Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Its not like the nuke waste has another home to go to. Open the damn thing already.
Actually, there is a better option: Do nothing. Just let the waste continue to accumulate in the cooling ponds at each individual plant.
The cooling ponds have sufficient capacity. Security is adequate. The waste is becoming less radioactive as it sits there. So there is no harm in waiting. A few decades from now we will have more knowledge about geology, radiation, engineering, etc., and be in a better position to make a long term decision. It is quite possible that by then we will have power plants that can burn the "waste" as fuel. Even if not, we will have much better robots and other technology that will make processing the material far cheaper than if we did it today. Sometimes procrastination is the best policy.
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. "