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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.
Do you have any clue where the Idaho National Lab is? It's nobody's backyard. There are few more perfect places on the planet for "high level nuclear waste".
Challenge it. Oddly enough, there are other sources of energy that do not require fossil fuels to be burned.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Not sure if troll or serious ocean dumpings been done already:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Only temporarily sustainable. Eventually, it will reduce land mass and raise ocean levels (maybe hundreds or thousands of years, but eventually). Beyond that, it's a horrible solution because seawater will eat through the containers and become contaminated.
There are plenty of places we can store the shit until we figure out a use for it; and there are surely plenty of uses for it we simply haven't thought up a way to market yet.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
One shipment would be used to research fuel recycling techniques. The other would be used to research what happens to the fuel when it is placed in storage casks for years or decades.
INL is the perfect place to do this work.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/...
In a few hundred years we'll have mastered harvesting the sun's energy. Assuming we don't all kill each other first.
We've already mastered it, it's just that we're primarily using solar energy that was stored millions of years ago.
Are you aware that elements have different isotopes with importantly different properties?
they should put the storage vault in the ground under Chicago city hall
That wouldn't be a bad idea. It could safely supply free heat and hot water for years
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Over top of the Snake River Aquifer is to you a perfect place? Which is upstream of 3 different states and supplies water for significant percentage of the U.S. Agriculture.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/...
despite the obvious evidence it is the ONLY green energy.
Except for solar+wind+storage, where storage includes electric car batteries connected to smart chargers. I already have an electric car, and a smart charger. It charges at 2am when electricity prices hit a trough. But with wider adoption of solar, it could charge at mid-day instead.
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.
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....
Re: "recycle" would have put production out of cheap and easy reach of the US mil sector.
It was part of the early US nuclear weapons cycle and kept that way for inspections, later UN treaty obligations. Every US private company, the mil, gov got what they needed out of the simple methods put in place.
The UK, France, Soviet Union had their own exotic ideas about their own use, storage and international inspections, treaties.
They had fewer needs to stay with traditional methods and found ways to deal with some of their waste ie new ideas to reduce big long term cooled water pool or expensive longer storage.
The very public downside to decades of production line nuclear weapons ready systems is the very large amounts of complex waste.
It was well understood at the time that waste would be created on an epic scale but it was the easy way to link the very public nuclear energy sector with the needs of the very hidden, large scale nuclear weapons production. The 'no-recycle policy" was a way to keep all the old production lines ready without any questions or new tech, upgrades.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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...
Historically Idaho IS where the preppers, sagebrush rebels, neonazis, and northwest tea party types form their enclaves.
But if you want anything done, just contact someone connected to the sitting Butch Otter governorship.
'Gladiator School' prisons and defrauding Idaho taxpayers? Done!
Illegal ISP contracts issued to connected overpriced bidders? Done!
Somehow DOE has missed the boat so far. NOT done -- YET.
It would just be one more confrontational issue between tea party and traditional corporate Republicans.
Idaho's last Republican caucus was an abortion, dead on arrival as each contingent took its half of the fetal corpse home rather than reach accord.
It was a less civil precursor of this year's feuds in the U.S. House of Representatives.
As one of the reddest of red states, don't worry that Democrats will be allowed to intercede on behalf of average citizens.
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
Do you have any clue where the Idaho National Lab is? It's nobody's backyard. There are few more perfect places on the planet for "high level nuclear waste".
Been there, worked there (installed some scientific equipment there). It's miles and miles and miles and miles and miles from anywhere. But they have a helluva cafeteria. Leave Idaho Falls, drive 2 hours out to the site, work for 5 hours, drive 2 hours back to the hotel.
I remember you take a left at a place called "Mud Flats", no lie. I used to get the rental cars up to 120 on the roads leading out there. No cops for 100 miles in any direction, whoo hoo!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
One of the issues that we deal with in the Northwest is that the federal government, particularly the DOE, has generated (and shipped in) a lot of hazardous nuclear waste in the area over the years and has horribly mismanaged its disposition. The epic levels of contamination at the Hanford site are mind boggling--and right on the banks of the Columbia River. They buried toxic waste on the reservation at the Idaho National Lab that we now have no records of--we don't know what it was or exactly where it's buried.
They keep promising to clean up their mess, but then they never seem to quite get around to fulfilling their promises. We end up having to sue them to get them to take action. Even then, they try to shirk as much responsibility as they can. There isn't a lot of trust of the DOE in this area of the country.
Over top of the Snake River Aquifer is to you a perfect place? Which is upstream of 3 different states and supplies water for significant percentage of the U.S. Agriculture.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/...
Oh, shut _up_ you whiny liberal bitches. 30 years of drinking the "...government IS the problem..." Kool-Aid has led us straight to this. Corporate America is able to buy anything they want, including the willing collaboration of "regulators" whose role was originally to look out for the interests of the citizens. We handed the reins of power to "our betters" years ago.
That might actually be a good idea in some parts of the country. I live in Southern California, and that's earthquake country. So's Oklahoma, where there's also lots of old oil wells. I'm sure that there are parts of the country where something like that would be safe, but you do have to take tectonic activity into account when picking where you're going to do something like this. And, just for the record, if I lived someplace with old oil wells and little worry about earthquakes, I'd have no problem with having the waste dumped in my area, because when it comes to this, I'm not a NIMBY.
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Idaho Nazis... I hate Idaho Nazis.
Idaho is the home of nuclear energy in the US. What better place to put the "clean, safe and too cheap to meter" waste materials than the location of the first nuclear energy plant? They still celebrate "Atomic Days" every July 17 in Arco, Idaho. And, I believe Idaho still has more nuclear power plants per capita than any state in the US.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com...
http://www.boiseweekly.com/boi...
So the question is not "why would the Department of Energy" want to store nuclear wastes in Idaho, it's really, "Why would the Department of Energy want to store nuclear waste anywhere else?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
'...Idaho still has more nuclear power plants per capita than any state in the US.
Not hard to do when you are 44th in population density.
It *could* be extremely valuable. Unfortunately, it would need to be reprocessed into elements (and occasional compounds) first. Mixed up like this it isn't useful for much but heating.
(Actually, some parts would need to be separated into pure isotopes to be maximally useful. The process wouldn't be cheap, and has been actively discouraged by the government.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You forgot about water for half of the west coast. We had a great place for storage in Nevada until politics killed it.
Hanford was the site of the first nuclear reactor of its design, used to produce plutonium during WWII. The site was subsequently expanded to produce more plutonium, and some energy, through the Cold War. It is so messed up because of a lot of crap that went on during that time period: not knowing anything about industrial nuclear reactors, not having any kind of waste storage or processing plan, lots of scale-up, Cold War secrecy, etc. So, yeah, Hanford is a mess, but I think it is wrong to inhibit any kind of progress due to problems that were mostly documented more than 40 years ago. No waste was shipped to Hanford. The current DOE is very aware of the problems at Hanford and is actively trying to clean it up, but it takes a lot of time...and you need somewhere to store the waste. Without a waste storage facility, there is no way to clean up Hanford, and the barrels are going to keep leaking because most of them are more than 50 years old (never intended to be long-term waste storage).
And that addresses the first and third issues (being a temporary solution and the eventuality that we will find a viable use for this material) how, exactly? Two out of three ain't bad, but you, sir, only even tried for one. And you failed at that, as well; sand and sealife will erode the Teflon layer on short order.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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
I understand that the problems at Hanford have complex causes with long history. But what the former governor seems to be concerned about is a lack of transparency from DOE, which is an issue that people in the Northwest have been fighting for years (hence the lack of trust).
Listen, I understand that some level of contamination is unavoidable. But they've got liquid nuclear waste leaking out of tanks into the soil at the banks of the Columbia River, and they can't just keep telling us that they're "working on it". I'm sorry that they did such a terrible job planning for future needs, and I get that part of the reason for that is because they were doing completely new work, but another part of it was a wanton disregard for the environmental and human consequences of building their nuclear arsenal. There was plenty of money to build the bombs, but today it seems to have dried up: DOE budgets something like $3 billion per year for cleanup, but actually gets about $2 billion. I realize that's not all DOE's fault, but this is the reality. The federal government made an enormous, toxic mess in Eastern Washington and now they're dragging their feet when it comes time to clean it up.
But again, the issue in this article is a lack of trust. The DOE may be completely sincere in their cleanup efforts, but if they won't communicate about it, and we have to pry details out of them with FOIA requests, then there is no reason for the states to believe in that sincerity. This is, after all, the organization that turned 586 square miles of Washington State into the most heavily contaminated nuclear waste dump in the country. Why should the people of Washington believe that this organization has their best interests in mind?
[Also, one note: though many shipments of waste to Hanford have been stopped before they occurred, there are at least 2 shipments of nuclear waste that were delivered there from a DOE facility in California. The amount transferred is obviously dwarfed by the scale of waste products generated on site, but there is great fear that DOE just wants to ship all of this mess to Hanford and then leave it there indefinitely--likely in "temporary" storage facilities that are a continuation of the same irresponsible policies that created this problem in the first place.]
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?
It comes down to money. DOE wants to clean it up. It's gonna take a ridiculous amount of money to do it. Congress won't give them the cash, but DOE staff can't point the finger, in fear of losing what little funding they do get. Thus the FOIA stonewall.
Congress is where the blame lies, not DOE.
There is not enough lithium on the planet to store the energy needed, so another battery material is needed.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
No. France gets about 17% of its electricity from spent nuclear fuel. France's energy sources are nuclear (74.5%), renewables (19.5%). They've simply decided to change the mix so that 40% of the electricity comes from renewable energy sources by adding in more wind and solar by 2025.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That doesn't mean they are dropping the nuclear power, though -- in fact, they are building a Generation III plant that is much more fuel efficient and has less radioactive waste to boot. It should come online in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem in the USA is that we haven't built a nuclear reactor in almost 20 years. The average age of a US facility is 34 years. They were designed to run only 30 to 40 years (licenses expire at 40 years, but they can be extended another 20). They're all older model Gen II reactors.
What we do today is stupid; we spend the fuel in an old, inefficient reactor, then instead of re-using the spent fuel in a breeder reactor, we mix it and encase it in concrete to store for several thousands years. If we built a Gen IV breeder reactor, we could burn uranium and/or thorium and have very little waste which would only need to be stored for a few centuries instead of tens of thousands of years. But, you'll likely never live to see a new nuclear reactor come online in the USA -- it takes decades just to get approval for a site -- mounds of red tape and lots of NIMBYs.
I tend to agree. Unfortunately for the DOE, they are the ones that have to implement Congress' half-baked approach to the Hanford remediation, so they are the ones who get the blame when their underfunded efforts fail to meet expectations.
It sucks that our government is unwilling to meet the moral obligations that it has to the people of Washington and the rest of the country to clean up its dangerous toxic dumping grounds--at Hanford and elsewhere. For this project to be held back by unenthusiastic funding is shameful.
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"...
Reprocessing tends to separate out the plutonium that's useful for weapons, the industrial process we currently use is designed to produce plutonium as an offshoot.
No sir I dont like it.
Yeah. The people didn't want it. Funny thing about politicians. Once in a while the public stands up and gives them the finger. It's a shame because we need somewhere to store that waste. However, if you look at Hanford leaking into the Columbia river it's not hard to see why the locals aren't on board.
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.
They keep promising to clean up their mess, but then they never seem to quite get around to fulfilling their promises.
So they have a "mind-boggling" amount of waste there (including a cubic km of contaminated soil according to Wikipedia) and they didn't clean it up overnight. What makes you think they're taking their time? How many decades should it take?
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.
Oh, shut _up_ you whiny liberal bitches. 30 years of drinking the "...government IS the problem..." Kool-Aid has led us straight to this.
Get with the times, "..government IS the problem" has been conservative Kool-Aid for some time now.
The GP's point was to imply that Idaho somehow 'deserves' to get the waste since their ratio of nuclear plants to population is high(est). My point was to show that if their population is one of the lowest in the nation then it would skew the view to look like the Idaho folks are more generally in favor of the industry and have a disproportionately large number of nuclear plants (read: they deserve it). Extreme example to illustrate:
State A has 1 nuclear plant and a population of 1000.
State B has 10 nuclear plants and a population of 100,000.
Which state produces more nuclear waste and is more 'deserving' to have the waste put there?
My point that I implied but perhaps should have stated explicitly is to show that it is likely to be far more complicated and a simple 'per capita' metric is at best overly simple and at worst, deceitful. I'm sure you've heard of the "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" saying.
Given that they've been stockpiling this waste "temporarily" for over 60 years, I think they should have made more progress toward an approach to cleaning it up rather than just filling up holes in the ground and then digging new ones and filling those up, too.
And what makes me think they're taking their time is that their plan is to be finished with cleanup by 2060 at the earliest--that's more than 100 years after they started making the mess! Furthermore, that plan has a $3 billion per year budget which is currently being funded at about $2 billion per year. How are they going to finish by their target date when they're only getting 2/3 of their target budget?
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.