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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.
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.
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/...
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.
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
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.
Idaho Nazis... I hate Idaho Nazis.
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).
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?
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.