Charles Krauthammer is probably right.
It is time for clean coal. It will buy a couple of hundred years in which time every thought should be turned to finding real, renewable energy.
Old fashioned coal plants. Screw the EPA.
There is no place within the confines of the USA that environmental activist will allow a nuke disposal to be sited.
Let’s roll the dice and shoot the stuff into the sun. It’ll probably work. I’m sure the greenies will be alright with that. The only downside is we might decide someday that we want to reprocess it.
Or we could reconsider another third rail of nuclear power - nuclear fuel reprocessing. The French have done it for decades and have much higher fuel utilization rates with much smaller amounts of waste. Our fears of reprocessing leading to diversion for weapons have kept us away from this obvious solution.
I don’t know if Yucca was intended for Japanese disposal, but, of course, I would have no problem if that were the case. The site is perfectly safe and would have put this problem to bed.
So, if the only reason the rods were still over there in Japan was Harry Reid, then one could reasonably say that Senator Reid is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the worst nuclear contamination incident, by far, in DECADES.
A very short sighted attitude, but given the ignorance portrayed in the MSM concerning the situation at Fukushima, and the hysteria created by the reports, I can see why he'd say that.
The debacle in Japan shows the ongoing risk of keeping any spent fuel in close proximity to the reactor. After the extended cool-down period, spent fuel would be safest if moved to a remote storage site where it can be safely sequestered. The risk of mishap during transport is almost zero given the way the fuel is encased for the trip.
I also hope that we develop reactor designs that are stable in all operating regions. The current reactors in use and under construction require active cooling even after being shutdown. The failure of this cooling is what triggered the current meltdown in Japan.
While we are doing this research, we should closely evaluate the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). We have far more lithium available than uranium and the reactor is far more efficient. The reactor is stable.
“Further, the reactor is designed with a salt plug drain in the bottom of the core vessel. If the fluid gets too hot or for any other reason including power failures, the plug naturally melts, and the fluid dumps into a passively cooled containment vessel where decay heat is removed. This feature prevents any Three Mile Island-type accidents or radiation releases due to accident or sabotage and provides a convenient means to shut down and restart the system quickly and easily.”
...
“Even though a full-scale LFTR has never been built, we expect the lifecycle cost of thorium reactors could be at least 30% to 50% less than equivalent-power uranium-based LWRs.”
see:
http://www.thoriumenergy.org/lftradsrisks.html
What we seem to have forgotten is the danger these cooling pools presents as a target for terrorists. Immediately after 9/11 there were multiple studies which investigated thye vulnerabilities of our nuclear plants, and thye associated cooling pools to attack by aircraft. All this seemed to vanish when the new regime took power.
If you are still in doubt visit
http://cryptome.org/index.html and scroll down to “US Nuclear Spent Fuel Storage Casks Eyeball”. There you’ll find pictures, coordinates, and design of hundreds of potential targets - and it might take less than an airlines to open them up.
Thank you Reid, Obama and Chu.
I want the Yucca facility built just to spite Nevada democrats.