If Y’all have decided that nuclear power is a good thing, y’all better get your mind straight that there has to be a place to store the waste.
Cave in the desert seems like a better place than say, on the shores of 20 percent of the world’s fresh water in the Great Lakes area. Just my two cents – but you guys work it out, ok?
Let me know what you decide.
Lawmakers are reviving a zombie of a plan: storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, a long-contested site in Nevada about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
“Opposition has inhibited congressional appropriations and driven the executive branch to dismantle what has otherwise been a technically successful program,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said during a hearing Wednesday.
Discussion of Yucca Mountain as a permanent resting place for the nation’s 85,000 metric tons of nuclear waste (and counting) has lain dormant for years after local opposition and congressional gridlock effectively killed the plan, writes Nico Portuondo.
But as Republican and Democratic lawmakers find common ground around nuclear power as a way to combat climate change, the old problem of where to put the spent fuel is rearing its head.
Lawmakers have already allocated $2.7 billion to enrich uranium domestically. And a bill to jump-start next-generation reactors passed the House with bipartisan support earlier this year.
At the moment, nuclear power plants store their radioactive refuse on-site, near reactors, at more than 100 locations across the country.
The Biden administration has proposed finding interim storage sites that could serve as a backstop while Congress works to restart Yucca Mountain or finds another long-term site, a process that could take decades.
But even some Democratic lawmakers expressed doubt about the viability of interim storage sites without first securing a permanent repository. Plus, two states, Texas and New Mexico, have already outlawed the designation of such sites in their jurisdictions.
While Yucca Mountain remains the federal government’s official plan, Nevadans — whose state is a key presidential battleground — are dead set against it.
“The bottom line is this: Nevada does not produce nuclear waste, we have not consented to storing it in our backyard, and we should not have it forced upon us,” said Nevada Democratic Rep. Dina Titus.
Nuclear power may be a carbon-free alternative to burning fossil fuels, but it turns out no one is really excited to store its radioactive byproduct.
State of Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford:
The state’s official position is that Yucca Mountain is a singularly bad site to house the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel for several reasons:
GEOLOGY and LOCATION: There are many unresolved scientific issues relative to the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site. These issues include hydrology, inadequacy of the proposed waste package, repository design and volcanism. The Yucca site is seismically and volcanically active, porous and incapable of geologically containing the waste. Yucca’s aquifer drains to the Amargosa Valley, one of Nevada’s most productive agricultural regions, is adjacent to a busy and growing Nellis Air Force Base, and is only 90 miles from our largest metropolitan area, Las Vegas.
LIMITED SPACE: Yucca isn’t big enough to store all of the nation’s nuclear waste. More than 70,000 metric tons of high level nuclear waste and spent nuclear is stored in more than 77 reactor sites across the country. That number increases by more than 2,000 tons each year. Yucca’s statutory design capacity is only 77,000 metric tons. By the time Yucca would be filled to capacity in 2036, there will still be at least the same amount of spent fuel still stored at the reaction sites, even if no new plants are built.
TRANSPORTATION: Transporting waste to Yucca Mountain puts the American public at risk. More than 123 million people live near the proposed truck and train routes which would be used to deliver waste to Yucca Mountain. Those routes travel through 703 counties in 44 states. An accident or attack along those routes could hurt or kill thousands of innocent people.
NATIONAL SECURITY: Contrary to DOE arguments, building the Yucca Mountain repository will not make America safer. Instead, it will give terrorists more attractive and vulnerable targets. The DOE expects more than 100,000 shipments of spent fuel to be transported to Yucca Mountain-thus creating 100,000 mobile targets. Furthermore, the DOE plans to store high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel above ground at the Yucca site for at least 100 years. This creates the largest new spent fuel storage target in the world.
It is not deniers that will kill the world but self righteous nimby’s.
Most of the people worried about this have no idea how much nasty material is shipped by rail through the countryside. Every now and then something as spectacular as the East Palestine derailment makes the news, but there are hundreds of smaller spills and near misses every year. Add to that the many tank farms (and 1400 coal ash impoundments) that are vulnerable to increasing major rain events and severe storms.
A sample of what I call “industry safety porn” videos: https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB/videos
I presume that nuclear waste will be transported in heavy or double-walled containers, and that any “spill” wouldn’t go very far. Contrast that to the relatively frequent problem of chlorine gas clouds (including one spotted coming from a plant on the Mississippi not far from Baton Rouge).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chlorine-accidents-take-big-human-toll/
I’m not in favour of moving spent fuel to more permanent storage, but not because that would be a risk. The containers are ridiculously secure, the fuel is a dense ceramic encased in metal anyway, and if any did get out, it’s easily detected ( the Australians found a small radioactive sample for mining surveys, that fell off a truck somewhere on a 200 mile desert road, within days.)
The US government has already determined that storing it in casks onsite at reactors is safe. The NRC relicenced those reactors to run for another 20 years (to 60), and most will go for another 20, to 80. There’s no obvious reason they couldn’t contine on past that – not like hydro dams, which silt up, geothermal bores, which cool down, or wind turbines, that gradually fatigue their hard working towers (blades and nacelles can be replaced, as can reactor steam generators and turbines.)
When, or if, the current crop of reactors do age out, the sites they’re on will be the best place to build their replacements – they already have cooling water, transmission, a workforce, and local acceptance. There’s a good chance those replacements will be fourth-generation fast reactors, which could use light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel again. 95% of the spent fuel content is uranium 238, which is fertile, 1% U235, which is fissile, and another 1% is plutonium, mostly also fissile. Canadian heavy water reactors (Candu) can run on natural uranium, which is only 0.7% fissile. Also in Canada, Moltex Energy is developing a process to convert spent fuel from Candus into molten salt, to power their molten salt reactor (MSR) design – they were granted a patent for the method in January. Unlike the Purex system used for fuel recycling in France, which is complex, multi-staged, and very expensive, the Moltex one is much more compact and simple. A vat about the size of a billiard table acts the same way as aluminium smelters do, separating out the desirable metals by voltage. Unlike Purex, it never makes pure plutonium, only a chloride mix of uranium, plutonium, and a few radioactive fission products, no good for either bombs or light water reactors, but ready to put straight into MSRs.
Who’s gonna’ take care of it ten thousand years from now? Short of loading it on rockets and firing it into the sun, whatever you do is a short-term solution to a very long-term problem. Will we be around to keep track of it? Maintain the tunnels, the equipment, the seals against the outside environment?
Two things: I am oft reminded of the closing of one of Asimov’s robot books, with the robots “for the good of humanity” turning the valves that so irradiated the planet as to drive humanity to the stars. And, uhh … we are fleas; planet lice, agitating the hide of a far greater organism. The religious nutballs are right ~ correct ~ we fleas cannot “destroy the planet”, just make the inhabitable part uninhabitable for any life for the next quarter or half a million years. We’re not ready for the stars, the stars aren’t ready for us.
War is not the answer. Next question …
Everything is radioactive, including us, We are constantly bathed in radiation even when not getting X-rayed. The danger is primarily from the entertainment industry and utilized by anti nuke ideologues. Personally I Avoid It Anyway! The solution to this buggar all problem is to use up the ‘nucleoids’ in mixed fuel reactors. Then there might be someone around in 10k years.
I (a mid-fifties mid-Nevada Army-brat) was born with an extra thumb. Perfectly normal (I am told): at some point in the deep dark recesses of antiquity one of my ancestresses bred with a six-fingered giant and these genetic reoccurrences actually reoccur in about one out of a thousand births
I don’t think it accounts for the streak of autism …
Anne Boleyn, Henry the Eighth’s second wife, had six fingers on one hand – probably means she was a witch (or AI-generated.)
She got the red-head gene too!
Think I’ve interpreted your post correctly. Both a stretch and a possibility.
Now that we’ve established (tentatively) that we are both human, I would be interested in hearing *how* you interpreted that 😉
Now that we’ve established (tentatively) that we are both human, I would be interested in hearing *how* you interpreted that 😉
That the Nevada nuke test radioactivity caused your excess digit?
Per your response to my original comment ~ radioactivity is no big deal, all around us. Six-digitism is well established around the world and down through history so, quite frankly, we have no way of knowing. I’m inclined to no, not the open-air testing but that’s not the point. It is as well established down through history and around the world that radiation kills. Deforms. Mutates. Maybe that’s what we need, what’s in the cards, to move on to the next iteration in our evolution: a mutation
I’m pretty sure the streak of autism is from mercury in the water, but it could be the Spirit of Cap’n Jack …
Having worked in the late 1980’s on the science team that chose this site, it is certainly better than the alternative storage options.
Any links etc for technical details, geology, storage systems etc, aka real information?
agree here, certainly