Regulators OK nuke storage site in Utah

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/dossier/nuke/

WASHINGTON -- A proposed temporary nuclear waste storage site in Utah cleared an important regulatory hurdle Thursday, paving the way for the site widely viewed as a stopover for the nation's waste on its way to Yucca Mountain.

It is now up to the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a final decision about whether a group of nuclear power utilities can open the storage site on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

<snip>

It's unclear what the ruling could mean for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Yucca critics had mixed views about the rulings impact.

Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office, said the ruling does not have any direct implications for the Silver State, but it could help in the fight against the repository.

<snip>

"Once stuff starts hitting the road people are going to go ballistic," Loux said.

<much more>

[NNadir]

1. After this happens, everyone in Utah will die.

Here's an interesting fact about Utah.

During the 1950's, huge amounts of radiation used to rain down on that state as the result of nuclear testing. As might be expected from the deliberate (and criminal) release of fission products, many people were injured by this practice. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of persons, especially in the community of St. George.

Ultimately 1,200 Utahans and or their survivors would sue the government after contracting or dying of Leukemia thought to have resulted from open air nuclear testing.

http://historytogo.utah.gov/nuctest.html

Despite this deliberate tragedy, the raining of millions of curies of radiation on Utah, it happens that Utah has the third highest life expectancy in the nation.

http://www.harktheherald.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=46230

Of course, some people seem to expect that life expectancy in Utah is about to fall to zero. One need merely say the words "nuclear waste" and death becomes inevitable.

I very much enjoyed, btw, the remark of Bob Loux from the Nevada Office of Digging Vast City Sized Acid Leaching Holes in West Virginia, to wit: "'Once stuff starts hitting the road people are going to go ballistic,' Loux said." It reminds me of Ralph Nader's 1977 remark that "If we don't shut down this country's nuclear power plants in 5 years, we're going to have a civil war on our hands." http://www.notnader.com/durstin1.html It would be most unfortunate for Bob if in fact, no tragedies occur and his credibility is eroded. Maybe Bob can leave his energy profligate state for a few hours, drive out to Utah, and spread thumbtacks all over I-70 where the nuclear waste trucks will drive. After they get flat tires, he can get a bulldozer and knock the trucks over. After that he can climb on top of the cannisters with dynamite and blow the cannisters open. With the help of large amounts of acid, or maybe with jackhammers, he can then break open the fuel rods in order to be sure that some of the nuclear waste is volatilized.

Years later a few thousand Utahans might sue Bob, but it will be worth it for the pleasure of getting rid of those troublesome mountains in West Virginia.

[jpak]

2. Utah residents have the third highest life expectancy in the nation

because most of them are Mormons that do not consume tobacco or alcohol. It has nothing to do with past exposure to fallout from nuclear weapons tests.

The Las Vegas Sun has an extensive archive of articles related to Yucca Mountain...

http://www.lasvegassun.com/dossier/nuke/news.html

Here's some good ones...

DOE predicts nuke reactions in casks: Nevadans worry about danger at Yucca

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/special/2003/nov/26/515926524.html

State test shows corrosion at Yucca - Water would corrode nuke waste casks.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/special/2004/may/12/516843179.html

Nuclear waste crash could kill 1,200 in Chicago

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/special/2002/jun/27/513640826.html

Nuke casks can be damaged: In Army test, missile explosion blew hole in high-level waste transport container

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/special/2002/feb/11/513020524.html

80,000 loads of nuke waste to travel near LV (Las Vegas)

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/special/2001/jan/12/511291436.html

Nevada will also be the final resting place for the depleted uranium produced at US uranium enrichment plants (nuclear power's "other" waste problem).

It will cost $2.6 billion and take 25 years to convert the 750,000 MT of depleted UF6 accumulated of US enrichment facilities to uranium oxide.

All that DU-oxide is going to be dumped at the Nevada Test Site.

So not only has Nevada played host to dozens of atmospheric atomic bomb tests, it will be the dumping ground for the nation's spent fuel and depleted uranium as well.

[NNadir]

3. Um, well, I guess radiation isn't that dangerous then.

All you have to do to live a long time if 100 million curies of radiation falls on your head is quit smoking and drinking. Or are you saying it is. Clearly being down wind from nuclear tests is not as dangerous as smoking, since life expectancy would go down irrespective of your smoking habits if it were.

Thanks for pointing that out. I appreciate it. Let's start a movement against ash tray wastes.

Thanks for all the NIMBY references too. I'm glad to learn that we all have to eat, drink and breath coal dust and ash because the army can blow a hole in a nuclear cask. I'll bet if you bang on one with a jack hammer for a month or two, you can do the same thing.

Now, let's make a totally unrelated remark. I am always intrigued by people who say the rosary and then remark on how important saying the rosary is because they say it.

This would be similar to saying that nuclear waste is dangerous because a crash of a nuclear truck in Chicago could kill one 1,200 people. This is a meaningless statement, because it includes no estimate of the probability that a nuclear crash will occur in Chicago and that all of the other improbable events connected that also must occur for the killing will also occur.

Now I recently asked another poor thinking poster here if he (or she) could define what an expectation value is and of course rather than an answer to that question, I got a whole diatribe about why I am a bad guy (which BTW I do not deny).

So, it looks like I'll have to define an expectation value. It's best described (in this case, as opposed to the quantum mechanical case) as the probability of an event multiplied by the magnitude of its consequences. For instance, if there is a type of accident that has a known probability, and it has an effect like killing people, the expectation value is the probability of the accident occurring times the number of persons killed by the accident.


Commercial nuclear fuel as moved around the country since 1957, tens of thousands of tons of it. In no case has any ever leaked out of a container. Ever. Anywhere. But lets say that this remarkable string of good luck ends tomorrow and a truck with a canister of nuclear material crashes in chicago near Chicago tomorrow. Let's say too, that the army immediately drives up with a Sherman tank and blows a hole in the caninster and its nuclear material spread all over I-90. Now let's concede also that 1200 people immediately die from this accident. Let's also insist that their is a 100% probability that whenever a truck crash occurs in a truck carrying nuclear material, the army will arrive in a timely manner to make sure that the cask is breached to the satisfaction of nutcases who cite this improbable event as though it were an absolute certainty. Now let's estimate the probability base on our experimental value. We have 1 crash in 48 years, and therefore the experimentally determined the probability of crashes involving trucks carrying nuclear fuel is 1/48 or roughly 2%. 1200 people die. The expectation value of deaths from this accident in any given year is thus 0.02*1200 = 24 people.

Now let's say that there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that if nothing is done about global warming because of the fondness for complete idiots for coal, that a runaway outgassing event of methane hydrate will occur for methane hydrate and extinguish mammalian life on the planet. If the planet's population is 6,000,000,000 we have an expectation value of 6,000,000,000*(1/1,000,000) = 6,000.

Thus even if the probability of the outgassing event is 1/21,000th as small as the Chicago crash coupled with an over enthusiatic Sherman tank driver, the overall risk to humanity is 250 times greater.

No wonder our planet's doomed. We certainly deserve it. We are actually proud of our poor thinking.

Oh and about that DU. Don't worry about it. People in countries that have a future will probably buy all of that material and every other thing we have, the grand canyon, the grand West Virginia coal pit, (a wonderful place for Chinese municple waste I think. Uranium, all Uranium, depleted and otherwise, is valuable to people who think. Only dumbells think of it as waste. Every serious energy scientist on the planet recognizes that we will people in wealthy countries (which will NOT include the United States) are going to NEED that Uranium.