That said, so called "nuclear waste" should not be buried in Yucca mountain.
My contention about the storage has nothing to do with dumb fear mongering about earthquakes in Nevada.
Let's dispose of some dumb mythology first.
One of the biggest pig wastes of electricity on the planet is Las Vegas, and yes, they buy power from the grid which the Palo Verde, Diablo Canyon, and San Onfre nuclear power plants supply. Nevada is full of shit when it says "we don't use nuclear power." If they shut off that part of the grid that comes from these plants, they might have a case.
I note as well that the citizens of Nevada have no problem whatsoever dumping waste into the air that everyone on the planet shares because of their complete ignorance of risk analysis. Eighty-two percent of the power generated in Nevada is fossil fuel derived, 51% is from the dirtiest and most dangerous fuel on the planet: Coal. (The installed capacity to exploit solar resources in sunny Nevada are so small, as to not even be measurable - in spite of decades of hype on how large this resource allegedly is. Note that although renewable capacity in Nevada is 1284 MW, the vast majority of this is hydroelectric power. Less than 0.1 MW is represented by solar PV - sort of makes you wonder, doesn't it?)
http://www.eere.energy.gov/states/state_specific_statistics.cfm/state=NV#consumptionIn Nevada they fucking actually kill
real people (as opposed to theoretical people thousands of years in the future) - since air pollution
kills - every damn day for the privilege of lighting billboards picturing the insipid gun toting paranoid Wayne Newton.
The integration of Nevada's power grid, and its imports from nuclear utilities are discussed extensively in this link:
http://energy.state.nv.us/2005%20Report/Final%20CD/Chapter%202%20-%20Final.docIt is also not true that even a vast earthquake in a putative "waste repository" in Nevada would necessarily lead to any deaths at all. At the Oklo site in Gabon, where naturally occurring nuclear reactors operated for hundreds of thousands of years, there was very little migration of any of the fission products over billions of years. Gabon, I note is in a
rain forest. For an earthquake to actually kill someone, it has to rupture all of the containers in such a way as to provide huge surface area in tons of glass, then provide water to dissolve all of this material, and sufficient acid to render it soluble. Then it has to leach for distances of hundreds of kilometers in sufficient concentration to actually find its way into the water supply in such a way as to avoid dilution. The probability of even one of these events is extraordinarily small; combined the probability is so trivial as to be ridiculous.
This is especially true when one compares it with the risk of say, our climate becoming so destabilized that there is no safety in our cities, no food in our bellies, and no air for us to breathe.
Global climate change is not something that is going to happen someday. It is happening NOW, and the citizens of Nevada are participating in that unhappy outcome right NOW.
Spent fuel is not only enormously safe
compared with the wastes every other viable energy alternative (no one has ever died from it's storage while people die every day from coal, oil and natural gas waste) but not only that, it is also valuable. The ideal solution for nuclear materials is to store them in a readily accessible area until they are needed. This is the "solution" proposed in Canada, and it is an excellent one. It is the de facto solution in the United States. I would have no problem with such storage right here in my own town here in New Jersey. This is because I am not a fucking retarded mystic speculating about every imaginable scenario as if my ability to imagine it were able to transform it into a certainty. I understand risk.
My kids health is being directly impacted by coal. Nuclear power has had zero effect on them. Zero.
Although uranium and thorium are extraordinarily cheap right now, and will readily available from cheap accessible for quite some time to come, in a few centuries, it will probably be necessary to recover the uranium resources represented in spent fuel. It is a betrayal of future generations to further indulge our "waste mentality," that requires dumps. Spent fuel in the United States will soon amount to about 75,000 metric tons - an amount of mass smaller than the annual output of a single 1000 MW coal plant in about 10 days. The volume of this material is extremely small - it would easily fit into a few small warehouses. Moreover this amount corresponds to a quantity accumulated over 50 years for all operating nuclear plants in the United States. Converted to plutonium, the uranium in this spent fuel is about enough to provide about 60 years of the total energy supply of the United States (roughly 100 exajoules per year) without any additional mining whatsoever. For this to happen however, the price of uranium will have to rise by a factor of 20 - something that would have a trivial effect on the price of nuclear electricity since the energy density of uranium is so intense. (At current prices, uranium is the equivalent of gasoline at less than 0.01 cent a gallon, and thus even were the price to rise by a factor of one hundred, it still would be extraordinarily cheap.)
It is dumb to bury spent fuel. Almost everybody on the planet has gotten this through their tiny little heads.
Few heads, though, on the subject of energy are as tiny as those of the Americans. Imagine that they piss and moan about the non-problem of so called "nuclear waste" - which has injured no one - while their cities are being demolished with increasing frequency by global climate change. One almost thinks that a nation filled with such pathetic assholes as we are deserves what it is going to get.
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