It’s incorrect to say that breeder reactors are “potential” technology. There are currently many breeder reactors currently in operation cite in many countries. The reason it’s not used in US, civilian nuclear power is political, not technological. In addition, numerous more sophisticated reactors such as the pebble bed reactor have also been mentioned.
Besides, theres not going to be much Pu in the waste, seeing as how you need it to use in breeder reactors.
I didn’t mean to imply that breeder reactors aren’t in use. “Potential” there refers to the idea of them as a large-scale energy resource. There are solar collectors in use as well.
Sam, it took me a while to find the sentence I quoted, in post #33 if anyone is looking for it. I will concede I paraphrased and left off three words that followed what I wrote, and eight words that preceded those that I quoted. :eek:
I apologize for the poor cite. I have heard expert mention of the limited U235 supplies and chose the first cite I found. (PS: worst cite ever? C’mon, I can’t throw under lekatt.)
Obviously I chose poorly. However, I stand by my broader point even with the thread you linked – seawater recovery and other such is still something that takes development and cost. It’s a choice we make to develop these technologies. We can choose to develop solar technology and solve the current problems with them, and it is, to my mind the greater potential energy resource with fewer safety issues. Bear in mind that I am still a nuclear power supporter.
No, I’m not kidding. Once again you leave out inconvienent facts, seemingly because they won’t support your assertions.
What is the half-life of Pu242, also a component of nuclear waste? 376,000 years cite (see Table 2)
And again, arguing for 10,000 year time spans is irrelevant. The NAS and the courts say it must be safe for 100,000-300,000 years.
As I pointed out, the likely hood of someone flying a plane into the WTC was dismissed at one time. The likelihood of more than one plane deliberately hitting the WTC would have been thought laughably remote. But it happened, and only after the tragedy did we take more stringent steps to try and prevent this from happening again. I would hate to see a mishap involving nuclear waste that could have prevented, but that was overlooked or dismissed in planning because it was “unlikely”.
While I appreciate that you were attempting to bring a bit of levity to an otherwise contentious forum, I’m sorry if you’re joke wasn’t that funny to me. I blame those very DOE para-military guards, who may someday be forcing my state to accept this waste at gunpoint. I find it hard to be amused by anything that involves my own countrymen pointing guns at me “for the good of the country”.
And you’re still missing my point. The point is that isotopes with very long half lives are pretty stable, and not particularly radioactive. Waste comprised of material with half-lives greater than 10,000 years is orders of magnitude less radiactive than the waste that was only created, say, 10 years ago. It will be safe enough that it could be handled pretty much like hazardous heavy metals, which we handle and ship around the country all the time.
And once again, let’s be clear what the tradeoff is here. You’re acting like it’s a choice between nuclear power and living in a world of parks and bunnies. In fact, the choice is between nuclear power or blowing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere. It’s very frustrating arguing with some anti-nuke people, because they argue as if there are no tradeoffs to be made, like the decision to NOT use nuclear does not also carry significant risks and environmental side-effects. The determination to be made is not whether nuclear is perfectly safe, but whether on balance we would face less risk and less damage to the environment with nuclear than with fossil fuels. Because those are currently our only two options.
And if you ask me, the miniscule risk that 10,000 years from now there may be a cleanup problem at Yucca is rather dwarfed by the risk that we’ll make serious changes to our climate in the very near future (compared to 10,000 years) on our present course.
I think you keep missing my points which are: we don’t want your waste. Sending nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain will not eliminate the on-site storage of nuclear waste, it will only create one more place where nuclear waste is stored. And the mountain is unsuitable for use as a geological repository, due to the numerous fault zones and the precious water table it lies on top of.
The NWPA specifically says that Yucca needs to be a geological repository. It is unsuitable for that purpose, and would need extensive man-made facilities, even according to the DOE.
I have never said we should not use nuclear power, Sam. I have only said, from the beginning, that we in Nevada do not want the waste from nuclear power plants, which we do not have or use (please do not bother explaining how a power grid works; I know). If you want to store it on-site, instead of creating another, and larger, storage facility, I have said I could remain guardedly neutral about the prospect of building more nuclear facilities. Just don’t make this state your dumping ground.
Please understand that this issue is very prominent in my home state. It is something that I read about every single day. As I read at least 2 newspapers each day, which have contrasting editorial policies, I get a wealth of information about the subject. I am also keen to educate myself on matters important to me, and I have read many DOE reports, EPA reports, all of the emails I talked about, etc. etc.
I know how many people live close to Yucca Mountain. I’ve been to Beatty, Armagosa, Rachel, Pahrump, Tonopah, Warm Springs, Indian Springs, all of which are less than 70 miles from Yucca. I’ve backpacked and camped in the Sheep Range, the Toyaibe, Death Valley, the Pahranagat range, and more. As those of use who know and love this area are fond of saying: Nevada is not a wasteland.
If I have engaged in “dishonest debate” in this thread, I am no more guilty of that than you, or Shodan, or many others.
I’ve seen cited items dismissed as “silly” or “outlandish”. I’ve seen a quote from a DOE official mis-applied to try and explain an email that clearly indicates that data in the Yucca study was “made up”. I’ve seen facts left to die by the wayside, such as your comment about infrastructure, and my reply that Yucca does not currently have a railroad spur. I’ve seen misleading comments made to dismiss very real concerns (“radioactive silica” was never mentioned and was not a topic, it was a red herring brought up to distract from the actual events). I’ve seen you ignore jrfranchi’s comments about solar panels. I’ve seen you continue to use the 10,000 year period in your posts, even tho the National Academy of Science, and the courts, have said that that time period is not suitable. Heck, you just used it in your last post. Do you think you know better than the NAS?
In short, I’ve seen the same things here on this board that I see from the DOE: “screw Nevada”.
Well, we don’t want to be screwed.
Here. This is one site that I go to regularly to keep informed.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/whatsnew.htm
I’m getting tired of trying to inform people, only to see my posts ignored or trivialized. It’s pointless for me to waste my time posting facts for people who don’t want to read them. If you want to read about Yucca Mountain, and become better informed, here’s the place to go. I’ve read almost everything linked to on that site. Now you can too.
It’s also highly unlikely that cows will develop super-intelligence and take over the world. Should we worry about that too?
You need to show something relevant about 9/11 as it relates to nuclear waste storage. Otherwise you are just throwing out random quotes and hoping the mud will stick.
Your risk assessment skills are a little off.
The idea of Yucca Mountain is long-term storage of high level waste. Instead of storing the waste at 141 different locations, some of which are closer to major population centers (and, since this seems to worry you, closer to the local water table) and have not been as intensivly studied as Yucca Mountain. And, as has been pointed out, Yucca Mountain is already in a nuclear testing range.
You might think of it as a homeowner storing his valuables in a vault instead of hiding some of them under the bed, some in the closet, and burying some in the back yard. Even with the risks of being robbed in transport, you are still safer keeping it in the vault than in the back yard.
Err, no. Yucca Mountain is not in an areas where continental plates meet, nor is it located near any volvanic hot sports. And a volcanic event large enough to disrupt the repository is likely - sometime in the next 63 million years.
[ul][li]80 miles an hour. [/li][li]The casks we were talking about. [/li][li]Of course it was fucking empty - do you think it would be a good idea to use casks filled with spent nuclear fuel in a test? Sheesh.[/li]
[li]A concrete wall. [/li]
[li]In 1984. [/li][li]Yes, there were independent observers - it took place at Scandia Labs, as mentioned in the original cite.[/li][/ul]
Respectively. Any other facts you might need?
The rest of your post is simply a repetition of NIMBY, and has been addressed.
Regards,
Shodan
But as has already been pointed out to you (and is frankly obvious just by reading this thread alone and following the very discussion you are involved in), the risks HAVEN’T been overlooked or dismissed. There has been ungodly levels of testing and risk assessment that has gone into every step of this design from the containment vessels to the logistics of transport, taking all your points and more into account. At some point it becomes ridiculous…or at the very least diminishing returns.
And the point you still don’t seem to grasp is that if there are some small risks in the transportation of nuclear materials from the various nuclear power plants to YM (and the deeper point that there are ALWAYS risks…one must weigh and assess them and decide on how to minimize them if at all possible, then get on with life), there are greater risks in just leaving the materials scattered about in pools at each nuclear site. Certainly the waste there is more exposed than it will be at YM, its decentralized so you have to guard multiple sites instead of one central facility, etc.
Its like worrying that your teeth aren’t sparkly white while smoking, or worrying the plane you are going to be flying in will crash while you drive your car to the airport on the freeway.
Just for drill I’m going to just drop this cite into the discussion. It talks to many of the points you seem to be hung up on (touching briefly on the whole 10,000 year bit you and Sam are discussion). Its obviously a pro-YM document but its still pretty good as far as the basics goes. Read and enjoy.
I don’t even know what to say to this part…certainly since we aren’t in the pit. I’ll just say that whatever the hell you are talking about here wasn’t what the joke was. Obviously my sense of humor is pretty obscure if you didn’t even know what I intended to be funny. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the DOE para-military types. As for your ‘point’, whatever that is I’ll just say…um, what the hell are you talking about? DOE guards forcing your state at gun point? What are you smoking and can I get a toke?
-XT
Except it’s a silly number. Some of that stuff might be capable of causing heavy metal poisoning in a thousand years. But by definition any dangerously radioactive substance will have burned itself out within a few hundred years.
The substances with high half-lives are not dangerously radioactive. And heavy-metal storage is done all the time and with much less worry.
Finally, who cares what the courts say about it? It has nothing to do with them and they don’t get to decide scientific truth or or what is practical or safe. Frankly, most judges are less qualified than by little brother on this matter.
As has been said - nothing. As nice as it might be for those 10,000 people not to live near a nuclear waste dump, so what? The other millions in this country need Yucca mountain more than they, if we use Yucca mountain. And it’s not as if those areas will simply fall off the map. Barring massive problems, which are far more likely to happen at the current sites than Yucca mountain, the region will remain perfectly fertile and happy.
I live in one of the nation’s worst air-quality regions because of current power plants. We have 170,000 people in this county.
And I’m afraid to say that we in the rest of the country have noted that we don’t care a whole lot what Nevada wants. We’re doing this for everyone, and that may mean that your ox gets gored. That’s basically what living in a nation means; sometimes we have to accept that other’s interests overrides our own. It sucks, but look on the bright side: everyone else gets screwed over some other way.
No, we simply cannot collect enough juice. The technology isn’t promising and isn’t goig to be efficient enough. We’d have to cover grotesquely huge areas with solar cells at immense cost. Nuclear has the advantage of being far cheaper and more practically managed, essentially. If you want to try and develop the tech, be my guest, but I just don’t see it becoming financially or environmentally worthwhile within my lifetime.
xtisme, thanks for the cite.
Regards,
Shodan
Another attempt to belittle me, and to ignore the fact that “very low probability” does not mean “can never happen”.
See my comment above.
You might think of it as the homeowner removing 80 dollars from each stash and putting the larger sum in one place. If Yucca is licensed, there will still be nuclear waste materials stored on-site. There won’t be trucks backed up to the plant, waiting for casks to be filled and shipped.
Err, yes. Yucca is a volcanic region. That’s why there is volcanic rock on the surface in the area. I said dormant, not dead. And I never made a claim that Yucca is an area where continental plates meet. Why do you keep “refuting” claims that were never made?
Thanks for the facts. Testing empty casks ignores the inertia of the shipped material. Casks filled with steel rods, for example, can be accurately used to assess the impact of materials inside the cask as their inertia is changed to kinetic energy when the cask hits something. Also, the test you cite does not factor in the heat generated by the nuclear waste it is supposed to transport, particularly in an accident involving a fire, such as the Baltimore tunnel fire of 2001.
In fact, none of the casks that are intended or designated for use have been subjected to full-scale testing.
cite The table wouldn’t format properly, but can seen on page 3 of the cite.
And even Sandia makes a good case in favor of the full-scale testing:
But those full scale tests have still never happened.
Actually, a judge did decide this issue. As I cited previously
I don’t recall saying “can never happen”. And it was more an attempt to belittle your argument, which is not a whole lot less far-fetched than super-cows.
But I take it you have nothing to offer in terms of relevant comparisons.
Right, and you might carry your money in your pocket until you get to the bank. If you therefore claim that it is more risky to stash it in the bank instead of hiding it under the bed, then you are missing the point of the analogy.
Well, “dormant” in the sense of “no activity for the last 11 million years or so”. You did read the quote about it being one of the least active areas in the western US, did you not?
You mentioned your concerns about volcanoes in the region. If you read the cite, you would notice that the various activities that cause you to fret tends to center around areas where the continental plates meet, or volcanic "hot spots. Yucca Mountain is neither, and is about as active as my great-aunt. And she hasn’t been dead for 50,000 years, either.
Again, you need to actually read cites before you try to argue against them. You must have missed the mention of the test where they dropped the cask onto a steel rod from a hundred feet.
The casks weigh about seventy five tons, empty. They slammed one into a concrete wall at eighty miles an hour. They dropped one onto earth packed as hard as concrete at a terminal velocity of 235 mph. They didn’t rupture.
But no doubt putting a steel rod inside would cause it to pop like a balloon.
Oh wait - it didn’t.
Again, you need to read cites before you argue against them.
Oh sure. If and when more tests occur, you will also dismiss them.
If we drop a cask from a thousand feet, we should have dropped it from two thousand. If we cook it for half an hour at 1475 degrees, we should have cooked it for three days. If we drop the thing onto a six inch steel rod, we should have shot at it with an anti-tank missile. If we make the fucking thing as invulnerable as Superman, then we are going to be deluged with questions about Kryptonite.
Look, if you want to fret yourself into a tizzy that the nuclear waste casks can’t survive being at Ground Zero in an all-out nuclear exchange, knock yourself out. The rest of us have the real world to deal with.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for presenting a bunch of misleading and false information, Shodan. Thanks also for making it as difficult as possible for me to do the HTML coding in order to respond. :rolleyes:
This is incorrect.
cite The original USGS report here.
This is false. As I cited previously
As I said, the storage casks that are supposed to last for thousands and thousands of years do not exist. You are talking about the transportation casks, which are estimated to last, at best, for a few hundred years.
You don’t seem to understand that the mere fact that something is possible does not mean it is an argument against. Of course an acident is possible. But transport and confinement is probably safer in the long run than leaving it where it is. Risk can be managed. You don’t seem to understand relative risk.
Yes, I’m well aware of what the Judge said. I also don’t care. It’s not his purview and he has no valid authority in this case. It doesn’t matter if the federal government says Yucca Mountain is made of chooze, Nevada has no right to stop it.
Your posts are becoming increasingly hostile, Shodan. Your dissemination of misleading and false information is becoming tiresome. I have come to understand that you will not change your opinion, no matter how much of the basis for it I point out, with factual cites, to be wrong.
Ridiculing me and attempting to trivialize my facts isn’t going to dissuade me. Ascribing an intractable delusional attitude to me will not change those facts. I’ll just keep coming back here and citing corrections.
Post snipped.
I know the guy who ran the cask test. I’ve spoken with him about it. (By the way, they did fire test the casks) The guy who ran the test is happy with the results and extremely confident that they know what is going to happen. One issue with testing is that you can’t do exact real world tests because, well, it’s a test, and if it goes wrong while using real materials you’ve got a problem. So they set up the tests so that they get the information that they need and then interpolate.
At the same time the people who do the testing (at least all the people I know) always want to run another test. They always want more data. It’s the way they work. They would prefer to test everything in exact real world conditions. But of coarse that isn’t possible.
The guy who ran the test had one concern and that is the manufactoring process for the casks. He is confident that the casks, as designed, are safe. If the casks are made to spec all is good. So, in his opinion, they need to build some of the things and make sure whomever is building them are doing it correctly. Once they get the process down they need to have a serious inspection scheme setup to make sure the process is followed correctly.
Also, note the seventh item on the list you provided. Parse it a couple times. All it means is that IT LOOKS BETTER if they do the test with full size containers. The rest of the points come down to three things: a) “We’d like to do a full size test to make sure our math is correct” b) “We’d like to make sure that they build and load the containers correctly” and c) “We’d like to bang on one of these containers for a couple years”. (The last is a direct quote from the guy who ran the test) The fact that these guys want to do more testing doesn’t mean that the original tests are flawed, it just means that they can think of other ways to test the containers. One of the tests they did was to strap a rocket motor onto a cask and shoot the cask into a wall.
http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0211avoiland.html#_ftnref7
(regretablly, no pictures)
Slee