Orrin Hatch does nuclear NIMBY.

[NNadir]

Senator Orrin Hatch wrote to the New York Times thusly:

"I was perplexed to read "The Nuclear Waste Site in Utah" (editorial, Sept. 16), which supports the private plan to store half of our nation's high-level nuclear waste on a tiny Indian reservation in Utah.

Were you aware that this private, aboveground site would hold 4,000 casks of waste directly under the low-level path of 7,000 flights of F-16's each year, with many of these fighter-bombers armed with live ordnance?..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/opinion/l23utah.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fLetters

[madeline_con]

1. Is there some sort of prerequisite for government work...

at high levels that demands monumental stupidity??!!

[teryang]

2. If it wasn't in his political backyard this hypocrite wouldn't object

It's the first thing I've ever heard from him that I didn't disagree with.

[Frances]

3. But I thought the religious fundies

wanted the end of the world as soon as possible.

[JaneGat]

4. Plane crash risks left out of Yucca Mountain plan, too.

Plane crash risks left out of Yucca Mountain plan, NRC staff says
By ERICA WERNER
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department left out risk factors related to potential airplane crashes and hazards at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in planning for the project, nuclear regulatory staff told the agency in a memo released Thursday.

The department undercounted the number of Air Force plane crashes at the site in Nevada during the 1990s, and discounted the possibility of jettisoned ordnance, birds hitting planes and cruise missile testing at the Nevada Test Site, the memo by Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff said.

The Energy Department also made an unsupported assumption that airplanes that malfunction outside the no-fly zone would never enter the zone and crash into the dump, the memo said.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/aug/04/080410033.html

[jpak]

5. It goes to show....

NOBODY WANTS SPENT FUCKING NUCLEAR FUEL IN THEIR STATE

it's bipartisan and unanimous

:)

[Massacure]

6. Nobody wants anything in the U.S.

My neighbors ended up with their panties in a bundle when the city tried to paint a shed red. There is never a lack of idiots in the U.S.

There are people who don't want oil refineries in their back yard.
There are people who don't want coal power plants in their back yard.
There are people who don't want nuclear power plants in their backyard.
There are people who don't want wind turbines in their backyard.
There are people who don't want solar panels on their neighbor's houses.

It's the entire reason why this country will be third world ten years from now.

[jpak]

7. It's different with spent fuel - NO ONE wants it

Nuclear plant operators don't want it...

(they got the feds - ummmm taxpayers - to take it off their hands back in the late '80's).

Every state that ever hosted a nuclear power plant doesn't want it...

(they all voted for Yucca Mountain).

and the State of Nevada REALLY doesn't want it...

(it's going to cost them several billion dollars to manage shipments through their state).

[Massacure]

8. Okay then, prove it to me.

Name all the 295,734,134 people who do not want it in the United States.

[NNadir]

9. Stupidity is bipartisan and unanimous.

This bit about the F-16's is pretty typical of the very weak and strongly paranoid reaction to radiation by people who understand zero about risk analysis.

Now if every F-16 for which Senator Hatch voted for is likely to crash, we might ask him why he voted for all these expensive planes in the first place. Clearly they don't work.

Next we have to deal with the rather silly question of why, if a huge percentage of the citizens live in the pathway of the F-16's, and they cannot secure their live ordnance, why the flight paths aren't changed? Is Senator Hatch claiming that his citizen's are inadvertently bombed regularly and nothing can be done about it?

Suppose that a jet does crash. The entire inventory of spent fuel could easily be contained in a few small warehouses. What is the probability that an F-16 will manage to precisely hit this building in a crash situation? Did every single F-16 crash that ever occurred result in a direct hit on a facility containing hazardous waste.

I used to live near Miramar Air Station, and during the annual air show, the Blue Angels used to fly directly over my house at a few hundred meters altitude, wing tip to wing tip. We had lots of laboratories with lots of hazardous materials in the area. Not one was ever struck by a crashing F-16.

Of course, we could change the flight paths of the F-16 if we're really, really, really, really paranoid about tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny risks but we certainly wouldn't want to interfere with people practicing to kill other people, would we? Especially not for clean safe energy. If however, we did change the flight paths, the spent fuel would continue to do exactly what it's done decade after decade after decade in spite of all the weeping, carrying on, and illiterate fear mongering: Nothing at all.

I posted this article to show exactly how dumb all objections to the transport and storage of spent fuel are. They rely on a series of increasingly improbable events that are then presented as a certainty. They are not certainties. They are the weak presentations of people who are examining their internal hemorrhoids close us, eyeball to hemorrhoid. Orrin Hatch has had his head up his ass his whole life, and this is no different.

There is no such thing as absolute certainty of course, which people who have taken high school science courses know. (Those who haven't taken such courses join Greenpeace.) We can compare risks however. How does the risk of an F-16 inadvertently bomb compare with the risk of major cities being destroyed by the effects of global climate change? Well, since the latter event has already occurred, the probability is 100%. How does the risk of an F-16 crashing into a spent fuel canister compare with the risk of tens of thousands people dying in a typical US city from air pollution each year? Well since the last event is a certainty, it's probability is 100%. We cannot know precisely what the risk to Orrin Hatch's mystically bent constituency is, but we do know that it is very much smaller than the two certainties I just mentioned.

In sum: It is well known by anyone who has looked into the matter that spent nuclear fuel has killed zero people, unlike the wastes associated with every other viable form of energy. Imagining elaborate schemes in which it is conceivable for this so called "waste" to do what it has never done does not create a certainty that these events will happen.

It's just the usual fear mongering by paranoids for the benefit of paranoids.