Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain 212
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that a group of congressmen backed by the nuclear industry are pushing to reopen the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The site has sat closed and uncompleted since the Obama administration scrapped the project. The article goes into the pros and cons of the Yucca Mountain site for storage and also brings up some interesting political issues involved in continuing development. It's also worth noting that there's been a fee on electric bills since 1983 for the building of the site."
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:About time (Score:2, Informative)
lol you are making the mistake of thinking the argument is about common sense. Its about politics.
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
Shhhh! You'll wake the tree huggers who only want to use biodegradable elf farts powering windmills in Denmark! Just imagine if a nuclear plant melts down! The entire world's salt supply will kill us all! [nikochan.net].
As I've always said, solar and wind are great, where its sunny and windy. We need to stop the fantasy science and at LEAST use today's available science to solve today's problems. You wanna develop space solar panels and beam down power? Fine, we'll close the nuclear plants AFTER you get it working.
It really is a pretty safe facility (Score:5, Informative)
I remember working on some of the Yucca Mountain studies years ago and there really isn't a better place you could store nuclear waste. It's very stable geologically, and the storage medium leeching was practically non-existent, even if you stored the blocks under water.
Most of the objections are NIMBY related and don't represent any realistic threat.
I can promise you where nuclear waste is being stored now, where ever that is, is a lot less safe than it would be at Yucca Mountain.
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Fun fact: the ban on reprocessing was lifted by Reagan. The government just isn't subsiziding it.
Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
I believe regardless of the science and actual process for reprocessing it is simply an equivalence in many politician's minds of reprocessing == proliferation. I believe the truth is that you get plutonium out as a "waste product" from straight fuel rod reprocessing but with some new formulations of fuel rods you may end up putting the plutonium back in.
My understanding of fuel reprocessing today is that it is somewhere around 97% of a fuel rod is available for using in a new fuel rod. In other words, only 3% of the mass of a fuel rod is truely "waste" and ends up needing to be buried somewhere for a long time.
Of course it is idiotic to be storing fuel rods which require cooling and isolation when they could be reprocessed with 97% of them being reused. But the nuclear politics are filled with idiocy.
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Fun fact: the ban on reprocessing was lifted by Reagan. The government just isn't subsiziding it.
"The technology was banned by President Carter due to proliferation concerns. President Reagan lifted the ban, and President Clinton later reinstituted it. [nei.org]"