Sweet Og, what foreign nation does he propose putting such a facility in?
Candidate nations should at the very least have a currently stable government. Which lets out a lot of the poorer nations that would be eager to trade US $ for minor long-term risks to their peoples. And I really don’t think that this would be something that would be voluntarily accepted by any nation that wasn’t that desperate for (formerly) hard US currency.
The other thing that bothers me are the reports I keep hearing about how endemic corruption and bribery are to many of these poorer nations. I’m not saying this makes the people in them evil, or that we shouldn’t trade with them. But when we’re talking about setting up a facility like this where the requirements for acceptable storage are so exacting, and expensive, that is not the sort of culture I’d think any sane person would want to see storing this stuff.
I really don’t know whether Yucca Mountain is the best possible site for this facility. But, dammit, we need some site, soon. Keeping the waste in “temporary” storage pools outside of major metropolises is not an acceptable long-term solution. And I, for one, do not want to see this waste shipped to a facility where the people or government operating it might be amenable to bribes to allow someone to make withdrawals.
Nitpick: the nuclear waste was stored on the Earth side of the moon - that’s why the moon hurtled into space when the nukes accidentally exploded. Alpha, though, was on the Far Side of the Moon.
If we just spread it over Iraq, it would solve two problems at once.
Seriously, is this a “furriners are too dumb to know better” shtick. They were smart enough to not want New York’s garbage, why think they’d take nuclear waste.
One minor point? There’s two kinds of nuclear waste. The contaminated suits and so on. Most of the bulk, and it’ll decontaminate quickly, relatively speaking.
And the used fuel. Not bulky. And the thing is, there might be a use for that stuff in the future. I don’t think throwing away something that might be useful and is scarce, is a good idea. Keep it in the country.
(And for those who see this thread in subsequent days, a direct link to samclem’s cartoon, unaffected by which day you are reading it, is at Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines although it will not work, today, because it has not yet rolled into the archive.)
I for one welcome our future rad-scorpions and a land where the lone wanderer must consult his Pip Boy to save our cave of people, delivering us water.
There are good technical arguments against storage at Yucca Mountain Repository (or centralized site storage). The pretense that burying waste underground makes it just “go away” is both shortsighted and obtuse. Permanent on-site bunkered storage, where potential leakage can be monitored and mitigated, is arguably a better solution albeit one even more politically unpalettable. This notion of shipping it somewhere overseas for processing, however, is fraught with safety and security issues.
The reality is that should the United States be looking toward maintaining and expanding nuclear fission power production we should be looking at fast neutron, gas cooled reactors like the GFR, HTGCR, or PBMR types, which produces more energy per fuel mass, can be used to transmute nuclear waste, has more efficient thermodynamic cycles, and have the fuel already encapsulated. (The latter makes it more difficult to process, but also substantially more difficult to use for neferious purposes.) Pressurized and boiling water reactors of the type used for portable applications are familiar but outmoded, and liquid sodium cooled reactors have too many inherent risks to be considered truly safe even if the nominal cycle is failsafe.
Stranger, for the record I want to say that I agree with everything in your last post. My support for Yucca Mountain is based solely on the argument that the Yucca Mountain facility will be better than what we have now. AIUI there are temporary storage pools that have fuel burned back in the 50s that have been waiting for a long-term storage facility to be built. It is time, and past time, to get something done, I believe.
If the pools in question had been built for longer term use, I wouldn’t feel so strongly about the issue. In absence of evidence to the contrary, I am worried about their containment these days.
And while I can see the argument you’ve hinted at for bunkered storage, after the fiasco that is Hanford, I’m not sure I’d trust the government to do the job right. I realize that the organizations have changed and without the political pressures from the Cold War the exact errors made at Hanford would probably not be repeated. It still leaves a bit of a bad scent.
While that may sound like I should be worried, per my own argument, about leakage at Yucca Mountain. I am. I’m simply less worried about leakage from one central facility than I am about leakage from dozens of sites. Many of which are in, or near, major metropolitan centers.
A reasonable concern, and something that should have been long ago addressed as part of a national energy policy standard on the production and handling of nuclear waste. Unfortunately (and Hanford is a great example of this) expediency and a lack of experience or willingness to accurately predict decommissioning and remediation costs often leaves a legacy of underfunded safety and remediation efforts. Limited processing and long term storage on site may not be as suitable politically as remote site storage or shipping it off to some nameless Central Asian or African country for “processing”, but it forces designers to deal with the ramifications of the entire fuel cycle.
More modern reactor designs would increase both the utilization of fuel and minimize high level waste, and would allow for reduction via transmutation of long lived radionuclides, leaving only some of the chemically reactive medium life products like Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 for long term storage. A sincere, technically valid nuclear policy would focus on this, at least as a comprehensive long term agenda.
Perhaps this is political pandering, but perhaps not. People are allowed to change their positions you know, particularly in light of new information.
Maybe McCain read some results of a new study of Yucca that raised some new concerns about using that site. From what I’ve briefly read on the subject, the concerns appear to be geologic instability and leakage into groundwater. Not mentioning the safety and logistical challenges of actually moving the stuff there.
I do agree with those that say something needs to be done, though…it’s way past time to consolidate this waste into a central facility, or at the very least, a small handful of regional ones that are permanent, remote and expandable.
If it weren’t for the idea of shipping it out of the country being brought up at the same time, I’d be more willing to cut McCain some slack. As the exchanges between Stranger and I illustrate, there are a lot of ways that honest and informed people can come to different views of the issue of high grade rad waste management.
But the idea of simply shipping it out of the country seems to be designed to pander to NIMBY feelings of the uninformed. Without any kind of thought for the magnification of the health, environmental, and security concerns it would generate. What’s worse, IMNSHO, is that it would open up the whole site selection process again leaving things as they are now. In limbo.
Which leaves me thinking that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - McCain is doing this to pander to those voters opposed to Yucca Mountain.
It doesn’t change my view of whom I plan to vote for come November. But it does erode my once positive opinion of McCain even further.
That’s fine, we’ll keep all of our waste here at the plant, on a hill next to the river. But, we want all our money back for the facility we paid for that we were never able to use.
