Report: Some damaged containers expected to arrive at Yucca

[struggle4progress]

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A small percentage of nuclear waste containers is expected to arrive at Yucca Mountain with undetected leaks and cracks, potentially exposing workers at the proposed repository to high levels of radioactive contamination, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Saturday.

Without special precautions, spent nuclear fuel contained in these damaged tubes could trigger chemical reactions when extracted from protective canisters in preparation for long-term storage, according to an Energy Department study obtained by the newspaper under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Completed in March by DOE and outside engineers, the study concluded the department had not fully evaluated the hazards associated with handling damaged fuel at the site, nor designed a process for effectively managing it.

"It is rather late in the day for these people to be thinking about this stuff," said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "It is truly astonishing that they have not thought about this issue thoroughly a quarter of a century after serious work on repositories began." <snip>

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/aug/13/081310550.html

[Trillo]

1. No offense intended to Makhijani,

but this is standard operating procedure in capitalist systems. It is my belief the purpose for news items such as this is simply to convice the public that they need yet more money.

Its just a shakedown.

[struggle4progress]

2. I'd guess Arjun is rather less surprised than he politely pretends to be.

[Jim Sagle]

3. But hey, what's a little radioactive leakage?

[oscar111]

4. "ALL uranium back in the ground"

because

NUCLEAR POWER = NUCLEAR WAR

every 6 months this headline

"tiny nation X caught siphoning uranium off to make A-bomb"

sooner or later, a regional A-war.

remember , WW2 was a nuclear war.
call it what it was. Odd that so few call it that.

just a matter of time before a war, israel-iran, or pakistan-india, or china-taiwan, or Japan-N.Korea, or again, Argentina-britain, or........