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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.
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.
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
At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The pools aren't necessary forever - 5 to 10 years and then they can be moved to dry casks. Already, over 20% of spent fuel is stored this way. Hardly permanent, as the casks need to be reconditioned/rebuilt every 30-100 years - but not the active process that you describe.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That shit is poison, a proliferation risk, and it isn't like there is an unlimited supply of fissile material anyway. At best nuclear energy is a stopgap technology. At current rates it is thought that there is a 200 year supply at best... more like 100 years (or less) should consumption double (or triple).
"Proliferation risk"? Please cite your source!
"200 year supply at best"? Again, please cite your source.