Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has achieved his long-held plan of doing away with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Following conversations with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House, Senator Reid today announced that the administration and the Energy Department have agreed to cut off all funding to pursue a license application for the Yucca Mountain Project in the 2011 budget. It had been approved as the nation’s only permanent geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and Department of Defense high-level radioactive waste.
“This is a major victory for Nevada,” Reid said. “I am pleased that President Obama has lived up to his promise to me and all Nevadans by working with me to kill the Yucca Mountain Project. I look forward to continuing my work with the President and his administration to find responsible, alternative solutions for dealing with nuclear waste.”
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The proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is on federal land at the edge of the Nevada Nuclear Test site. The volcanic area has fractured, and critics expressed concerns that water moving through the fractures into the facility could corrode the containers holding the waste, releasing radioactivity into the environment.
You know what would be CHEAPER than this thing? A magnetic rail gun and launcher similar ‘cast’ enclosures into space out of our orbit. SOUNDS silly science fiction, but it’s actually pretty easy. No rockets to fail, they don’t have NEAR the safety record required for this kind of thing. But a MRG is just a ‘bullet’, once it reaches speed it’s all done. You have a safety ‘switch’ at the end to divert cargo if escape speed hasn’t been reached.
NOTHING dealing with this waste, NOTHING will be perfect. But we can get rid of it. And unless someone’s worried about ‘polluting’ the sun with radiation, it seems like a good disposal idea.
#21
Hey, I think that’s the first really great idea I’ve read in a blog comment! Have there been any studies to estimate how much it would cost to get working?
>> homehive said, on July 31st, 2009 at 6:02 am
>> Now that a generation of Hippie Bolsheviks are occupying Washington, D.C,, we can only expect more of their Anti-Science, Anti-Civilization decision making.
Yeah, “hippie bolsheviks” PERFECTLY describes this administration!
Holy smokes, man, you SUCK at political analysis.
It was the “faith based” BUSH ADMINISTRATION that trashed the hell out of real science.
Not me, you,
I’ve been long infatuated with the so-called “Babylon Gun” being developed by Gerard Bull until his murder, often attributed to Mossad.
While I am a pacifist and hate weapons, the Bull story is amazing and may have yielded non-rocket launch technology.
As for nuclear waste, I think a low-tech solution is the ticket.
Can we encase the crap in ultra-reinforced concrete and store them at the bottom of an ocean trench?
They could be monitored for leakage and be retrieved for repair if necessary.
The technology is already mature — mostly really great concrete and reliable remote sensors.
If I remember my class on plate tectonics correctly, the crap will eventually be recycled back deep into the earth after a million years or so.
Everyone needs to read the book “Beyond Fossil Fools” by Shuster.
If we used fast neutron reactors, he claims, nuclear waste would be reduced by over 90%. It’s pretty clear looking at the data, if we don’t want to be dependent on radical islam and we want to be able to breath, nuclear is going to be a big part of the story. A typical coal plant puts out 100x more radioactive materials (from the burning of the coal and adjacent material deep in the earth) than a nuclear plant, giagawatt for gigawatt. The book is enlightening.
Great! Now we can keep dumping in SRS in South Carolina where there are no real facilities to handle it save for giant swimming pools.
And its right near an active fault line.
This kills the nuclear industry and keeps us on coal for another 50+ years.
This debate is heating up nicely…
What do ya do when ya build a house?… Put in a waste desposal system and a bathroom…
Seems like this should of been sorted a long time ago, before the First Nuclear Pwr Plant went on Line.. and besides what else can you do in Nevada?… besides gamble or work for the Military…
Seems the facility would generate a new revenue stream. We have to put this unwanted material some place… Under a mountain seems like a good idea to me..
We cant just sell it on Ebay?… that is what I do with my unwanted material?..
Hey Mikey,… you wanna try it…
Hire the mob. They’ll dump it in Somalia.
Congratulations Dave, thanks to people like you, nuclear waste is stored in fragile water pools at reactors near large urban areas instead of safely under the barren wastelands of Nevada.
Great going NIMBY.
#29, Sweeney,
Why blame Dave? He didn’t put the waste in any fragile swimming pools. Blame the short sighted private sector that built their nuclear plants without thinking through where they would dump the waste.
#30- The government licensed every nuclear power plant in the US. The government has always been responsible for developing a final repository and they have dropped the ball. Blame the government if you are going to blame someone. Harry Reid in particular is a good person to blame for stopping a good, workable solution.
#24 said, Greg Allen, said:
“Can we encase the crap in ultra-reinforced concrete and store them at the bottom of an ocean trench?”
I say encase it (the crap) in concrete or seal it up in glass balls like the French do or just leave it in U.S.-style impenetrable steel casks. Then park ‘em in an ocean trench, like #24 says, but near a subduction zone & they will be inhaled into the innards of the earth & recycled. No more worries.
All the preceeding rhetoric aside, I have in my library an interesting book about how to label the site for future generations. Remarkable. The problem is that the site would be deadly for tens of thousands of years, and in that time, cultures and languages would be lost, so the big problem is to devise a warning that would be coherent far, far, far in the future. Examples were shown, but another problem is that anything that indicated “DANGER!” also would potentially invite exploration to see what the hell is so important.
I love how moss completely owned jbensen2.
You’ve been owned son, now go to the corner and shut your mouth.
The waste could be disposed of easily and cheaply.
Just make it into flag pins and then give them out at the next Republican Convention.
Two problems solved.
Yet more blatant lies from the anti-nuclear ‘stop all industrialisation’ loud crowd.
This mountain was never needed in the first place if reprocessing turned deathly radiating fuel rods into new fuel rods and desperately needed nuclear isotopes for medicine. I hope the first reprocessing remix plant being built somewhere east of mississippi does not get the same shameful treatment.
Next biggest lie was that 3-mile leaked radiation.
But the biggest lie of all was the outrageous cost of civil nukes. Go figure how a gram equivalent of nuclear fuel versus fossil fuel in the near future leads to near zero long term costs. Those early claims were RIGHT! Of course you have to shield the reactor and be proliferation resistant (main task is to avoid jars of plutonium which some processing schemes enable).
The proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was never going to hold nuclear waste. It was actually a giant bunker meant to preserve a remnant of humanity from the coming devastating calamity. A nuclear dump was considered to be the ultimate cover story that would
keep those not selected for survival from trying to obtain the stores from within the facility. New arrangements have now been made for the selected few.
Now that you know what will you do? Time is running out.
#30: NRC and the Yucca Mountain Project didn’t drop the ball. Reid funded the research until it was obvious that they had a good design that would be approved by NRC. Then he pulled the money for the license application from the project to get himself re-elected (most Nevada voters aren’t all that smart).
Once Reid dies (he’s 70) or gets voted out of office, the license funding will be restored (or will be paid for by the nuclear power companies) and the Project will continue.
Will Cheney have to move his office as well?
Yea, not a surprise that this administration is against nuclear power. Just as they cut back on oil drilling offshore and on federal lands(I thought that was the liberals position?)