Posted on 03/01/2009 8:30:01 AM PST by Robert A. Cook, PE
President Obama won't allow radioactive waste to be buried at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, rejecting the long-controversial project after 20 years of planning at a cost of at least $9 billion.
Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu "have been emphatic that nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period," said department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. The budget plan Obama released yesterday "clearly reflects that commitment," she said.
"The new administration is starting the process of finding a better solution for management of our nuclear waste," she said in an e-mail.
The decision leaves unresolved a long-term plan for nuclear waste, primarily from power plants, even as utilities seek to build more reactors.
Under the disputed proposal, nuclear waste from reactors around the nation was to be shipped to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to be stored in tunnels 1,000 feet underground. The Energy Department had plans to bury more than 109,000 metric tons.
Radioactive waste is now spread among more than 120 sites in 39 states, according to the Energy Department. There are 104 operating commercial reactors in the United States, and 17 applications are pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 26 more reactors.
Obama's plan would not curtail work on new reactors, said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry.
Nevada opponents and environmental groups have filed lawsuits seeking to block the storage project on grounds that Yucca Mountain could be subject to earthquakes and that transporting waste across 43 states would create a hazard and a potential target for terrorists.
Under Obama's budget plan, the administration would devise a new strategy on waste. Spending on Yucca would be limited to the costs of meeting a legal requirement to process an application that former President George W. Bush submitted in June. The Energy Department didn't meet a contractual obligation to take possession of nuclear waste by 1998, and has been found liable in court to claims by utilities for compensation for storing it
"That sounds like pretty big news. Not just Obama but the new energy guy rule out further work on Yucca mountain.
Vague references toward working toward a new plan.... any ideas what that would be ? Any idea how much further funding is allocated in the spending bill toward that end?
One would think it would be a political challenge to license any new reactors in absence of some viable plan."
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Oh Shitte.
Carter refused to allow recycling (an essentially endless and internal nuclear fuel option that creaets more fuel than it uses) because he feared terrorist could get the recyclked fuel.
Well, Pelosi and ABBCNNBCBS have "decided" that Iran and North Korea should get a nuclear enrichment plants anyway - without interference from Israel or the US - so I suppose that little problem has been dealt with.
Without Yucca Flats, the rest of the long term nuclear development is dead. Until one of the three heads of this communist "administration" is separated from its seat of power.
THAT created the price rises that destroyed everything else from mid-2008 until the election.
Wow. Where will they put it then?
I guess there’s some land in Chicago they can store it at.
I wonder if we can buy the facility for $1, or something.
Send it to Kenya.
Although Obama has decreed that we will not store nuke waste in the Yucca mountains, I believe that this is an unintended good decision on his part.
He did it purely to appeal to the “No Nukes” crowd.
I have always believed that storing nuke waste in a dormant volcano was a really dumb thing to do.
We absolutely need a nuke waste storage facility and I hope there is an alternate site upon which this task can be purposed. I propose Chicago, New York City, or Detroit. Actually Detroit makes the most sense, since theywon’t be building cars ther for much longer.
B.H.O. and his administration = tools.
How many ways does this guy know of to wreck the country. And he's just getting started.
I've heard North Dakota mentioned. No earthquake risk, lots of appropriate rocky ground to drill storage tunnels into, closer to the majority of American nuclear plants, and the state would probably be happy to have the jobs. Probably should have been the choice in the first place.
OJ found the real murderer, didn't he?
It's a lie to allow the budget to pass while killing Yucca Mountain.
They have no intention of finding another way.
It's like Obama's lie on the campaign trail. He once said he liked nuclear power, but I swear he also said he did not like it at other venues. That was a lie to take away the "Obama is against nucler power" issue from the race.
His intention is to kill nuclear and coal power. He further intends to leave us only wind and solar, with demand side management (rolling blackouts, CFL lights, reduced power use at home and work) to fill the gap......It's the greenie way.
He will break it up into portions and send it to the upper water sheds of every red state. No kidding!
People have underestimated what a hateful man Obama is. And soon we will see it in spades as populist resistance to his socialist boondogle economic policy quickens.
" I won" will become," You are under arrest for creating an insurrection against the president."
Homeland Security will likely become a politicaal instrument of the continuing Obama Campaign puppet political industry. It makes trillions in profits each year by stealing from the so called rich.
Obama is a pirate.
A fascist pirate.
It's Yucca Mountain.
Hopefully this will at least end the endless lawsuits over the project. The results of one of which required projecting conditions at the site, including human activity, not the original 10,000 years into the future,but beyond that to the time of maximum risk, however long that might be (and which would be somewhat dependent on those projections). 10,000 years in the past gets you to the time when men where just learning to plant crops, rather than just harvesting what grew naturally. Which of course makes it before the growth of anything that could reasonably be called "civilization".
What a bunch of Maroons!
The south side of Chicago would make a better choice.
Why would this jugeared idiot make such a call? Either he knows the technical difficulties of dealing with waste storage and has a better idea or, he is intentionally provoking further destruction of our country—which is it? The stinking smell of stale BO gets ever stronger and more people will eventually get the drift if they stand downwind.
We don't want to neutralize it. Nuke waste is only nuke waste because it's too radioactive to shove into a landfill, but not radioactive enough to use as fuel. If we had a decent way to separate out the radioactive isotopes, we could use the radioactive isotopes and dump the not-so-radioactive remainder.
Don't think about raising your own cows , pigs or goats either. The same applies to them.
They believe that it's a winning issue for the Dems. Sadly, they're probably right. I've talked with many uneducated "conservatives" here in Las Vegas who think it should be shut down too.
Nine billion dollars wasted. Just pathetic.
Yucca mountain was overkill. There are far better and cheaper ways to deal with nuclear waste, but to make the anti-nuke nuts happy the monstrous waste of money known as Yucca mountain was envisioned. But its not good enough; they won’t be happy until the industry is dead.
If it is impossible to wade through the red tape to open a petroleum refinery, I can't imagine the EPA nightmare associated with opening a nuclear storage facility.
In other word there is no other solution. If there is one solution that is better than putting the nuclear waste in the Yucca mountain it would have been implemented long time ago.
The government is always the problem.
The Enviro-communists won’t be happy until all humans are dead. Except themse3lves, of course. According to their ideas, they’ll still be around and driving their SUVs to awareness raising events.
So where do they plan on storing it? They obviously are experts on nuclear waste storage just as Hitler was an expert at genetics.
The fools that voted for Obama and his class warfare are ushering in the re-incarnation of failed Soviet Russian policies.
Communists never work,they only steal.
There are ion exchange resins that are specific to elements such as cesium. I worked on one project where these were used (West Valley Nuclear Services). The spent ion exchange resin was run to the glass melter. So it is technically feasible to extract the fission fractions from spent fuel, and recover the unused fissile material. Teh vitrified fissile fractions are chemically stabilized so that they can be sequestered in a salt mine. Chemically stabilization does not reduce the radioactivity, only time will do that. It does eliminate the possibility of the stuff leaching. The French have been doing this for decades.
Wow. We’re getting the royal shaft from all angles from this nut.
Throw the nuc waste into the sun!
The premise for the nuclear waste disposal system was an earth based mass driver which would have 100% reliability. The cost to achieve this operational state would still be several orders of magnitude less than planting the material in the ground. The projectiles would be small, 100lbs, and the fire rate 1 projectile per minute. The projectile would be a 50lb slug of radioactive waste, which had been vitrified and wrapped with lead shielding to make up the other 50 lbs. A one per minute firing rate with 90% efficiency, (the 10% down time would be scheduled so as to perform necessary R&M to achieve the 100% reliability) would deliver 23,652 tons, (yes tons!!!), to orbit each year. Of course only half that weight would be nuclear waste but that would still amount to almost 12,000 tons per year. Should a projectile fail to achieve orbit, it’s trajectory would be such that it would fall safely into the Sahara desert or the ocean where it could be recovered and re-inserted in the launch queue.
Inter-orbit tugs would catch the projectiles and deliver them to two mass drivers that are in a higher orbit. Those mass drivers would then fire the projectiles in a retrograde path, (in the direction along the wake of the earth's orbit), which would slow the projectiles from earth orbital speed. They would then follow an elliptical descending orbit which would drop them into the sun.
The mass drivers would fire these projectiles so as to have zero orbital effect for the mass driver. I.E. On one side of the earth the projectiles would impart a positive delta v to the mass driver which would raise the mass driver’s orbit. On the other side of the earth the projectiles would have a negative delta v which would lower their orbit. During one orbital pass the net change to the mass driver, if the same number of projectiles are fired on each half orbit, would be zero.
The same technique could be used to boost metals, fuel components and other acceleration insensitive materials. Imagine how quickly we could construct O'Neil sized habitats if we were delivering 20,000 plus tons of steel aluminum, glass, etc. to orbit each year. For this type of material you could scale the mass driver up to 1000lb billets and you have a delivery system with a quarter million TON per year capability!
Early on I mentioned that if I were president I would set a national goal of moving our heavy, polluting industry off planet by the year 2050. This low cost high tonnage launch system would deliver the material for the O'Neil industrial parks at the LaGrange Points!
Agree 100%.
If you drill a hole in ND, you are going to stike oil. The Bakkan formation is HUGE!
Why would you want to permanently dispose of material that costs energy and materials to acquire? There could be a good industrial use for the waste material. It seems quite wasteful to do that.
First of all, if Obama proposes to stifle the Yucca Mountain project to find a better alternative, wouldn’t a prudent person also suggest what alternatives were under consideration, or is that just so much of the usual Obama BS?
Perhaps your Chicago suggestion isn’t such a bad idea. Chicago has miles of tunnels under the city, with a railroad tracks for moving the “hot” waste. Besides that, how could a little radioactivity make Chicago any worse than it already is? And, whenever Obama returned to Washington after dinner in Chicago, he would glow in the dark, as some people believe is does already.
http://users.ameritech.net/chicagotunnel/tunnel1x.html
How much campaign cash for Obama came from the OPECKERS? I think they bought him!
Save it!! It will make a great junkyard for liberal politicians, socialists, fellow travelers and their corrupt agenda.
We recycle aluminum cans but every year we bury over 75 thousand tons of garbage. why don't we do something????? this garbage has value!
Nuc waste has been a pain in the butte where it's buried. If we use my method to get it and eventually us off planet the investment would be worth it!
The best way to handle waste would be to mix it with glass (so it can not dissolve) then bury it at sea. I think there is a treaty which outlaws this choice, a treaty engineered by the Soviet Union to cripple our nuclear power industry.
Whether it is worth it for us to get off planet at all, I’d leave up to the free market to decide.
Your plan would send a lot of material to the sun, thus making it unavailable to future use. The lead you want to permanently destroy, for all intents and purposes, could be used in a number of different things. It is utterly wasteful to get rid of that.
I had the idea of sending garbage to the sun when I was about 9 years old and ignorant of economics.
Some people are doing something with the garbage, or at least trying to convert the organic (carbon-based) material into fuel. Recycling the organic materials is an active area of research.
Landfills make good repositories of materials that just aren’t economically worth recycling yet. They also generate methane that can be used to generate electricity.
Your method seems shortsighted, idealistic, and naive to me.
It should be stuck somewhere and warehoused until someone wants to buy it for some useful purpose. The storage and disposal problem should be solved in the free market.
Have all your people gone insane or just post before your morning cup of joe?
Nuclear anything should be stopped at all costs until we actually do develope a method of reusing the waste or at least make it non-harmful to the planet and people.
You think it’s better to produce dangerous toxic radioactive waste (deadly to people and planet) instead of a little carbon dioxide (which by the way is expelled from our own bodies and used in nature)? Sorry, I use too much logic and rational thinking to reach that conclusion.
If we simply keep storing this stuff (where to store it?) until there is a break through as mentioned above - how long will that take? How much can we “safely” store before then? Will that break-through ever happen? - go ahead and volunteer your own backyard, basement, or attic space - but leave my land, ground water, bodies of water, public lands such (especially schools) the hell alone.
Send it into the sun???——WTF???? Do you realize the frequency of failed rocket launches? Do you realize how many rockets and payloads never make it out of our atmosphere before they explode or fall back to Earth? Even if those rockets were to make it out of our atmosphere - you have orbital space junk that could cause major problems. What there is a hardware issue or failed equation that causes it to miss the sun and is then left orbitting like a comet with a trajectory headed right back at us?
Really people, do some independent thinking. Then after you think for yourself, evaluate your conclusions and find where you might have made errors. Building nuke plants is much more hazardous to our existence than coal-burning plants.
Sort of.
The nuclear physics of the decay and fission process mean you can't "hurry up" the decay process, nor magically prevent high-level wastes from being created. [Much of the low level wastes (wipes, clothing, clothes, water, samples, etc. CAN be reduced by eliminating/reducing the extremism around "over-sampling" and "over-wrapping" and "over-washing" everything that affects nuclear power.
Actually, the nuclear waste from a conventional commercial 2-3% U235 enriched reactor consists of mostly (85-90 %) UNUSED fuel. The rest is made up of Pu239, very-short lived - but VERY highly radioactive! - waste products, a smaller amount of moderately radioactive 100-300 year waste products, and very small amount of long-lived - but not very radioactive - waste products.
Properly recycling the used nuclear fuel does four things:
1) Separate and refine the usable Pu239 from the rest of the matter. This plutonium IS “newly created” nuclear fuel - with more energy content that the original low-enriched U235 that you started with in the original reactor. This “new” fuel can immediately be used in another reactor - if the second reactor is properly designed for this kind of fuel. Straightforward, we have had that physics solved since the mid-50’s, and have had the actual technology since the mid-60’s. Works well. No problems except democrat politicians.
2) Separate the used fuel and radioactive wastes from the unused U235. Not easy, but it has been done. Re-use the “refreshed” uranium in the current generation of reactors.
3. Chemically, separate the short-half-life highly-radioactive wastes from the longer lived - but larger volume - mid and long-life time wastes. Let the short-lived waste decay for 3-5 years. (That reduces the heat load and radiation exposure.) Vitrify the reduced volume waste. This means encase it in a ceramic-like glass mixture = No “water washing” away of the particles if the outside stainless steel were to (somehow!) get exposed to ground water and (somehow!) corrode through and (somehow!) get washed through the Yucca Mountain SALT layers down a few thousand feet into the DRY rock below.... Anyway, no rust, no dust, no handling problems for the vitrified waste.
4) Ship and store the vitrified low-volume, low heat load waste. After only a few hundred years, the ACTUAL radiation levels from the waste are about the same as the original uranium laying in the open rocks underground everywhere in the world in million ton quantities.
Yes. There are some long-lived components. But the enviro-extremists don't WANT a solution to the problem, so they hype the problems. The shipments. The length. The amounts of waste. The dangers.
5)))))))) Develop fusion. But Obama doesn't want that either. It would be a solution.
And he only wants problems. Fear. Hatred. Class envy. Greed. Power.
WTF ???
Read my answer above. Them justify each sentence in each of your paragraphs. NONE are correct.
Technically. The above-ground storage of garbage is a “good” idea. It locates the stuff for future re-cycling.
Dumping it at sea - like New York has done for years - PREVENTS recycling when it (recycling the used material) becomes economically profitable.
Above ground, you know exactly WHERE to go get the stuff you want.
(There are a few problems with storing conventional garbage above ground 8<) - but there are adequate, moderately safe, low-impact ways.)
I worked on the West Valley design as well.
Good idea - Small facility (as far as size goes.) They (the separation/vitrification facilities) could be built at old nuke storage sites at abandoned USAF and Army bases nearer to power plant concentrations, then only ship the small-volume vitrified waste for long-term stowage.
For equal amounts of energy produced, coal emits more radioactivity than nuclear plants, it’s just that the activity is spread out over a larger volume and diluted in the atmosphere.
It’s like taking your morning dump. You can go out every day and leave turds spread out over forty acres or you can dig a hole and do your business in an outhouse every morning.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages, I suppose.
BTW — I got into the whole shipping hysteria with some anti-nuke activists who came out into rural Nevada with their nonsense dog-n-pony show.
They know nothing about containment. They were peddling all manner of hype and hysteria about train accidents. I had to point out that shipments by rail-MILE (not just ‘accidents’ cherry-picked out of the news, but accidents multiplied by miles of shipments) railroads are incredibly low event haulers. Much safer than on-road truck traffic.
No matter. They were saying things like the stuff would be scattered all over the place, blah, blah.
Finally a rancher stood up and said “We lived through the atomic testing. We could live through a spill. It ain’t like it is being scattered all over the range... it would be in one place, where it could be all gathered up...”
The anti-nuke activists pretty much quit coming ‘round after that, because they couldn’t panic the populace.
But they get the city slickers in a real lather tho.
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