Yucca mountain nuclear storage site on 60 Min now

[pinkpops]

right now.

[bluestateguy]

1. I hope Nevadans will rememeber this next November

It was Clinton who promised to veto a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. * has ensured it will be trucked over to Nevada ASAP.

[ramapo]

3. Ultimate NIMBY

If not Yucca, where?

I know there are concerns with the Yucca site. But where should this stuff go?

Can't stay at the individual sites. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

Who would want this? And there will be lots more to come. Wait until the operating nukes reach end-of-life.

[Frangible]

4. Just release it into the atmosphere like coal

Ok, that was kind of a sarcastic line... but seriously, I think people are just being overly paranoid here. There's a certain amount of irrational hysteria in that article. I wouldn't mind if they buried it in my state, but being that we're the 4th most seismically active state, that probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Our two primary sources of power, nuclear and coal, produce radioactive waste. It's sad but true. Coal has high amounts of naturally occuring uranium and thorium.

We all use power, until we can find a better primary power source, and I think someday we will, we all have to accept responsibility for the byproducts, be they toxic U/Th laden coal smoke or depleted fuel rods and mine tilling of nuclear plants.

Suing the government is cute and all, but in the end, I think it's an evasion of responsibility. The waste was created because we and everyone else use electricity. Even without nuclear, coal generates massive amounts of radioactivity and pollution.

Where do these Nevadians think the electricity that powers the neon lights in Las Vegas that never dim, the pumps for their water, the power to make their cars, etc, comes from? Green power? Not hardly.

But people don't want to see it that way. They want to think the waste, the byproducts, are someone else's problem, and they can go on using electricity inefficiently forever and not worry about any damage to the environment.

Well, I think it's time people got an attitude check. It's your waste, you use electricity, and the vast bulk of that is coal and nuclear. Accept responsibilty; it's your waste as much as another state's.

Don't like it? Fine, but realize you had a hand in its creation with the power you use, and work to develop truly green sources of power that can one day replace coal and nuclear altogether. Until then, don't stick your head in the sand and wish for the problem to go away while you continue to make it happen.

Rant off.

[pmbryant]

5. Nevada doesn't have any nuclear power plants

Where do these Nevadians think the electricity that powers the neon lights in Las Vegas that never dim, the pumps for their water, the power to make their cars, etc, comes from? Green power? Not hardly.

From the nuclear energy industry's mouthpeice themselves: http://www.nei.org/doc.asp?catnum=2&catid=93

Note from the map that Nevada doesn't have a single nuclear power plant.

I wouldn't mind if they buried it in my state, but being that we're the 4th most seismically active state, that probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Are you aware that the Yucca Mountain site is in the midst of an area of volcanic activity, in addition to seismic activity?

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2000/aug/03/510589422.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020801075418.htm

--Peter

[Frangible]

8. energy grids are shared

Between states. (except for Texas, I believe)

The "volcanic activity risk" is 1 in 10,000 (0.01%) of happening in a period of 10,000 years. That's pretty remote-- are any other sites any better?

[pmbryant]

9. No nuclear plants in Nevada

The Nuclear Energy Institute's own web page doesn't claim that Nevada gets any power from nuclear energy. And it is quite clear that Nevada has chosen not to build any nuclear plants in their state. Why they should feel compelled to accept the entire nation's nuclear waste is beyond me.

Especially since Yucca Mountain isn't even a particularly safe place to put this highly dangerous stuff.

From the Science Daily article I referenced above:

Yucca Mountain is located within a long-lived volcanic field. Risk assessments have suggested that the probability of volcanic activity occurring during the 10,000-year compliance period of the repository is around 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000.

Note that the waste will be there and will be dangerous for far longer than 10,000 years. Then note that there are a huge number of sites across the country (some others elsewhere in Nevada as well, no doubt) where the volcanic risk would be essentially zero, and the wisdom of choosing the Yucca Mountain site is seriously questionable.

But Congress is not considering one single alternative site. It is Yucca Mountain or nothing.

How smart is that?

--Peter

[Frangible]

10. yes but

The Nuclear Energy Institute's own web page doesn't claim that Nevada gets any power from nuclear energy. And it is quite clear that Nevada has chosen not to build any nuclear plants in their state. Why they should feel compelled to accept the entire nation's nuclear waste is beyond me.

Due to how power grids are shared, they most likely get some of their power from nuclear.

Fact: Nevada imports 49% of its energy
Fact: Neighboring Arizona which exports power is 37.3% nuclear in terms of power generation

Nevada produces barely half its energy, you have to think that they're getting some nuclear from Arizona.

But Congress is not considering one single alternative site. It is Yucca Mountain or nothing.

If true, that is messed up, but arguing it's unsuitable because of 0.01% probabilities seems rather odd to me, shrug.

[pmbryant]

11. 0.01% to 0.1% probability of volcanic activity in 10,000 years

Fact: Nevada imports 49% of its energy

A source for this would be appreciated. I searched around a bit earlier and couldn't find this info. I'll drop this line of argument if this is true.

Anyway, the real reason Yucca Mountain is not a wise choice for a storage site is because of safety issues. The potential for volcanic activity is just one of many such issues.

But Congress is not considering one single alternative site. It is Yucca Mountain or nothing.

If true, that is messed up, but arguing it's unsuitable because of 0.01% probabilities seems rather odd to me, shrug.

That is very true. Congress eliminated consideration of any alternative to the Yucca Mountain site back in 1987. Before then, several sites, in several different regions of the country, were also being considered.

Here's a brief reference to what happened from a CNN.com article last year:

Under a law passed in 1987, the Energy Department was authorized to study the suitability of only one potential underground storage site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Congress exempted other potential sites in Washington and Texas as part of the 1987 law.

This law is popularly known as the "Screw Nevada Bill".

The volcanic probabilities at Yucca Mountain are actually 0.01% to 0.1%, according to the articles I cited earlier. And that is just in a period of 10,000 years, which is not very long compared to how long the high-level waste will be dangerous. And considering the potentially horrific consequences if a volcanic event breached the repository, those odds are not very promising. Especially since it's not like this whole country is composed of "long-lived volcanic fields" like where Yucca Mountain is. There have got to be better choices! But Congress has prevented any from being considered.

--Peter

[Frangible]

12. here's the cite...

http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/national.html

I'd think most of the more dangerous isotopes would have decayed in 10,000 years; Iodine 131, Strontium 90, etc.

But yes... completely ridiculous they cannot look at any alternatives.

[NNadir]

13. This is true, but I would expect that miners will be digging up Yucca

mountain long before that. (After 10,000 years the only important radioactive materials left will be essentially the isotopes Cs-135, Tc-99, and I-129.) The transruranium actinides, elements such as plutonium, Americium and Curium will also remain in significant quantities. Many of the materials in nuclear waste are extremely valuable. Thus I would expect that future civilizations, who undoubtably will understand both the content and the risks, will actually seek to recover these materials, particularly as they grow scarce.

The once through fuel cycle used in the United States is for lack of a better term, dumb.

We should NOT build Yucca mountain, except possibly as a temporary storage area, but should reprocess the nuclear materials, partitioning the elements and using them as appropriate. It is important to destroy the plutonium by fissioning it, and recovering the energy as a product. This is the policy of every nuclear nation except the United States. Burying it will not make it go away. For the short run we should simply store the wastes above ground. They have yet to hurt anyone.

We should transmute and fission the other transuranium actinides, recovering their energy. We should also transmute the relatively long lived I-129 and Cs-135. We probably should keep much the Tc-99 as Technetium is a very valuable element that does not naturally occur on earth. It may be possible to use this strong high melting element as a construction material in future nuclear reactors, during which much of it will be transmuted into the valuable elements Ruthenium, Rhodium and small quantities of Palladium.

We should capture the energy of Sr-90 in remote energy systems since it has a thermal output of about 1 watt/gram and no penetrating radiation. (It's only harmful if you eat it.) We should also capture the energy of Cs-137 and other radionuclides that easily decay to non-radioactive elements in short times. These materials can be used in the radio-degradation of dangerous wastes like PCB's for instance. (They were once contemplated for recovering water from sewage, except for the fact they were not suitable for destroying nitrates.)

I expect that the time will come that there is not enough rather than too little of the materials we now characterize as "nuclear waste."

There is, contrary to popular opinion, not a "huge" amount of nuclear "waste." There is about 77,000 MT of used nuclear fuel for the entire history of commercial nuclear power in the United States. Piled a few meters high, this amount of material would barely fill a football field. This is a very different situation than the situation with fossil fuel wastes, which destroy vast areas.) Further, much of the most serious activity has already decayed. Wastes from 1980 for instance contain almost no Cerium-144, for instance, although this isotope was a serious danger when the fuel was removed from the reactor. It is worth noting that more than 95% of the waste consists merely of Uranium that is of course, naturally occurring. It is easy to demonstrate that via recycling schemes, running nuclear reactors with actinide recycling for 1000 years will actually lead to a reduction in the total radioactivity of the earth. (This statement is
NOT true for the once through "build Yucca" strategy.)

[Frangible]

14. Correct me if I'm wrong

But isn't recycling fuel both uneconomical and a rather environmentally nasty process with today's technology? I remember reading about it and hoping they could find a better way to do it.

[NNadir]

15. Not really.

Some of the methods used in weapons reprocessing were rather messy resulting in horror stories like the Hanford tanks - a very, very serious matter that somehow gets routinely ignored. Some of the commercial methods, the methods at Sellafield, where some Tc-99 is rather foolishly dumped into the North Sea, in the UK are less than ideal, but there are a number of modern methods that are rather clean. Most of these methods involve electrorefining or molten salt extraction procedures. An excellent report is available on line from the National Research Council detailing some of these methods. If you look into it, you can in fact find all sorts of well understood processes for doing separations and transmutations on the web as well as in the scientific literature. The National Research Council has concluded that some geological disposal methods will probably be necessary in a P & T scheme using existing technology, although it will be vastly reduced. I am not convinced that any permanent long term disposal is either necessary or desirable. Many of these technologies are amenable to even more dramatic improvements. There is also a very new technology known as ionic liquids that has barely been explored in this area.

Traditional methods mostly relied solvent extraction (which is still used in many places). To save time and cost during the arms race, this materials were used and discarded haphazardly, sometimes under poorly documented experimental conditions. It happens though that even these processes can be made subject to solvent recycling and similar schemes that would further reduce their relatively minor environmental impact.

The fact is that like most things nuclear, we are operating on 1970's technology at best. Because of the fear of nuclear energy - which IMO is irrational - there has been very little incentative to upgrade the industrial processes to the state of the art. Yet these processes are well understood, particularly as we have arrived in the Golden age of chemistry and materials science.

It is undoubtably true that someone somewhere will be nonetheless harmed by the adoption of wholesale nuclear energy. However, the number of persons injured by energy overall will certainly fall by a factor of thousands. No form of energy is absolutely 100% safe. All involve some environmental and health comprimise as well as risk. However, because of the unparalleled energy density of fissionable nuclear fuels, only exceeded by the unproven density of nuclear fusion, nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest option we have to prevent a short-term castrophe.

The most problematic isotopes are the volatile ones, in particular Kr-85, (Krypton gas) which is monitored to expose primitive recycling technologies such as that being employed by the North Koreans. Even so, detection of this isotope is extremely difficult, really on an atom by atom basis, since even a filthy reprocessing scheme such as the North Koreans are undoubtably using doesn't result in that much nuclear pollution. The activity output is no where near the output of a typical coal plant releasing Uranium/Thorium/Radium/Radon/Polonium containing coal ash.

[treepig]

16. From the 17 October 2003 issue of Science (magazine)

Proton Guns Set Their Sights on Taming Radioactive Wastes
Dennis Normile

Once mooted as energy sources, nuclear reactors that substitute particle accelerators for chain reactions are taking long-range aim at a new mission

KUMATORI, JAPAN--On the grounds of Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute, workers have dug into a hillside to give a 30-year-old experimental nuclear reactor an unusual companion: a proton synchrotron. When it starts up in fall 2005, the synchrotron will fire protons into the heart of the reactor, straight down the axis of a cylinder of heavy metal wrapped in a core of nuclear fuel. Neutrons dislodged from the target will hurtle into the fuel, shattering atoms as they go.

It may seem a roundabout way to generate a nuclear reaction, and it is. But this type of accelerator-driven system (ADS), as it's called, isn't primarily designed to generate power. Instead, its aim is to transform some of the nastier ingredients of spent reactor fuel into less troublesome elements. The technology "has a unique role to play in treating nuclear wastes," says Stefano Monti, a nuclear physicist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and the Environment (ENEA) in Rome.


. . . snip . . .

The basic processes at work in an ADS--splitting atoms to change one element into another--have been understood for almost a century. Similar schemes were briefly studied in the 1950s to turn thorium into uranium-235 to fuel nuclear reactors. The idea was revived in the 1980s when scientists started wrestling with the problem of waste from nuclear power plants. The most troublesome components of nuclear waste are long-lived fission products and actinides --elements such as americium and curium --which have half-lives of thousands of years. Researchers working separately at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and at Los Alamos started looking at using subcritical, or non-self-sustaining, nuclear reactions to burn up these wastes. They envisioned using an accelerator to fire a beam of protons at a target surrounded by spent nuclear fuel. In what is called a spallation reaction, the protons break target nuclei, producing neutrons that trigger reactions in the surrounding material (see figure). Some radioactive elements are rendered nonradioactive. Others absorb a neutron, become unstable, and then either fission or decay. Actinides, for example, are transmuted into uranium, which decays into shorter-lived radionuclides that can be disposed of as low-level nuclear waste. Because the reaction is subcritical, if the stream of protons is shut off, the reaction stops.

more . . .

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5644/379

[dArKeR]

2. Yucca Mountain

(CBS) For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government and the nuclear industry have been trying to figure out what to do with massive quantities of deadly radioactive waste that has been piling up at nuclear power plants and munitions factories since the dawn of the atomic age.

Right now, it's sitting in temporary storage facilities, many of them near major metropolitan areas, vulnerable to accidents, environmental disasters and terrorism.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/23/60minutes/main579696.shtml

[gethmord]

6. Why not put it in the ground?

Where do you think we got it from in the first place?

Also on a History channel special.
They claimed if we double the percentige of power produced by nuclear means in the U.S.. We would produce an extra 500 ton of nuclear waste a year, And lose 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year.

[Throckmorton]

7. Yucca Mountian is putting it in the ground,

Right now, there are hundreds of billions of curie's of spent nuclear fuel, in about 80 sites across the USA. None of these sites were built to permanently store this material.

While Yucca Mountian has its drawbacks, the primary one being the distance this waste must travel from most eastern reactors, it is preferable to leaving it where it is.