Right now at Hanford they’re building a vitrification plant that will supposedly turn all the waste into non-leaking logs of glass that they can bury and not worry about leaking more badness into the Columbia river. Article.
Is this a tested process? Will it be a feasible option to the kegs of radioactive waste? Has it been used before?
Yes, but it was also pointed out that it won’t stand up to an attack in any of the places around the country where it is currently being stored either, and that the risk is greater from leaving it where it is. I noticed that nobody in the 60 Minutes piece said that leaving things the way they are was a good plan. So it really comes down to, as has been pointed out in this thread, what’s the Plan B? The objections mainly seem to be of the “not in my backyard” type. But the stuff exists, and we can’t just make it magically disappear, so it has to go in someone’s backyard.
Well all I know of is a few other options the government chose to review. They were sending the waste towards the sun and putting it in the ocean. Supposedly both had very high potential of something bad happening to them. That is all I know now. I will post more on it later.
Ok, to be gentle, there is no way in hell that any serious government proposal would have the Sun down as a reasonable destination for radioactive waste.
The ocean trenches are an approach that could work however I thought you were worried about:
a)transport to site
b)security
c)environmental impact
To get any material to the trench you’ll need to get to a coast via rail. You then hope to bury the material in a subduction zone and then allow the plates to drag the stuff down into the mantle. It’s going to be there for a while; long enough that some one could always figure out how to get at it. I mean you won’t be actively monitoring the (hopefully) vitrified material. Finally one you drop this stuff into the oceans it’s gone, at least for now. You can’t fix anything. The canisters rupture? Opps. The stuff actually begins to impact a local ecology? Opps. At least with a central facility there is continual monitoring and actual adjustments can be made once a problem is detected. Hell if it’s bad enough and they can find a better place to put the stuff they can actually load it up and move it again.
All in all, I fear our political system is in vapor-lock over this. YM is not perfect, but it is a darn sight better than anything else in the near-term.
The search for an ideal solution might very well lead us to disaster.
I fear you’re right. The NIMBY-factor could well kill this and any other potential site. It’s essentially a roundabout way of banning nuclear power. If such an outcome is the intent of the left, we part ways considerably on this issue. I am 100% for the use and expansion of our nuclear power infrastructure, and it pains me to see the resource effectively sabotaged through neglect and mismanagement.
It has been done here before, but launching things into the sun isn’t a viable option, sending it out of the solar system would be easier. Of course the potential for disaster if a space ship carrying nuclear waste blew up shortly after launch would be devastating. The oceans are in bad enough shape as it is that they don’t need the added stress of our nuclear waste as well.
Here is an article in today’s New York Times about it: High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project. While the idea is promising in some ways, it also seems to entail considerable difficulties in implementation.
Not exactly . . . it’s not about Nevada as such . . .
That’s why nobody cares!
We are talking about spending so much money that new rail lines will (or should) approach the site without passing through Las Vegas. Las Vegas is the most impacted city, but it is not especially impacted.