Slashdot Mirror
Former Governor On Holding the Department of Energy Accountable In Idaho (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: "I have been involved in government at the state and federal level for a long time and have had my share of political and legal run-ins with government agencies, but rarely in more than 50 years in politics have I encountered a government agency more committed to secrecy—perhaps even deception—than the US Department of Energy." So writes former governor of Idaho Cecil D. Andrus in this account of the U.S. government's plan to ship commercial spent fuel to the Idaho National Lab for what the feds call "research" but what the Andrus (and his predecessor) feel is an attempt to store high level nuclear waste in Idaho. According to him, despite Freedom of Information Act requests, the federal government is not sharing its plan for the waste once it gets to Idaho. This is a disturbing tale of government secrecy and stonewalling, and the problem with nuclear waste: no one wants it in their backyard.
nobody wants it in their back-yard, so why not leave it in someone else's back-yard? The U.S has done it before, in the form of artillery projectiles in the Middle East, afterall.
One man's waste is another man's third appendage. Fap time + both hands on the keyboard!
Just make sure I can draw off the residual heat for various things like hot water and free energy..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This so-called nuclear "waste" will be worth a fortune in the future. Folks in a couple of hundreds of years on will be wondering why the "ancients" simply just buried this valuable fuel.
Forget oil in Texas . . . nuclear fuel in Idaho will be where it's at!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
that wherever the preppers will seek to flee, that is where the junk will be stored simply to dissuade dissent.
Imagine you're trying to run the DOE and you're trying to do something about this dangerous nuclear waste.
No matter what you do, no matter how much you plan or how much money you spend there isn't a State government that won't use it as a game of political football to score points with their voter base. Pandering against the big evil government is braindead easy.
For fucks sake we can't even put it in the middle of fucking nowhere, in the fucking dead and dry Nevada desert, inside ancient salt caverns nobody fucking cares about.
You're trying to deal with an issue that will have implications even hundreds of years in the future and a bunch of petty state podunk slackjaw political hacks are sticking their dick in the pie to score votes 2-4 years out.
Fuck doing it the "right way". Governor's lucky they didn't bury it in his back yard.
I thought they gave up trying to find a way to deal with it. I bet Japan will be the first.
Nuclear is the last unrestricted secret. Never be surprised by the tactics used around nuclear. Including not using it for civilian use despite the obvious evidence it is the ONLY green energy. What are you going to do about that obvious fact?
JJ
On the one hand, I hate the government so the DOE is bad! On the other hand, I love nuclear energy so opposing waste disposal is bad! Ow the cognitive dissonance is killing me!
Carry it way out into the middle of the ocean and sink it in weighted, armored containers. Nobody can disturb it, and nobody can claim NIMBY.
I grew up out that way.
I'll say the area around Arco Idaho is pretty much as empty as any of the west gets.
I'm don't know how geographically stable the area is nor do I have knowledge of the water table.
Fun Fact (first nuclear powerplant)
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2960
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arco,_Idaho
I guess it is only 60 miles from Idaho Falls....
So why don't we recycle the spent fuel? http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
This would make so much more sense. Then we can look at actual waste issues and tackle those in a sane matter (radiated parts, debris, etc). Who actually benefits from a no-recycle policy? Miners? Coal & Gas industry? Do regular people have a net benefit or net loss to a no-recycle policy?
I say save a mountain, recycle spent fuel. Prevent an accident, recycle spent fuel. Prevent storing highly radioactive material, recycle spent fuel.
Democrats just looooooove Obama when he's making up new laws and forcing them down people's throats, but this is the kind of shit that sort of government attitude leads to. "We get to do whatever we want because we're the Government - and you are not." He's created a culture of secrecy and stonewalling unprecedented in American government, he got away with it thanks to Democrats and the compliant media - and now you're surprised the government thinks it can do whatever it can get away with and lie about?
Obama created this bed but we've all got to lie in it.
Allow reprocessing of spent fuel. France, UK, India, and Russia manage to do it. Might be more expensive but it gets rid of long term storage issues and drastically reduces long term environmental risk.
What about using oil wells that are no longer producing? Some of them go down thousands of feet. Put the nuclear waste down into the well, then cover the waste with a layer of lead shot, then a layer of mercury and asbestos, then seal off the well with concrete.
OK, so lets see why they might be wanting to keep this a secret shall we?
First off, there is the risk of some crazy extremist, Muslim or otherwise, trying to crash a commercial airliner or otherwise deliver a large explosion to the storage facility. If this happens in a high population density area full of business, manufacturing and commerce, say Los Angeles or New York, the damage is in the trillions not to mention the loss of life is in the millions. If same crazy blows up the facility and it is 50 miles to the nearest house and 100 miles to the nearest city of more than 500, the impact in life and economy is minimized. Also, with very low population density, it is easier to keep everyone away from facilities like this.
Then there is the same crazies trying to steal the stuff to make a dirty bomb to hit a major US city. Again, if it is 50 miles down a back road to get to the storage facility, that is a lot of ground to cover undetected by security.
Then there are all of the bed wetting jerkoff local politicians who:
A. Have no clue how dangerous spent fuel really is.
B. Have the "not in my back yard" mentality, even though they benefit substantially from the power generation and have essentially no use for the massive amount of land in their state. (Idaho has 217,000 sqkm and a population of about 1.6 million, making it 7.4 people per sqkm or 44th in population density in the US.) When you subtract out the metropolitan areas, the remaining rural area population density is actually a lot less than that. Lets say that fuel is coming from California, with a population of 38 million and a density of 95 per sqkm and a GDP of $2.4 trillion. California grows most of the country's fresh fruits and vegetables, they have a huge tech sector and biotech and $292Bil of the money that the US government uses to pay the military, pave the freeways etc comes from California. By contrast, Idaho grows 33% of the US potato crop, other grains, and they have some lumber and mining activities. They provide for just $7.6Bil of the federal budget. But what they do have is a lot of land with a minimal population away from the porous southern border, which is ideal if you want to store something like spent nuclear fuel.
So yah, that is why they are being secretive. As a country, we have to put the used fuel somewhere, and Idaho makes sense. In reality no one should give a shit, including the people in Idaho if there are a few square miles in the middle of nowhere dedicated to long term nuclear storage. I am sure actually that the potato farmers would appreciate a little less competition at market for their potato crop.
I think a good place to put nuclear waste would be inside an extinct volcano, in the Nevada desert. That was the plan, until Harry Reid and Obama screwed it up. Yucca Mountain gets 7 inches a year. Idaho gets enough rain to support agriculture. Idaho is majority Republican....
Find the address of and send the spent fuel to all the idiots who posted here supporting the "clean" nuclear energy.
Let's hear their opinion again when they can't go in their own backyards.
Idaho would be a perfect place to get rid of mountains of nuclear waste.
Just pile it up, throw a tarp over it, and the local yokels will come and steal it, carting it away by the pickup truck load.
Seriously, these goobers would steal dog shit if you put a sign up saying "PLEASE DON'T STEAL THE DOG SHIT".
True story: A friend of mine crushed his old, broken refrigerator flat with his tractor and left it in the yard (he was going to take it to the dump in a few days). It was stolen the next night.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If we mined 1000lbs of uranium Idaho, send it back there in.
If we mined 1000lbs in Colorado, Sounds like colorado should have it's property back.
Yeah, yeah, it's not uranium anymore.
But hey, I promise you the 'waste', as they call it, is far rarer than the raw material and there for more valuable.
States should be fighting for it!
Hey, Iran,
If you stop enriching uranium, you can 'store' our waste!
USA
that spent nuclear waste ought to be stored in the same state in which it was originally used. If you don't want to deal with the waste, don't burn the fuel in the first place.
linquendum tondere
There is no secret. Just talk to a lab employee. They are using the spent fuel to produce a thermal generator capable of producing electricity for many homes. It is a safe way of recycling the fuel instead of letting it sit and rot.
Once you agree to any nuclear installation, they can change the rules and do whatever the hell they want. This is what has happened at pretty much every nuclear power reactor: the nuclear waste ends up being stored on site indefinitely. It makes no difference that this is the worst possible scenario because it makes security a nightmare and the sites were never designed for long term storage in the first place.
The DOE's job is to make nuclear technology happen. They don't really give a rat's ass about the environment or security. It wasn't like they wanted the EPA Superfund. They didn't start it and it's mostly paid for by taxes on other polluters, like the fossil fuel and chemical industries. All they do is spend the money when enough political pressure is brought to bear.
Take Hanford. They are cleaning up things they know how to deal with. Unfortunately that's not where the real trouble is. The most horrible problem are these huge tanks full of various toxic and radioactive waste. They don't know exactly what's in them and they are so old that they all leak. It is possible that moving the material around could cause either a chemical or nuclear explosion because critical mass could be reached. (Not nuclear weapon bomb level explosion, but enough heat to cause a vapor explosion.)
So they don't know how to empty the tanks and they don't know how to deal with the material when it gets out of the tanks. They had a plan to build an automated facility to make glass logs that would physically contain the radioactive material and it has failed. They are over budget and behind schedule. Their timetable is a fantasy.
So why does anyone in Idaho expect anything to be different?
Why is Snark Required?
Allow reprocessing of spent fuel. France, UK, India, and Russia manage to do it. Might be more expensive but it gets rid of long term storage issues and drastically reduces long term environmental risk.
And we already have a mothballed plant to do it.
We're just not doing it because of an executive order by Jimmy Carter, who was convinced that reprocessed fuel would all be weapons grade (depends on how much reprocessing you do, actually; you can stop before you reach that point), and that as a result, it would contribute to nuclear proliferation.
Seems to have worked with North Korea. Oh. Snap. It *didn't* work with North Korea. Jimmy Carter's "bad"...
Store a little bit in everyone's backyard. We are all responsible for it.
They could give a portion to each state to store, and states that refuse can stop receiving any nuclear power, and no longer get protection under MAD (hey Russia, if you nuke California we won't retaliate)
Problem solved.
Good luck with that!
One of the most major criticisms of Yucca Mountain was that the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility could not be applied to Yucca's geology. The reason to choose a specific geology (in addition to being seisemically stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to control the the amount of time ground water took to travel through the facility carrying radioactive isotopes, eventually, into the water table. If the amount of time it takes exceeds the decay rate of the longest lived radio-isotopes then the facility was providing defense in depth.
In addition, as a site like that would be containing pu-239, whose half life is around 25000 years, after considering the daughter products you need a geology capable of containing it for 500,000 years, which is what the original specification called for.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology (pdf) revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. The reason is Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash.
Feild studies have established that crystaline rocks like granite and bentonite clays can acheive this control. So far Finland is on track to be the first with an active facility with a Swedish facility also in the works.
Curiously, getting this right should be the one thing pro and anti nuclear folk should be able to agree on, if only for their own reasons. For Nuclear power to continue operating such a storage facility is essential so that new reactors can be deployed and materials removed from reactor sites. For people against Nuclear power such a facility would improve the safety of the industry as a whole by providing a place to store the materials permanently where there ingress into the environment can be controlled.
The DOE have got to build a facility somewhere. The right location has to be chosen because of all the rail and other infrastructure required to move the spent fuel has to be funded and built. This should not be a difficult thing for America to achieve by applying a scientific approach to selecting the site and building it instead of the politics used to select Yucca Mountain.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Seriously, better to burn this 'waste' at the location where it was generated with new molten salt reactors. These can do it safely and cheaply.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So let's do the un-screw Nevada bill. Ship it all to Yucca mountain and the feds pay for a LFTR reactor or twelve to burn it up and provide cheap electricity to Nevada as payment for taking everyone else's garbage.
Will someone PLEASE just fucking build a nice big LFTR research reactor so that we can finally go down the road to a real thorium fuel cycle, which can use the 99% of the energy that remains in this so-called 'Nuclear Waste', and turn it into very low-level waste in the process.
I mean, its simple physics for bloody sake, it's not like it's hard or anything.
They were ALL told to do that because they had no email backup server. The IT chief said so.
And as the law is written, it does NOT say the archiving has to be fail-proof. Even paper copies get eaten by rats or soiled by plumbing leaks.
Laws rarely define such contingencies. They are written by lawyers and politicians, NOT disaster recovery or prevention experts.
Adding such details into law could really bloat them up, and Republicans seem to repeatedly complain about the size of laws.
GOP wants contradictory things because they are not logical. (True, few politicians are.)
Table-ized A.I.