Wanted: A Town Willing to Host a Dump for U.S. Nuclear Waste (bloomberg.com) 335
The Biden administration is looking for communities willing to serve as temporary homes for tens of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste currently stranded at power plants around the country. Bloomberg reports: The Energy Department filed (PDF) a public notice Tuesday that it is restarting the process for finding a voluntary host for spent nuclear fuel until a permanent location is identified. "Hearing from and then working with communities interested in hosting one of these facilities is the best way to finally solve the nation's spent nuclear fuel management issues," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. The agency, in its notice, requested input on how to proceed with a "consent-based" process for a federal nuclear storage facility, including what benefits could entice local and state governments and how to address potential impediments. Federal funding is also possible, the notice said. Approximately 89,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is being stored at dozens of nuclear power plants and other sites around the country.
[...]
One such interim storage site could be in Andrews, Texas. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September approved a license for a proposal by Orano CIS LLC and its joint venture partner, J.F. Lehman & Co.'s Waste Control Specialists LLC, to establish a repository in the heart of Texas' Permian Basin oil fields for as many as 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The joint venture envisioned having nuclear waste shipped by rail from around the country and sealed in concrete casks where it would be stored above ground at a site about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) from Andrews. But the plan has drawn opposition from Texas authorities and local officials who once embraced it as an economic benefit but have since had a change of heart. A similar nuclear waste storage project, proposed in New Mexico by Holtec International Corp., is awaiting approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said it expects to make a decision on that proposal in January 2022.
[...]
One such interim storage site could be in Andrews, Texas. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September approved a license for a proposal by Orano CIS LLC and its joint venture partner, J.F. Lehman & Co.'s Waste Control Specialists LLC, to establish a repository in the heart of Texas' Permian Basin oil fields for as many as 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The joint venture envisioned having nuclear waste shipped by rail from around the country and sealed in concrete casks where it would be stored above ground at a site about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) from Andrews. But the plan has drawn opposition from Texas authorities and local officials who once embraced it as an economic benefit but have since had a change of heart. A similar nuclear waste storage project, proposed in New Mexico by Holtec International Corp., is awaiting approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said it expects to make a decision on that proposal in January 2022.
Florida (Score:4, Funny)
Maralago! It's toxic already. (Score:5, Funny)
Just have Anthony Fauci say it's a bad idea and you'll need to always wear PPE and it'll be approved as soon as you show the $ that would be paid to store it.
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The fact that this is modded insightful instead of funny is what's wrong with Slashdot these days.
Re:Maralago! It's toxic already. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. If Fauci says it's dangerous, the plague rats would be lining up the ingest it! They'd set up nuclear waste displays in their homes and scream at store clerks for not selling nuclear waste.
We wouldn't need to pay them -- they would go out of their way to pay us to have access to it! They'd walk maskless into hospitals and refuse all treatment and demand access to nuclear waste instead.
We know that this is what would happen because we've seen this happen before.
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Dry casks corrode just sitting around, which is why we aren't already using the nuclear waste storage facility we built.
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Another reason we're not using Yucca Mountain is that the only way to get casks there currently is to drive them, on special trucks, right through Las Vegas. All these years and no one has ever addressed the missing last 200 mile transport link.
If "no one has ever addressed" it, then why was the DOE planning a rail line [energy.gov] to move waste to the site?
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I don't want a coal or fusion plant near me either.
Re:Florida (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather live next to a nuclear waste dump than a dump site for fly ash from a coal power plant. Fly ash is radioactive too, but nobody seems to care about it. Even when spills contaminate vast areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I'd much rather live next to a deep hole with sealed casks at the bottom, than next to a big pile of fly ash.
Re:Florida (Score:5, Informative)
Thank goodness for Florida bailing out Texas, occasionally, as the butt of the joke.
Regarding Andrews, Tx:
But the plan has drawn opposition from Texas authorities and local officials who once embraced it as an economic benefit but have since had a change of heart..
The site was actually embraced by the locals as a low-level waste disposal facility... contaminated gloves, clothing, instruments, and such. Opposition really only began when the facility was upgraded to handle and store high level waste like spent fuel rods.
Re: Florida (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Florida (Score:5, Interesting)
No to Florida, no to California, and no to the ocean. The only suitable town is Washington D.C. End of story
The ocean is really the best place for it, well under the ocean.
First of all, any waste that can be reprocessed needs to be. Then what can be reprocessed can be ground up and mixed plastic pellets. Then ship it out to sea to be buried.
To bury it we drill holes in the ocean floor next to a Subduction zone, where one oceanic plate is being forced under another plate. Drill through the sea bed and into the subduction zone, we want to reach the bedrock That is where we deposit the waste. The back fill the hole in the bedrock with concrete and let the ocean sediments cover it up.
In short order, geologically speaking, the subduction plate will carry the waste deep under upper plate and down in to the planet. It will literally be millions of years, if ever that shit ever sees the light of day again.
Out of sight, out of mind. Digging this shit up would be impossible, or at least prohibit ably expensive so don't have to worry about some terrorist state doing to make a bomb. Don't even have to mark it for future generations if we fall back in to the stone age for some reason.
We have the technology and its relatively cheap to use. We have been poking floors in the ocean looking for oil for decades. Same principle.
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If it's useful, put it to work. Else, bury it so deep that we get it out of the biosphere.
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Nuclear waste is popular in Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw a YouTube video where people were discussing the state of nuclear power in Canada and the issue of waste management came up. It turns out that many communities in Canada wanted to host a waste disposal site. The reason was that there is a fund for disposing nuclear waste, and requirements for monitoring the waste that meant a nuclear waste site would create many high paying jobs.
We have a similar situation in the USA, a fund to pay for the waste management, paid for by the nuclear power plants, requirements on the monitoring of this waste that will create many high paying jobs, and a request for communities to host these sites. I expect nuclear waste to be popular in the USA too.
I expect people to ask me if I would want a nuclear waste site near me. There's already a nuclear waste site near me, and it appears a great many people don't even know it's there. I do in fact have nuclear waste in my backyard.
Because the linked article is behind a paywall I didn't read it. It would be nice to read more about this so I can see if there's an option to get more nuclear waste in my backyard.
This is a sign of the USA preparing to build more nuclear power plants. I'll often see a demand that we do something about the nuclear waste we have before we build more nuclear power plants. Once there's places to store the waste that complaint is out of the way. What's going to be their next excuse?
We are going to see more nuclear power plants built in the USA because we are running out of power, we are running out of options, and we are running out of excuses.
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In terms of nuclear waste, the issue is who is going to pay. Ultimately, it is the taxpayer, which means it will not work. Back in 1980 there was an idea to clean up about 1000 sites using a superfund. Some of the mon
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Most places can live using wind and solar. For back up there is natural gas. The extremists was no fossil fuels, but really what we need to do is minimize the use of our fossil fuels.
Considering that humanity's carbon footprint needs to go negative to address global warming, I wouldn't say "no fossil fuels" is extreme in any way...maybe a little idealistic if anything.
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Fallout shelters are for nuclear war, not for power plants.
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Fallout shelters are for nuclear war, not for power plants.
2 birds 1 stone
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We can put it in your backyard.
Where do you live?
I live across the street from you.
Re: We can put it in your backyard. (Score:5, Informative)
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The Nuclear Playboys' playbook apparently requires them all to pooh-pooh total lifecycle analyses, because if you ignore that stuff completely it makes nuclear look pretty good. You know, if you just ignore all the stuff leading up to it, and all the stuff you have to do if you shut it down, then it's better than renewables. This returns to the facts that nuclear can only be sold with lies, and only looks good from a position of ignorance.
Re:Nuclear waste is popular in Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that link triggers people on Slashdot.
People with integrity are triggered by lies presented as facts, for example when your "citation" says "Nuclear power produces CO2-free electricity" which is a complete falsehood and is a perfect example of exactly the kind of willful ignorance I'm talking about in my GP comment. Nuclear only looks good from such a position of ignorance, where (again) you ignore everything before and after reactor operation.
Re:Nuclear waste is popular in Canada (Score:4, Informative)
I noticed you didn't link to any sources to correct the record.
I noticed that you ignore every link posted to correct your lies. Why fucking waste time pasting links? But anyway, here you go: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
Anyway, if you like that tactic so much, for some homework refute every claim in these links:
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
https://cleantechnica.com/2021... [cleantechnica.com]
Re: Nuclear waste is popular in Canada (Score:2)
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This returns to the facts that nuclear can only be sold with lies, and only looks good from a position of ignorance.
Then enlighten me if ignorance is the problem. Do you have some helpful bits on the internet you could link to?
Here's something https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm... [nrc.gov]
So safe, the guvmint has to insure it.
Re:Nuclear waste is popular in Canada (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is NOT lower in CO2 emissions. Consider all the concrete that goes into a nuke plant. Making all that concrete emits a large fraction of its own weight in .... CO2.
That's before you even get into refining all the steel, etc.
How much more CO2 does nuclear power produce? How much comes from alternative energy sources? Is this a large difference? A small difference? Can you quantify the CO2 emissions in any way and compare that to our other options?
Here's some numbers to look at: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
Sure looks like nuclear power is lower. Can you show a source with different numbers?
I suspect that you have no idea how much concrete and steel goes into making a pylon to hold up a windmill. The part we see is a big steel pipe. The part we don't see is a huge concrete block buried in the ground beneath it. I like onshore windmills, they produce some very low cost and low CO2 energy. What they can't do is produce energy reliably. For reliable energy we will need nuclear fission and thermal energy storage to go with those windmills.
Because we need reliable sources of energy we will soon see nuclear power plants built by the dozen in the USA. Kind of like how we were building nuclear power plants by the dozen about 50 years ago. It was energy scarcity then that drove the growth in nuclear power then, and it will be energy scarcity that will drive growth in nuclear power in the future. The lower CO2 emissions will just be a nice side effect of building more nuclear power plants.
Willful ignorance (Score:2)
How much more CO2 does nuclear power produce?
What's the point, I've been over it with you so many times when you were shilling from your other sockpuppet accounts. I'm sure I'm not the only on you've subjected to you're pigheadedness.
This is what I meant when I said you treat people here with contempt.
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What's the point, I've been over it with you so many times
The point is to convince the other people reading this forum. Consider the lurkers that don't post, or even have an account. Don't try to educate me then, educate the rest of the class.
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What's the point, I've been over it with you so many times
The point is to convince the other people reading this forum. Consider the lurkers that don't post, or even have an account. Don't try to educate me then, educate the rest of the class.
You're simply looking for an argument because you get a buzz out of the attention. That's why you're so obstinate. It's boring, you're boring.
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I am looking for an argument. I'm looking for someone to make an argument against nuclear power that includes some data. I keep being told I'm wrong on nuclear power but it seems nobody on Slashdot can show me data to prove just how wrong I've been. I'm not getting any data out of anyone. I'm told I should educate myself, to "google it". I did, how do people think I found the links I've been posting? I "googled it", and doing it again just gives me the same data I already had. If my numbers are wrong
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I am looking for an argument. I'm looking for someone to make an argument against nuclear power that includes some data. I keep being told I'm wrong on nuclear power but it seems nobody on Slashdot can show me data to prove just how wrong I've been.
You are a troll and a liar. The numbers that prove you wrong have been presented to you repeatedly and you merely ignore them because they are incompatible with your whole MO. Get a new line of bullshit, we all know what you are.
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People know a whore when they see one.
Re:Willful ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point, I've been over it with you so many times
The point is to convince the other people reading this forum.
Allow me to be blunt, MacMann. If your point is to convince other people that you are an utter asshole - you are succeeding beyond your wildest dreams.
You fall into a trap of your own making.
Back to nicey nicey.
At this point, nuclear power is opposed by too many people to hold them all in contempt.
And we've seen the results of the industry holding anyone who has the mildest disagreement with the idea that nuclear power is anything other than perfection.
Here's the problem.
While nuclear power generation can be made pretty darn safe, it is extremely difficult for humans to do so.
Because we're humans, and we come into the world with our own issues.
Using Fukushima as an example, and ignoring the reactor, the non-reactor components and the human decisions are exactly caused the oopsie that happened there.
Siting - the shoreline of an area that often falls victim to tsunami and earthquake.
Seawall - deliberately built lower than historical and geological rubble lines show would be overtopped by tsunami heights - the only way this wouldn't happen is if plate tectonics disappeared.
In a final triumph of stupidity, the emergency power source was placed in an area that was going to be underwater when the inevitable tsunami overtopped the seawalls.
This was going to happen.
Some corruption on the plant siting?
Cost cutting on that sure to fail seawall?
Who on earth thought of putting the emergency power source in a low spot?
These decisions all doomed the plant. And corporate culture doesn't allow for questioning the decisions of the CEO's and CFO's. Look at modern day Boeing, if you think that TEPCO was a one off.
So arguing about radiation and storage and all that is interesting, but how on earth are you going to change culture where the ultimate goal is profit, corrupt shenanigans, and plain dumb decisions?
I have a level of trust that that genie can be safely contained.
I also know enough about humanity to know that we are really good at screwing things up.
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The IPCC rates CO2 emissions from nuclear over a fairly large range, between 3.7 and 110gCO2eq/kWh. Median is 12gCO2eq/kWh, which was on par with onshore wind at the time of the report (2014). Onshore wind's maximum is 35gCO2eq/kWh though, way lower.
The reason for the large range with nuclear is that it depends on the type of plant, where the fuel comes from and where the waste goes. So any credible plan to reduce CO2 emissions with nuclear needs to cover the full lifecycle of the plant and the fuel.
Here's
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Because we need reliable sources of energy we will soon see nuclear power plants built by the dozen in the USA.
What we need is elimination of regulations, and an energy tsar who will issue an order on waste disposal, as well as total liability immunity.
If the energy tsar says you get a nuc power plant, you get one - people have a problem with that - send out the national guard and have them meet their maker - no more bullshit environmental "problems".
Waste disposal? Wherever the industry wants it - landfill it.
Then and only then will nuclear fission take it's place as the cleanest, cheapest best power source possible. We really can make electricity too cheap to meter.
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And the windmills are made of? Straw? CO2 emissions from concrete - wind versus nuclear is not even a contest. Wind is very low density so you need much more concrete per energy captured. But you knew that already....
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No, it is NOT lower in CO2 emissions. Consider all the concrete that goes into a nuke plant. Making all that concrete emits a large fraction of its own weight in .... CO2.
That's before you even get into refining all the steel, etc.
Considering building, maintaining and retiring of nuclear-plants they produce less CO2 per kWh than all current alternatives. Wind and solar are close, but still not there.. Hydro releases much more CO2 than what people think.
See "Lifecycle emissions"
https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... [carbonbrief.org]
If we have nuclear-power we also have the possibility to run electricity-powered foundries and reduce the released CO2 even more.
If we also start by going to next-gen nuclear-plants, such as liquid salts etc, we can reduce the a
Obligatory unit conversion comment (Score:5, Informative)
stored above ground at a site about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) from Andrews
Significant figures fail: it should say 50 kilometres.
âoeAbout 30 milesâ is equivalent to âoeabout 50 kilometresâ
Re: Obligatory unit conversion comment (Score:2)
Jesus. Is Slashdot ever get any Unicode support?
Re: Obligatory unit conversion comment (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully never, as long as they hold out we're protected from the emoji-invasion.
Re: Obligatory unit conversion comment (Score:2)
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Yes, and it should be easy AF because all you need to do is allowlist a few characters. OTOH, there is something to be said for the all-ASCII nature of Slashdot. I'm not sure what it is, but it's pretty hilarious to see mac users with their nonstandard browser complain
Re: Obligatory unit conversion comment (Score:2)
Texas and Green (Score:4, Interesting)
Texas was wholly on board, but once people started calling nuclear energy "green" -- hold up. Texas is off board. Put the brakes on this project, woah, woahhh!
Hanford in Washington State (Score:2)
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Isn't Hanford a dangerous radioactive supersite?
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Yes, it is. One of my former coworkers at the RV repair shop who's just bailed out (got a better offer, he's a fabricator, so I imagine it was a MUCH better offer) was on the reactor site cleanup crew up here in Humboldt (which by the way was a TOTAL SHIT SHOW, he has told me some pretty amazing stories about it) and he wanted to get on the Hanford cleanup crew because apparently he likes radioactives or something. (Actually, he likes the fat paychecks associated with. And the lack of actual work done.)
semi-relavant info (Score:5, Interesting)
First of calling it "nuclear waste" is not completely accurate. It is better to call them "spent fuel" as that is what they still are, fuel. In most cases the spent fuel rods are actually ~97% reusable in new fuel assemblies and only the remaining ~3% doesn't' currently have any use and needs to be sequestered for any significant time. If the existing spent fuel is recycled there will be no need to mine additional Uranium for a conservatively estimated 100 years. Even longer if we transition to Thorium at which point we can pretty much close the Uranium mines.
The big problem with reprocessing the fuel is that the current method also concentrates the Plutonium into a weapons grade form, something the US government don't want to happen so reprocessing has been discouraged over the years. An improved method of recycling the fuel [phys.org] could open some new paths for the re-use of the spent fuel assemblies.
Another thing that is usually missing from articles talking about all the spent fuel in the USA is context. The current amount, the product of the entire US nuclear power industry since its start would only cover a football field to a depth of aprox 3.5 meters before reprocessing so, its not exactly as big a problem as it is often presented to be.
Re:semi-relavant info (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem with reprocessing the fuel is that the current method also concentrates the Plutonium into a weapons grade form
No, it does not. Reprocessing spent fuel rods doesn't produce weapon grade plutonium. It produces reactor grade plutonium. To get from reactor grade to weapon grade requires enrichment, the same process to turn natural uranium into weapon grade uranium.
In most cases the spent fuel rods are actually ~97% reusable in new fuel assemblies and only the remaining ~3% doesn't' currently have any use and needs to be sequestered for any significant time.
It has a use as fuel. The remaining 3% of fuel is "spent" when used in a light water reactor but it's usable down to about 0.5% in a heavy water reactor. The fission of this spent fuel is aided by the small amounts of plutonium in the spent fuel rods. There's been many people proposing to build new heavy water power plants to burn this "spent" fuel, which isn't so spent if in a different reactor. These plans often do not go far because morons that think there's weapon grade plutonium in the fuel clutch their pearls and faint at any mention of a new nuclear power plant. They don't want us to even burn the fuel, which is a very effective means to destroy it's utility to make bombs. These anti-nuclear morons demand something be done about the spent fuel but then get upset at any solution proposed. This tells me that they don't want to solve the problem, they just need something to complain about.
These complaints would not be so annoying if they weren't so much bullshit.
If the existing spent fuel is recycled there will be no need to mine additional Uranium for a conservatively estimated 100 years. Even longer if we transition to Thorium at which point we can pretty much close the Uranium mines.
There's going to be thorium in uranium mines and uranium in thorium mines, the two do not exist separately in nature. We will be burning both as fuel for a long time.
The current amount, the product of the entire US nuclear power industry since its start would only cover a football field to a depth of aprox 3.5 meters before reprocessing so, its not exactly as big a problem as it is often presented to be.
That's quite likely true.
Most of the radioactive waste that is causing problems came from weapons production but people like to blur the lines on where this comes from and blame nuclear power for this. The source of this waste was from weapons and old nuclear power plants. The best way to destroy this waste is new nuclear power. If we don't destroy it then we have to store it. If nuclear weapons bother people then we need nuclear power plants to destroy the weapon grade plutonium in them. If we bury the plutonium somewhere then someone could dig it up. If we destroy it by neutron bombardment in a fission reactor then nobody will be able to produce weapons from it.
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It's not just spent fuel, a lot of it is equipment that has become contaminated. Some of it from thorium reactors - the amount of high level nuclear waste is a serious problem with them.
It's not just the US government that doesn't want proliferation or countries deciding that it's okay to produce weapons grade plutonium, it's most of the world. If the US starts doing it, other countries will start doing it.
The volume of the waste isn't the issue, it's the difficulty handling and storing it for extremely lon
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First of calling it "nuclear waste" is not completely accurate. It is better to call them "spent fuel" as that is what they still are, fuel.
It's a correct technical term, but it's also misleading. Spent literally means used, and unable to be used again. But if the rods are reprocessed into new fuel, you can use most of them again, which means that it's a linguistically incorrect term. Nuclear waste, however, is also a correct term. If you're not going to reprocess them, and you are just discarding them, then they are waste by definition ("eliminated or discarded as no longer useful or required after the completion of a process") and the phrase
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>The current amount, the product of the entire US nuclear power industry since its start would only cover a football field to a depth of aprox 3.5 meters
Of course, it could only do so very briefly...
Describing the amount of spent fuel like that is brain-numbing stupid, because you absolutely cannot store it like that. By definition the amount of fuel in a single reactor is more than enough to reach criticality and that's not even with 100% packing density... though I suppose letting a huge lump of spent
Alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's dangerous no matter where you put it. This is why nuclear power is a matter of selling out the future for profits today. I say profits because it's not the best, fastest, or cheapest option, but someone is profiting from it or it wouldn't be built at all. There are easier, faster, safer, cheaper, and cleaner methods of power generation; in fact, every method but coal is literally all of those things when compared to nuclear.
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You can't just dump it. It has to be contained in a facility that is fortified against natural disasters like earthquakes and extreme weather, and secured against theft and wildlife. The UK has had problems with the latter, such as the notorious "Dirty 30" storage pool where birds would remove nuclear waste and carry it away.
It also needs extensive monitoring equipment to be installed, to make sure that the fuel is being properly stored. Russia has already had one severe nuclear disaster at a spend fuel sto
C'mon nuclear fanbois, you should be queuing-up... (Score:2)
D.C. (Score:2)
The most logical place is Washington D.C. It's the one place you can be sure the government will actually do everything to prevent leaks or other dangers. Until the US capital is moved to a western state. Then D.C. is screwed. Not that anyone would be able to tell the difference.
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That might seem reasonable, but Washington DC is already a toxic waste dump [washingtonian.com]. High crime, too. Politicians don't care, they don't live there.
Why put it in a community (Score:2)
Wouldn't you want to store nuclear waste as far away from any community as possible?
Re: Why put it in a community (Score:2)
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There is one school of thought that says the way to deal with nuclear waste is to package it in as inert an environment as possible, so that even on 10^4-year time scales, it'll be safe without human intervention. This tends to imply really dry environments (deserts), and geologically stable (far interior of continental plates) which tend to have little population anyway.
Another school of thought says that's impossibl
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Not according to the great minds of some slashdot readers.
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Turns out that Nevadans, after having nuclear bombs exploded in their state for decades, and dealing with the results of uranium mining, but having no nuclear reactors of their own, weren't too keen on being the dumping ground for the nation's nuclear waste. The Yucca mountain site may not have been as dry or geologically dead as expected, despite billions spent on learning everything possible about it. And there's an argument to be said for di
wtf? why near a town? (Score:2, Insightful)
When a politician says "temporary"... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...restarting the process for finding a voluntary host for spent nuclear fuel until a permanent location is identified."
When any politician implies "this is just temporary", you victims better count on that being at least a lifetime or two, and well beyond any statue of limitations.
Standard tactic of pushing the problem just past the retirement date of every politicians career, to reap those corrupt rewards now. We The People, should know better by now, and this is the inherent problem when politics exists for politics sake.
A town full of IMBYs (Score:2)
Who would have thought.
Put it in Idaho, in granite. (Score:2)
or repeal the Price-Anderson Act. Two things that will never happen.
Springfield... (Score:3)
So how is your "Nuclear Fission ... (Score:3)
... as solution for global warming" thing going so far?
(/sarcasm)
If God had wanted for man to use nuclear power, he'd've put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
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... as solution for global warming" thing going so far?
(/sarcasm)
If God had wanted for man to use nuclear power, he'd've put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
Yes but the sun is all "good" radiation because it is natural... right? http://physicsbuzz.physicscent... [physicscentral.com]
Store it in Nevada... (Score:3)
There are large areas of land where the US set off nuclear bombs for testing during the cold war that would be a great place to store this stuff.
The land is already somewhat contaminated by the nuclear tests so storing more waste in the area isn't going to be as big of a deal as storing it elsewhere that hasn't been contaminated at all. Its already owned by the US government and designated as a restricted area so controlling access wont be a problem. The area is (AFAIK) sufficiently geologically stable that there isn't a threat from earthquakes (at least not if you build whatever storage you are using properly).
Reminder: Not a problem for fossil fuels! (Score:2)
Just a reminder that there's no trouble in disposing of radioactive waste with fossil fuels...because fossil fuel industry radioactive waste doesn't have to be handled like nuclear industry radioactive waste. [desmog.com] For a coal power plant, you can just let it blow out the smokestack!
Gotta love nuclear (Score:2)
The gift that keeps on giving.
Shouldn't we be sending it to the moon by now? (Score:3)
We seem to be approximately 22+ years late to the party. We should be storing our nuclear waste on the moon by now.
Well I guess the moon actually wouldn't be there now to store current nuclear waste so maybe it was a good reason to delay doing so.
8^)
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:4, Insightful)
So why do people have such an issue with it being put back there? So long as its deep enough and secure enough** not to contaminate the water table now or in the future, whats the problem?
All petroleum products came from the biosphere, so what's all the CO2 fuss?
And all cocaine came from plants. It's practically a salad. So why is it illegal?
And all you shit & piss has grown on a field near you, so what's the issue with disposing of it in rivers nearby?
Do you sense a pattern here?
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I sense a pattern of false analogues and straw men.
All those examples are substantially changed from their original form into a new form which causes far more damage than the original. Radioactive elements arn't - they were dangerous to start with and they're dangerous at the end.
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Radioactive elements are generally not particularly dangerous in their original deposits. Mostly because the dangerous bits are actually few and far between. U235 is fairly rare in natural occurring uranium. And there is, for obvious half-life reasons, fairly little Plutonium altogether.
If you disperse them at the same rate again as they are found, well, there isn't that big a deal with the whole nuclear garbage. But then again, we'd need a couple towns if we tried that, not just one.
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:2)
But then again, we'd need a couple towns if we tried that, not just one.
... and a lot of energy.
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Some, not a lot. Grind up the rods and mix them with an inert such as sand until the isotopes are as dilute or less than that which they came out of the ground. Then bury them.
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:3)
Then bury them.
That's shorthand for "dig a deep hole, move a lot of dirt around, then move the dirt back in place."
As to the grinding part... creating dust from highly radioactive material. On purpose. What could possibly go wrong, right?
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:4, Interesting)
The issue is that it's extremely difficult to store it underground in a way you can be sure won't get into water tables and will be stable for the very long times it needs to rest there before becoming safe.
Our understanding of geology is incomplete, and the tools we have to examine it are somewhat limited. A great example of this is the number of nuclear plants in Japan that turned out to be built on previously unknown fault lines, only discovered after the Fukushima disaster when people went back with better equipment decades later.
Then there is the difficulty of burying it. You have to drill a shaft that is deep enough and large enough to put the waste in. Because you have thousands of tonnes of the stuff you are probably going to need a lot of holes. Down that far you have to deal with things like temperature gradients and the fact that it's very difficult to monitor the waste. If something goes wrong it's not like you can just haul it back up either.
Overall it's just a terrible idea.
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and the fact that it's very difficult to monitor the waste
It's difficult to monitor nuclear waste? How difficult? What's the processes required? How many people does it take? What part is most difficult?
I recall Secretary of Energy Rick Perry talking about above ground concrete casks in what looked like a fenced off parking lot to store the waste. How hard is that to monitor?
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:2)
"How do you check if the bottom part of your concrete parking lot has developed cracks poisoning ground water?" - level of difficult.
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Raise them up off the ground on beams/whatever so you can see underneath.
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:3)
Then that's not a parking lot anymore, is it? It's a submerged building, with beams needing their own foundation, and access eays beneath.
Oh, and the checking part? Should actually read "check that they're not poisoning". Meaning you have to fix it if they do.
All of a sudden, the parking lot remark is pretty far away from the target.
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If it's buried far enough underground that it isn't going to cause trouble then you need to put the monitoring equipment down there too, and then seal it over. That equipment needs to be extremely reliable, in an environment where there is radiation and extreme pressures.
It's easier to monitor if you keep it in a pool or above ground, but then you need to fortify that location.
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I sense a pattern of false analogues and straw men.
All those examples are substantially changed from their original form into a new form which causes far more damage than the original. Radioactive elements arn't - they were dangerous to start with and they're dangerous at the end.
Not that I'm anti-nuke, but to be fair: what you take out of nuclear plant is orders of magnitude more radioactive than what you put in. Pure uranium, straight out of mine (not the reprocessed stuff, or MOX, mind you) that goes in - well, you could pretty much keep a few small pellets just sitting on a shelf in your home for few days without noticeable ill effects. Spent nuclear fuel, containing fission byproducts is the glow-in-the-dark will-kill-you if you handle it without protection stuff.
So no, an argument of "You were okay with the uranium in the ground before we mined it, so why do you mind if we put it back in after using" is a bad argument. There are tons of good arguments in favour of nuclear energy, but this isn't one of them.
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You do realise it can be diluted down to the same or less concentration that its mined at. Ok, this isn't done at present, but it could be.
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What isotope are you measuring the concentration of? Strontium-90? Cesium-137?
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:3)
Radioactive elements arn't - they were dangerous to start with and they're dangerous at the end.
Oh, good thing they're filling those reactors with what amounts to stones and dirt then. To think that here I went, believing that creating nuclear fuel was actually a complex extraction and purification process... silly me.
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:3)
Re: All nuclear fuel came out of the ground (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear fuel is not especially dangerous to start with. You don't want to eat uranium but having some sitting around isn't dangerous.
But nuclear reactors *do* "change things substantially from their original form". If you fission a U-235 nucleus you get fragments that are highly radioactive; many of them have half-lives measured in tens of years, which is short enough to be intensely radioactive but long enough to be that way for decades/centuries.
Also, nuclear chain reactions involve a bunch of neutrons flying around. Sometimes, instead of causing a fission, they stick to another nucleus, transmuting it into something radioactive. This is how reactors produce plutonium. But they produce other things, too. Uranium gets turned into "actinides", isotopes of other very heavy elements (down near uranium and plutonium on the periodic table). These can be radioactive for even longer (but at a lower level).
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Yes, I sense a pattern of false analogues and straw men.
All those examples are substantially changed from their original form into a new form which causes far more damage than the original. Radioactive elements arn't - they were dangerous to start with and they're dangerous at the end.
Such a load of bullshit. If that were true they would be digging Uranium ore and scooping it directly into reactors. In the real world it undergoes a complex refining process to purify the ore. It may be the same chemically but its's orders of magnitude more potent. So no it's nothing like the original form.
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So long as its deep enough and secure enough** not to contaminate the water table now or in the future, whats the problem?
The problem is that we can't make that guarantee about even yucca mountain, which was considered to be an ideal site. And since we concentrated the ores into fuel rods you can't just dump 'em in the hole without containment. Dry casks turn out to corrode even under ideal conditions, so they have to be monitored and inspected. There's frankly just no good way to store the waste, so making more of it is a crime against future humanity.
You literally can't even put it into a subduction zone and hope it never co
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USing that logic we need to evacuate the areas uranium is mined in because its not safe.
You seem to think civilian reactors create something magic that doesn't exist in the earth when mined.
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since we concentrated the ores into fuel rods you can't just dump 'em in the hole without containment
USing that logic we need to evacuate the areas uranium is mined in because its not safe.
If you didn't understand my comment, it could seem that way.
You seem to think civilian reactors create something magic that doesn't exist in the earth when mined.
No, fuel enrichment does that, because nature doesn't refine uranium as a rule. While we have found the remains of "natural nuclear reactors" they are so far vanishingly rare.
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Civilian reactors *do* create something that doesn't exist in the Earth when uranium is mined. It's not magic; it's fission products.
They do not exist naturally in the Earth in any appreciable quantity. Reactors make them. They take a while to decay.
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USing that logic we need to evacuate the areas uranium is mined in because its not safe.
Christ you're thick headed or just stupid. The ore is nowhere near as powerful or refined as the fuel.