Posted on 06/04/2010 8:24:11 AM PDT by epithermal
After being on opposite sides for most of the project's history, the DOE and Nevada both argued in favor of the DOE withdrawing the Yucca Mountain license application with prejudice so the agency can get on with considering other alternatives for disposing of the nation's used nuclear reactor fuel.
(Excerpt) Read more at lvrj.com ...
I’m not so sure. A geologist I know who has seen cores from the site said they show a lot of fracturing in the rocks there.
Wouldn’t this whole issue be largely moot if we started building breeder reactors, or am I oversimplifying?
/johnny
/johnny
Yep.
Why are we wasting this precious resource when we could be reprocessing this into energy?
Because Jimmy Carter is an idiot, and no President since him has had the guts to overrule his idiocy.
I am sure the rocks at Yucca are fractured, just like every where else on the planet. This is not to belittle your concern, but I am a geologist and I spent 5 years studying the problem of nuclear waste disposal at another DOE site, and the main concern is groundwater. I don’t pretend to know what the issues are at Yucca, but I do believe if it was approved it should be used.
I think we need to reprocess the waste, but it will still leave waste to be stored, which is why we still need Yucca.
I have a feeling the approval was pushed more as a political thing than on the basis of geological suitability.
A lot of different possibilities have been studied for long-term disposal, but when I last looked at the issue, there were no long termed solutions without serious drawbacks. Maybe some progress has been made since then. If so, please enlighten me.
The very best minds in science have been over this again and again and again. There IS NO BETTER PLACE for this function than Yucca. If we don’t want to use it then we aren’t serious about having nuclear energy.
I know someone who was involved in the initial assessment of Yucca Mountain. It gets something like 0.5 inches of rain per year, and is thousands of feet above the water table. EnviroWhackos filed a challenge over whether climate change might change that situation in the future (things like, as you stated, a glacial period, continent drifting into the tropics and turning it into a rain forest, continent sinking into the ocean, etc.) Petition asked whether we could rule out with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that none of those would EVER happen. Of course, no human being can do that. Hence NO site is suitable unless we have a crystal ball and can see what the planet will be like millions of years into the future.
I understand your concerns about climate change and hope that was considered in the siting at Yucca. The most interesting study I saw when I worked the issue was what type of warning signs would you put over a nuclear waste repository, since 10,000 years from now there will be no telling what language will be used. Mr. Yuk was thought to be a possibility!
I have not really waded through the data on Yucca, so I can’t offer an educated opinion on the technical feasibility of the site. As I recall the selection of Yucca was driven by a political decision in the 90’s when some powerful congressman from Louisiana pushed some legislation through to cancel funding to all projects other than Yucca. But, I believe any of the basic science that was done to support Yucca is probably trustworthy because I believe the scientists working the project are not particularly political.
I do recall that there were other alternative geological environments that were deemed more suitable, such as salt domes where the government stores its waste in New Mexico. I also heard about places in Texas where the ground water gradients were more suitable. I lost interest in the subject because it is all driven by politics and I have no respect for politicians when it comes to making decisions driven by facts.
All that would be needed is a significant increase in fainfall, and there is a leaching problem looking for a place to go.
Human movements are even more unpredictable, and with such a change in climate, population distribution might change as well.
Consider, a mere 8000-10000 years ago, there was a kilometer or more of ice above where I am sitting.
Stuff happens, and if we want to avoid being cursed by our descendents, we need to take that into account and find a way to prevent it.
I'm all for finding a way, and reprocessing to reduce the amount of waste seems like a good start. There will, however, be things we have no further use for which will have to be disposed of.
Yucca Mountain has been studied to death. The decision to abandon YM is a political decision, not a scientific decision as you and others indicate. Abandoning Yucca will mean incredible delays in removing waste currently stored on site at power plants. Yucca is a far more attractive option than on site storage. eprocessing would be a good alternative going forward but it does not seem to be on the table.
The opponents of nuclear power and NIMBY have joined together to stop YM. Moving to another location will allow the opposition to obstruct that site after many years of study.
The abandonment of YM is part of the coming energy meltdown. The left is determined to obstruct energy development except for their favored renewable options. This obstruction will eventually force artificial reductions in consumption and increased prices (think Germany with 3 times our electric rates), a key goal of the left.
I just remembered one more thing about the problem of nuclear waste disposal. All the scenarios that were studied assumed that the waste would break containment. So, it was not a question of if, but when and how long it would take the waste to reach the surface. So, even if waste were to reach groundwater, in some cases it would take millions of years to reach the surface and the risk would be reduced. I remember the engineers on the project built very sophisticated models in their simulations to research this.
Another point about leaching is that they have developed a process to glassify the waste so as to reduce leaching potential. They are building a plant at Hanford to do this now. I am not real familiar with the technical issues on the process.
I never said it was a scientific decision. I agree with you that we should use Yucca and start building nuke plants as fast as we can.
Yucca is a very dry tunnel, as compared to some on the weapons side of NTS in Area 12. I was involved with some of the instrumentation and testing to determine the effects of long term heating of the drift tunnels.
My considered opinion is that it is a safe site for it’s purpose. As for staying safe for 10,000 years... either we will have better technologies for waste disposal in the future and will apply them, or civilization will be kaput, in which case the troglodytes are on their own.
“I never said it was a scientific decision.”
I acknowledged that you indicated it was a political decision.
IIRC, all waste was to be encased in thick hardened glass containers for transport and storage. If so, and I think it is, how does the ground water issue even arise? Why would fractures in rocks matter? As epithermal says, all formations have fractures.
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