black Death in Europe, the development of marginal lands only continued profitably (or at all) while there was high population, and thus demand. Kill off a third of the population, and they stopped developing marginal areas and depopulated them.
The real risk of the waste site is increased expansion of human civilization which puts a lot of humans near the site. This isn't like Chernobyl or Fukushima where fire and explosions are spreading the material. We're talking more about material leaching into groundwater and things like that. A terrible thing to happen, to be sure, but not exactly a problem if no one is living there.
Compare this to your Roundup example, and it is apples and oranges. Herbicidal treatments will be applied to locations where weeds need to be killed for food production. That is a much more serious threat compared to some nuclear waste stored in casks under a salt dome in the middle of nowhere.