Nevada's Fight Against Nuclear Waste

They did the stonewalling, let them eat cake, yellow cake that is, of a kind

we don't really have a choice, we are going to have to devolope a program to launch this waste into space(the moon?) and get it off our planet. No more nuclear reactors untill we can make the residue harmless.

too costly to space launch, risky too if the thing veers and crashed. This will never be done. Deep burial in caskets made to last is best. Pretreatment of high emission waste by an automated facility would also help. Most of the objectors are nimybyists with no rational basis.

All you need to correct this is to earmark all electricity from source to buyers. Those that will only buy windpower or sunpower can get it and in the dark or when there is no wind they must live off their stored electricity. If that costs extra = their choice.

All the hysterial about nuclear is saddening in a tech society.

21000 tons, I wonder when they transported it to Yucca if they lost any of it, shipping damage, unhappy or underpaid workers, oh well nothing to get hysterical about.

yes it is going to be a large program but 21,000 tons (42,000,000lbs) of material can be sent off our planet and damn the cost. It is too dangerous to leave here. NO MORE NUCKES!

Not that this contributes anything to the argument, but here's an overhead view of the Yucca Mountain facility courtesy of Google Earth:

This is exactly why I am opposed to nuclear power in general and I hope the issue gets a lot of publicity so the public wakes up about the dangers.

I would however not be opposed to storing this waste in the center of Las Vegas. It could be used as an additive in the conctrete and glass of all new casinos. Yeah Baby !

Although Mass Transit is an efficient idea Mass Power Production is not. Just think of how efficient power production and use could be if we focused on individual site technologies. Wind where it's windy, solar where there is plenty of sunshine, hydro where there is any small but capable water source, geothermal etc. Sometimes thinking smaller is better.

The coal fired power stations place far more radiation into the air than the nuclear power stations. The coal they use holds uranium and thorium in small amounts, and that partly goes into the air. Nuclear stations take care to avoid any emissions and in the world the accidental emissions have been trivial with the exception of chernobyl, and that was concentrated in a small area whereas coal is global.

http://www.bccdc.org/content.php?item=61

http://www.uic.com.au/ral.htm

It is politically correct but a technical error to criticise nuclear power. The space needed for deep disposal is small and the risk in nil.

However the PC activists have made it into a nimby issue

OK I am a very reasonable person; objectively speaking, the nuclear reactors seem to do very well on the emmission side (I think it is steam), but it is the aftermath that concerns me. Kinda like asbestos, lead paint and nowadays gasoline creating an evergrowing hole in the ozone. It sure would be nice to recycle this stuff, for that matter it sure would be nice to develop hydrogen. Isn't the molecular structure of hydrogen a bit easier to work with than uranium 238?

to develop hydrogen you need to use a load of power to make the hydrogen, store it pipe it, etc. Once that is done the vehicles work well, but with short ranges on tanks of hydrogen unless the Hydrogen liquid or complexed solid, both of which are energetically expensive.

I suspect coal burning diesels will be best with a method of making a fluid coal fuel with ultrafine powdered coal and some carrying liquid?

The emissions while radioactive are small in volume compared to the huge tonnage of CO2 and water the furnaces vent to the air and some NOX and SOX. (WAter is not too bad).

Hydrogen is more of an energy storage medium than an energy source. With todays technology, you must generate energy and then use that energy to produce hydrogen. Then you can burn the hydrogen later to get the energy back.

Asbestos and lead paint are not science or environmental issues, they are legal issues. Lawyers make big money on these things by stacking juries with morons in front of judges with agendas. More health harm has come from removing these substances from structures than by having them there in the first place.

Historically companies, governments, and individuals have proven themselves over and over again to be irresponsible with waste of any kind let alone nuclear waste so why should the public be trusting little sheep and just take it on faith everyone reponsible for the waste and other dangers inherrant in nuclear power (terrorist targets and human error) will do the right thing.

Let us not forget that a large part of the fuel (any fuel) and power produced is wasted in transmission because it is done on such large scale. I defy anyone here to show me that small scale even individual site specific systems are not the answer to less waste, less emissions, and better reclamation of resources.

folks put on your thinking caps and don't be sheep. Bring it on let's hash this out.

Unfortunately, scale works against you here. For example, something like 8 million people live in the greater NYC area. There's no way that "small local sources" can generate enough power to supply their needs. Total U.S. generation capacity is about 768 million kilowatts (2002), of which the largest renewable source (hydro) produces about 3%. If ALL of the remaining hydro capacity in the U.S. were tapped, that percentage would rise to 6%.

Unless the structure of society changes, and the number of people (or energy consumption) falls drastically, "small is beautiful" just isn't going to get the job done. We're basically burning 400 million years worth of stored solar energy and using it to artificially inflate the carrying capacity of the planet. Unless we get much better at harnessing current solar energy at very large scale, there's a nasty shock coming in the relatively near future (next 100-200 years).

Nice Steve and Mr. Aurizon, definitely makes sense, thanks for giving me a big picture a can grasp! Mr. Rollin I appreciate your concern but if possible lets not argue this right at the moment.

So the nuclear solution is good because it can generate a ton of power, i.e.(Palo Alto in AZ. does almost all of Arizona), how much waste would a fully operative Palo Alto generate per month? How much waste does a nuclear submarine generate per year?

Thanks for helping to adjust my thinking cap and begin to understand the need for nuclear technology.

well, they have finally reached above 40% efficiency on solar power. I do not know how far they can get.

Bulk generation is the only way for large urban centers although if every roof had a 40% efficient solar array that would decrease the problem. Large flat areas covered with 40% panels would be even better as long as the ground beneath has a dual use that needs no sun??

STill, a market economy will cut back on oil use as prices go sky high and push solar onto all flat areas.

Your figures and stats do not sway me. You should know better than to use a worst case study (NYC)to model an entire country or world for that matter. And where do you get these figures for hydro? Are they based on capacity for large scale plants? Do they even begin to take into account small scale plants used where they are most beneficial?

How much less power would be needed if NYC's skyscrapers were inverted into the earth where the temperature is 55 degrees all the time.

While I am not against nuclear energy per se. I am against using technologies before the bugs kinks are worked out and nuclear waste is onw hellava big kink. Nuclear energy will be ready when there is no waste. No waste means we strip electrons from atoms without the use of brute force. Good science has a bit of finess and poor science has a tendency toward brutishness just like bad politics as a matter of fact historically the two seem to be strange bedfellows.

In the US, there is a executive order (Jimmy Carter) that prohibits the recycling of spent nuclear fuel and, from what I'm told by representatives of my local energy company, which runs a nuke plant, it is not cost effective to recycle the spent fuel at this time anyway.

However, recycling the fuel will remove and use the most-radioactive, longest-lived, largest-by-mass% component of the waste, Plutonium 239. As you may know, Plutonium 239 is an ideal material for a nuclear weapon - hence the executive order to protect against terrorists.

When it does become cost effective and legal to do so, recycling this spent fuel and the Plutonium 239 contained therein will drastically reduce the waste by mass and radioactivity and increase the available electric power, though at an increase in cost per kW-hr and risk of terrorist possibilities.

France produces over 75% of its power from nuclear/breeder-recycler reactors. Hmmm... I wonder where they put ALL that waste in that GIANT, TERRORIST-FREE country. Are you picking up on my sarcasm?

Nuclear power is an excellent source of energy, but even it is not renewable - you can use all the fissionable material on the planet and no more is going to be made - unless you can fuse atoms in an energetically efficient way.

Breeder reactors will see us through the next 3000 or more years. One hopes our descendents will have other solutions by then or will not need them, having gone back to a hunt-gather economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor