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."
About time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
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It looks like the Ford and Carter bans on nuclear waste reprocessing were overturned by Reagan. The Wikipedia page on nuclear reprocessing [wikipedia.org] has an overview of the current situation, and a link to a more in-depth summary of US reprocessing policy here (pdf) [fas.org].
Based on a quick read, it looks like one of the big hold-ups is that while the US isn't banning fuel reprocessing, it isn't subsidising it either; but that's just from a quick read and I encourage you to do your own analysis.
Further, reading over the Wiki
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You hit the nail on its head: "it isn't subsidising it either"
From my conversations with others and general internet reading, other countries have been reprocessing their 'spent fuel/waste' and using it over again. In some discussions the reasons for lack of space (for storage) has come up as a primary reason of why they do it. And why they don't do it here in the U.S.A. is because of cost - it's much cheaper to just set it and "forget it" than process it which costs money. It's such a shame that it has bee
Only one country + learn about it (Score:3)
Last time I looked there was only one France and they've had a lot of trouble with reprocessing and haven't done any for a couple of years.
Also for some reason a lot of people have it backwards. The one and only purpose of reprocessing is to extract usable material from spent fuel rods. It is NOT a way to reduce nuclear waste, in fact it actually generates a lot of low level waste due to contamination. The fuel rods are still very intense neutron sources after all so
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.
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If it's not subsidized, then it's only a matter of time before cost of storing (un-reprocessed) waste meets the raw cost of fuel.
My understanding is that reprocessing generates plutonium, and that probably had/has something to do with a lack of reprocessing.
Get the cost of fossil fuels to be more efficient (i.e. incorporate negative externalities into the price of oil), and all this immediately becomes more interesting for everyone.
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lol you are making the mistake of thinking the argument is about common sense. Its about politics.
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lol you are making the mistake of thinking the argument is about common sense. Its about politics.
It's far worse than that. It's about irrational fear on one hand and unknowledgeable hardcore anti-nuclear power fanatics on the other. How many times have we heard the anti-nuclear power crowd go on and on about there's no where to store the waste, and then when you bring up Yucca they switch to "well no you have to transport it!". What they really want to say is "Ban all nuclear power! Power everything with rainbow farts from Unicorns!"
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Fair and balanced, heh?
It is between irresponsible nuclear energy fanbois on one hand and political and financial/technical reality on the other hand. Nuclear is not going anywhere, and it's time for the nuclear energy advocates to stop pretending. Things don't get anymore true because you repeat them over and over. When you weight the probability of something going wrong wi
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Fair and balanced, heh?
It is between irresponsible nuclear energy fanbois on one hand and political and financial/technical reality on the other hand. Nuclear is not going anywhere, and it's time for the nuclear energy advocates to stop pretending. Things don't get anymore true because you repeat them over and over. When you weight the probability of something going wrong with the consequences it comes out that nuclear is not for most places on this planet.
It is simply not true that coal (for example) is worse than nuclear. It might be so on a an average day, but if shit hits the fan, nuclear can recover all the distance in a single day, and then make some the next day. And given the corruption and incompetence of the nuclear industry, we'll see another blow to its image within a decade. I'd bet it will be a Thorium reactor by the chinese, who are going to fuck up as surely as the sun gets up tomorrow.
Go ahead, claim it's impossible, so you are on the record when it does.
How's that called. Nuclear strawman? Hahaha.
You want me to claim that there will never be another nuclear accident? You're right, that would be silly. It will likely happen again. But here's the thing. In the 60 odd years since the first commercial nuclear power plant came online we've had what, three accidents of note in commercial plants? One of which has never been proven to have harmed a single person and the last of which the consequences are admittedly unknown. What did it take to get that final incident? Just a 9.0 earthquake and a 43 foot tsu
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The problem in Fukushima was loss of mains power together with generalized chaos from the monster tsunami. A sputtering cesna together with political unrest or mild underregulation of the nuclear companies can have the same effect. The monster tsunami is a nice cover, but is still a dis
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It's actually about Nevada residences say store your own fucking waste we don't want it.
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It's about irrational fear
The hardcore pro-nuclear power fanatics love trotting this one out.
Yes, theoretically nuclear can be completely safe. Unfortunately the reactors are run by companies whose primary motive is profit and by human beings who are naturally fallible.
Accidents do happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents [wikipedia.org]
Now, I am aware that the amount of radiation leaked from Fukushima isn't dangerous to most people in Japan, certainly not in Tokyo where I was when it happened. The damage it has done
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A mistake may happen! Stop all production NOW!
It's unreasonable to believe anything will ever be completely safe. And it's counter-productive to crawl inside a hole because of it. The least we could do would be to build plants which are safer than the ones already operating and reduce the amount of pollution caused by current methods of producing electricity (or at least stop the expansion of said pollution in the future).
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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.
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As I've always said, solar and wind are great, where its sunny and windy
Not this shit again. Look, we have solar thermal collectors that work 24 hours a day 365 days a year. They are perfectly adequate for producing baseline power. Plus, there are parts of the earth where sunlight is guaranteed anyway, which is why the EU wants to build plants in north Africa.
Wind does vary, but we can store the energy and release it when needed. In fact we already do that with current nuclear and fossil generation. With storage in place you only need to look at average wind speeds and those ar
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We could do space solar today too. We already have everything we need to do it. Just one more thing we lack the political will to actually make happen I guess...
We also lack large-scale heavy lift capacity. It's currently fantastically expensive to put things in space, and almost all of that cost is due to moving mass from the bottom of a gravity well to (much closer to) the top. It's simply much cheaper to just put solar cells on the ground (assuming you're somewhere with plenty of insolation and relatively cheap land) even despite the reduction in efficiency due to the atmosphere. Plus it's easier to upgrade and easier to maintain.
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You seem to think that nuclear reactor byproducts were ever going to be stored there. This was always a jobs product.
Let us fantasize. For many years, people were saying the exact same thing about WIPP [wikipedia.org]. Trucks loaded with TRU-PAKs head down to Carlsbad all the time.
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Different situation that proves my point. WIPP stores DOD waste. This comes from weapons that enrich their power so it's good.
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And WIPP makes sense, as it is a geologically stable formation. Yucca Mountain, not so much.
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And WIPP makes sense, as it is a geologically stable formation. Yucca Mountain, not so much.
Need I note that Yucca Mountain is also geologically stable (on time scales that involve nuclear waste)?
It needs to be reopened, and spent fuel moved in. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not perfect, but dry cask storage in Yucca Mountain is way better than rods in spent fuel pools in power plants.
There's been worry about shipping spent fuel rods around, but the casks are very tough (they will survive being hit by a locomotive), and the worst cases are far, far less dangerous than a failed spent fuel pool at a power plant, as we now know.
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Note that a good portion of the worry about shipping the spent fuel around is that the rails themselves actually need to be upgraded to support the weight of how the nuclear cargo needs to be shipped. The standard lines can't handle it.
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US rail needs upgraded anyway. Sound like an opportunity to improve our infrastructure and provide jobs, a great thing to do during a recession.
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Nothing wrong with our freight rail system - it's one of the best in the world.
Our passenger rail system is a whole other story, but good passenger rail infrastructure and good freight rail infrastructure are completely independent.
Yes, in our country our passenger infrastructure is heavily dependent on our freight infrastructure, which is WHY our passenger infrastructure is so bad.
Side Benefit (Score:3)
Yes, in our country our passenger infrastructure is heavily dependent on our freight infrastructure, which is WHY our passenger infrastructure is so bad.
WIth the average weight of Americans increasing, it could be very handy that passenger rail makes use of the freight lines.
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I thought our passenger rail system was awful because of those airplane thingies that get you there in 1/20th the time.
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How does the fuel get to the plant today? What makes the waste heavier than the fuel?
IIRC the fuel gets there by truck. If so, they can take the dry casks out by truck if there is somewhere for the trucks to go.
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You're looking at nickel-steel casks carrying uranium and heavier than water liquid waste products. Soooo, pretty fucking heavy.
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This is yet another case of anti-nukers actually making the world a more dangerous and costly place. If the anti-nukers would just shut the fuck up and let intelligent people actually move forward, things would be way better all the way around. As is, everything is more dangerous and far, far, far more expensive than would otherwise be required if anti-nukers would simply shut the fuck up.
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Well the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't reprocess it's nuclear waste. In fact you guys ship your plutonium to Canada so we can make nuclear fuel for reactors. Seriously? Time to kick environmentalists in the face when they fuck everything up for everyone else based on fear mongering.
Texas (Score:2)
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you know - the not in my back yard argument annoys the shit out of me.. everything is everyone's problem.. it has to end up some place.. if you don't like it in your back yard move.. but let it happen.. personally i don't mind.. if i don't like what is going on in the area around me i move..
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4
Yes. Your ignorance is really amazing.
Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Interesting)
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Look, I love the LFTR as much as anybody, and have for many years, but this kind of BS doesn't help the case. The neutron budget is just over break-even in thorium reactors and it does not lend itself well to transmuting waste. Other types of reactors specially designed for the job are much better for transuranic transmutation.
Also, the anti-proliferation features of LFTR are overstated. The LFTR produces and continuously reprocesses U-233. U-233 has been verified to work in nuclear bombs. Mostly the supp
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Fun fact: the ban on reprocessing was lifted by Reagan. The government just isn't subsiziding it.
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]"
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Because the same reactor can (and does) produce plutonium as an intermediary fuel. Some of those reactors can be designed to allow the plutonium to be harvested.
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You have to enrich the waste before you can use it.
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Burning waste products up requires reprocessing. Carter banned reprocessing unilaterally due to proliferation concerns and a false assumption that reprocessing = PUREX = proliferation - but there are fuel cycles that use reprocessing other than PUREX.
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Note: Thorium fuel cycle has nothing to do with burning our existing waste. Yes, it does happen to support a low-waste low-proliferation-risk cycle, but there are actually low-proliferation-risk cycles such as that used by the IFR that work with our existing waste regardless of thorium use as fuel.
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If you use uranium as you fuel [and most plants due] a by-product is plutonium. When reprocessing the fuel one can extract the plutonium easily.
Building a bomb out of uranium is hard. Nuclear fuel is “low enriched”. It needs to be purified to “highly enriched”. This is hard to do. Building a bomb out of plutonium, on the other hand, is hard.
Any country to reprocess fuel, could say with a straight face, that they had no intention of building a bomb – but verifying that would be
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Well, with *traditional* (Plutonium-based)recycle, here's the proliferation concern, as far as I understand it:
"Spent Fuel" from thermal-spectrum uranium fueled reactors (like light water and heavy water reactors which comprise essentially 100% of currently operating reactors) has some plutonium, and some U-235 (the type of uranium which can fission) in it. That Uranium-235 and plutonium (mostly the plutonium - there's not a whole lot of U-235 left after running through a reactor once).
The plutonium (and U-
THE US LACKS LONG TERM PLANNING (Score:5, Interesting)
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Thus, planning is limited to FOUR YEARS. How can one run the last remaining superpower on a four year shedule?
The Chinese are rapidly overtaking with their five year plans. I therefore recommend that the main US election cycle become every 6 years with legislative elections every 3.
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The political party in power at any given time is only obsessed and focused with getting themselves reelected in four years. Thus, planning is limited to FOUR YEARS. How can one run the last remaining superpower on a four year shedule? It takes 10 years to build a nuclear power plant. How long does it take to build other MEGA infrastructure projects?
By extension, when one party does plan ahead and start building Nuclear/Solar/Foo plants, after four years, the new party in power comes along to halt construction because it's not their baby.
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:It really is a pretty safe facility (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
But that's exactly why the anti-nuclear nutters oppose it; they love nuclear accidents because it helps them campaign to end nuclear power... the last things they want are safe reactors and safe waste disposal.
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But that's exactly why the anti-nuclear nutters oppose it; they love nuclear accidents because it helps them campaign to end nuclear power... the last things they want are safe reactors and safe waste disposal.
Good point! Protestors lack the proper incentives or, at least, impetus to inform their own opinions.
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I refer to these sort of tactics as bunghole politics. The idea is to stop up the system so that it has to be shut down. Named after the following joke:
The brain said "I do all the thinking so I'm the most important and I should be in charge."
The eyes said "I see everything and let the rest of you know where we are, so I'm the most important and I should be in charge."
The hands said: "Without me we wouldn't be able to pick anything up or move anything. So I'm the most important and I should be in charge."
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I'm inclined to agree, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
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If they have enough natural disasters that all their other nuke plants have the same type of shit occur, most of the japanese population will probably starve to death before they die from rad sickness.
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In other news, cigarette smoking has been declared safe due to the negligible number of people who drop dead from lung cancer within 3 months of starting smoking.
Shouldn't we apply some basic toxicology first? Don't people have to be exposed to a significant dose first? With cigarette smoking we have obvious, concentrated exposure to harmful chemicals. That's not the case with the Fukushima accident. Remember the evacuation zone and the public instructions to avoid various means of contamination? There appears to be a significant release of radioactive dust, but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding exposure to this contamination.
TEPCO's press release said same about Fukushima (Score:2, Interesting)
Why should I believe this assurance of safety when the Nuclear Industry's track record shows they ALWAYS lie about safety and potential risks. ALWAYS.
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I don't think they really do. Any large scale power system carries risk, but if you try to be honest about the risks people go off the rails.
At least as far as the Yucca Mountain leeching data goes, I've seen that with my own eyes. And that was before the nuclear industry basically took over the regulatory authority. Yucca Mountain planning did take cataclysmic events into consideration, up to what would most likely be extinction events for the rest of globe anyway.
If something really bad happened, y
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Any large scale power system carries risk, but if you try to be honest about the risks people go off the rails.
Yeah, lie to me about your statistics and I'll go off the rails. Too bad there aren't more of me.
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Parent is correct. When you get past the junk science and put credible people under the spotlight Yucca Mountain is understood to be a safe long term solution. I watched the congressional testimony. The DOE had to have it beat out of them, because affirming the safety of Yucca kicks a leg out from under the Administration's policy. NRC scientists affirmed the same thing. There are no technical reasons why we should not open Yucca Mountain. The only actual reason for the shutdown that anyone could cite
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The problem with "Yucca Mountain" has nothing to do with the facility - there are shortcomings, but I'm not aware of any place that would be better.
The problem is in the transport of the material to the facility - it affects more people, passes through densely populated areas, involves more congressional districts, and is easily the most dangerous part of the plan. The nation's nuclear failings and broken promises with the residents of the affected transit areas doesn't help either.
It's one thing to get pas
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Any place exposed to something that could get through those transport casks has more to worry about than just radiation. And smooth, vitrified slugs of glass buried in a single deep hole are a far cry from microscopic dust dispersed in the atmosphere over hundreds of miles. Most of the curies released into the environment have been from coal, not nuclear, and released in a way that is far more hazardous to health.
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Hate to tell you this, but the problem isn't really NIMBY - it's about several states being forced into something that's very much against their interests, and in a way that can potentially depopulate whole cities. The waste storage itself isn't the largest problem; the site can be secured relatively easily, and is safer than in the spent fuel pools at our nation's nuclear plants.
The problem lies outside Yucca Mountain: It's partly in safety, and mostly in politics.
The issue is that large, populous states,
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It isn't NIMBY, yet the things you named are all NIMBY fears for Nevada. From the perspective of someone that doesn't live in any of the prospective states I think Nevada is a much better choice. We've already contaminated the underground area near there with no wide-scale radiation issues, so even with leaks it seems promising that most of the country would not be affected.
Kamps said better sites for a repository include deep granite formations in places like New Hampshire, Wisconsin or Minnesota
So instead of sticking it in a low population desert we should stick it in a hole near the source of one of our biggest rivers (one t
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Kamps said better sites for a repository include deep granite formations in places like New Hampshire, Wisconsin or Minnesota
I never mentioned any of the other proposed sites; so it must be a bit of cross-posting. Honestly, Yucca is the most logical choice for a central repository. And I do live in an affected area. I also believe that it makes far more sense for dry cask storage on-site than to transport it across the country to the central repository.
However, all governments need to take into account the human element, and political capital. To be honest, anything with nuclear waste disposal in the area is seen as a callous vot
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>Nevada (and the transit states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah) have no nuclear plants. Why should they pay nearly all of the penalties, and enjoy none of the benefits?
Sorry.. You lost me right there... You do know that the first peaceful nuclear reactor in the us was in idaho, right? (idaho national labratory) and tons of other reactors? there is a GIANT reservation there for nuclear stuff. (and is the location of one of the very, very few nuclear incidents) If I remember right, the navy even trains there for their 'mop and glo's' for part of their training.
Do you realize how many nuclear weapons are sitting in Colorado and Wyoming? most of our ICBM's are located in t
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>Nevada (and the transit states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah) have no nuclear plants. Why should they pay nearly all of the penalties, and enjoy none of the benefits?
Sorry.. You lost me right there... You do know that the first peaceful nuclear reactor in the us was in idaho, right? (idaho national labratory) and tons of other reactors? there is a GIANT reservation there for nuclear stuff. (and is the location of one of the very, very few nuclear incidents) If I remember right, the navy even trains there for their 'mop and glo's' for part of their training.
The only nuclear plants in Idaho are research reactors. There are no commercial power plants, and never have been. There was a plant intended for nuclear fuel reprocessing, but it was never put into use after congress outlawed processing of nuclear fuel (see a trend here? - no nuclear material gets transported.) There's a HUGE difference in scale between a commercial plant and a research reactor. Heck, the University of Utah has a small reactor - but just because it's a reactor doesn't make it dangerous -
Why build one when you can build two at 3 times (Score:3)
the price? I suspect the biggest problem with Yucca is that we are ignoring the lost revenue of building another one. And the guys in charge would really love to be able to steer another bazillion dollars to their favorite contractors. Very generous contractors.
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huh? I see your line of reasoning, but it's more likely the very isolated nature of YMP hurt it. See, the hardest to kill government project is the one that 'resides' in as many representatives districts as possible.
Having said that, storing and managing nuclear waste is the very thing I want my government worrying/managing. Do you really think Walmart, GE, or BP has any incentive to properly manage nuclear waste? You've got to be kidding me!
I want them to use what they already built (Score:2)
I don't want anything privatized. I want them to use the facility they already built. If it is totally unfit for that use, then I want the money raked back from every contractor that we spent it on. Which will never happen. If they start from scratch, they get to spend all that money -again-. And the skimming will go on and on and on. Note: This is a nuclear facility. Lots of security. Which means blacked-out costs and expenditures and a perfect place to hide graft and corruption. Its
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Right, so place a marginal tax on gas that goes directly to an EPA funded environmental rehabilitation (cleaning) program. (Good luck passing that with who we've got in the Congress.)
PS Last time I heard what that marginal tax *should* be, just to properly cover the external costs of burning a gallon of gas, $12 would need to be added to every barrel of gas sold. Can YOU imagine paying $15 for a gallon of gas?
Perhaps you meant to answer a different post (Score:2)
I have no idea what I might have said to bring up the idea of tax increases.
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The energy sector suffers from drastically undervalued oil.
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Currently he is trying to find an alternative use for Yucca Mountain, in order to make it even harder to open again once he leaves office.
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I’m a big proponent of nuclear energy- it's a necessary cornerstone to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I think the best thing we can do is build modern reactors that can use the nuclear 'waste' as fuel, and burn it down to isotopes that decay in a few human generations. However, I'm not ignorant about the tragic failure of government that is the primary cause for the opposition to Yucca Mountain, and am keenly aware that there is no political capital left to spend - and why.
Trying to pin the "problem
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I'm not trying to blame Harry Reid or pin it on anyone. I am merely pointing out the fact that without Harry Reid, all the rest wouldn't have the power and capability to prevent the US from going forward with storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. Like it or not, that's the reality of the situation.
There are other powerful senators (such as Orrin Hatch of DCMA infamy) in neighboring states who are no less passionate about refusing nuclear waste.
Believe me: It's not just Nevada that fought Yucca Mountain. Utah also has a licensed nuclear waste disposal site - one that slipped past all congressional review because of a loophole in laws surrounding indian reservations; the company that instigated has had to run a massive PR campaign just to keep people from being violent to their employees. The surround
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only 42++ comments? (Score:2)
I'm saddened by the lack of interest this generated. I hope this is more a reflection of /. readers being too busy working to read and comment...
Why? Because nuclear waste and nuclear power are entirely under appreciated by the lay public.
-Nuclear power is one of the few, mature alternatives to fossil fuels.
-It's also pretty clean. (It'd be even more clean if the YMP was in full-swing).
-Somehow any nuclear accident gets blown completely out of proportion by the media (and therefore the public) while any
I have been to France (Score:2)
NIMBY (Score:3)
It's going nowhere, Reid is still Majority Leader, it's in his state, and he's still against it. Lotta political smoke, not much fire.
Real bad idea (Score:2)
Nevada... (Score:2)
good luck getting this by harry reid (Score:3)
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Citation needed
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We are coming for you and those like you. Those we don't keep around to be ridiculed will disappear.
You don't know when, you don't know where.
Sleep well.
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Hey, turn off Fox News and open the window up to let the crack fumes out.
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Simple fact: Obama is the worst president the US has seen for at least three decades. He's increased the deficit, he destroyed the economy, the job market is in the toilet, and he's already managed to start at least three wars (that we know about).
Wait? Three wars? We're pretty much out of Iraq. Afghanistan was started by quite a different president, and Libya isn't a war nor a strictly US concern. The Job market was in the toilet long before Obama hit the office, as was the financial crisis. Further, pretty much every president in recent memory takes it as a holy mission to increase the deficit, his predecessor didn't really do a very good at NOT increasing the deficit either. And I hate to say it, neither will whatever GOP backed moron who rep
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Bush destroyed the economy, Obama has done stuff all to fix it, but he didn't destroy it. The job market follows the same thread.
The only President in the last 30 years to not increase the deficit was Clinton, Obaman inherited the largest deficit and debts have this tendency to grow more rapidly the more of them you have. Again, hasn't really done much about it but given the only realistic solution to the deficit is a tax increase and no one seems to want one of those there's a bit of an excuse there.
Obaman
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Fusion Engery: No
Fairy Dust: Yes.
There are ways to reduce the amount of high level waste, but as people mentioned they fall afoul of the nuclear proliferation treaties.
There have been "table top" demonstrations of converting low level waste into safe stuff. Basically, you isolate the radioactive atoms and bombard them with neutrons until they fall apart into something safer. You don’t need nanotechnology to make this work – but close.
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The answer is yes. There is a way to process all that unspent fuel and reduce the waste to materials that can be safely stored until inert. It is called fission in a breeder reactor. We just have to repeal non-proliferation and build the reactors and we can get rid of all that waste while producing electricity at the same time.
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Coal & gas plants can survive rapid political winds of yes-we-can / no-it's-bad, but this nuclear stuff takes a longer term commitment. You can't change your mind on a dime.
Yucca mountain was scoped, zoned, and marketed as million-year storage, no wonder there's opposition. By me too. But as a "temporary" staging area until reprocessing and burning up, it may well be our best option.
Too bad there's such a garbage-man mentality around. Recycle your own wastes? Communism! Islam! Illegal immigrants! Drug-dealing! Or whatever the tea-party crowd wants to launder it as. The Greens are likewise a bit irresponsible in this regard.
Wait, what? What does "the tea-party crowd" have to do with this? Unless I'm terribly mistaken about the only people opposed to reprocessing fuel are either the greenies, because they hate nukes no matter what, or anti-nuclear weapons people because they don't know that it can be done without the output equaling bombs. Where are tea party people in that mix of people? Hell, for that matter who could seriously argue against cost effective reuse of materials?
Tea-party is about thrift (Score:2)
Recycle your own wastes? Communism! Islam! Illegal immigrants! Drug-dealing! Or whatever the tea-party crowd wants to launder it as.
Tea party people have no beef at all with recycling - as conservatives, it's just another means to being thrifty and not wasting things.
It's along the same lines as saying the government should not waste money on projects they are not needed, we should not waste nuclear fuel that is perfectly good.
The Greens are MORE than a "bit" irresponsible, they are the ones fully responsib
Re: (Score:2)
Some of the tea party may be about being thrifty, most of the Tea Party are about "government is bad".