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So, it looks like Yucca Mountain is out

frostedflakes

frostedflakes

Diamond Member
Old news, but I guess I missed it (and I'm assuming most of P&N as well, since there wasn't any discussion about it, even in the budget threads). The FY 2010 budget basically cuts off funding for Yucca Mountain, stopping the project dead in its tracks. In a Senate hearing, Energy Secretary Steven Chu confirmed that Yucca Mountain is off the table. Of course no alternative has been offered yet.

http://www.rgj.com/article/20090306/NEWS/903060430/1321

So, what now? Maybe New Mexico? It's already home to WIPP, I guess another dump site couldn't hurt.
 
There is no better place in the USA to store spent fuel then at Yucca Mountain, so whatever the "solution" is it will be a political one, not one based on science. I always wondered why we don't just drop it all to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, its not gonna hurt anyone down there (except maybe Godzilla 😛).

Really what this is all about though is people wanting to shut down the entire nuclear industry. Since they can't shut down all the power plants right now they go after the "support" type of things like uranium mining, reprocessing, and spent fuel storage. The goal being to "suffocate" the nuclear industry by making it impossible for the to find fuel, or get rid of waste. Nuclear waste is no more dangerous to mankind than hundreds of other compounds out there, its just fear-mongering by the liberals as well as to support their bull shit "green power" initiatives.

I mean take for example a pound of spent fuel verse a pound of arsenic, the USA uses both these chemicals in large amounts. People complain the spent fuel will be deadly for a million years, well guess what, the arsenic will be deadly FOREVER, and we throw it into normal land fills anytime you trash a calculator, cell phone, or anything else with a computer part in it. Same goes for dozens of other elements and chemicals. Many of which are ironically enough found in solar panels.
 
Originally posted by: Siddhartha
Storing the wastes at the nuclear plant sites is still at best a temporary solution. This issue will come back.
Click to expand...

you can look at the size of the concrete pads being used to store spent fuel casks that the utilities don't expect there to be a solution anytime soon.
 
If the citizens of Nevada don't want Yucca Mountain used as a nuk-u-ler waste storage facility, why should they be forced to accept it?

How about states' rights?

Make each and every state deal with its own nuk-u-ler wastes instead of shipping it all over the country with the endless possibilities for problems...and sticking it in Nevada.
 
Originally posted by: BoomerD
If the citizens of Nevada don't want Yucca Mountain used as a nuk-u-ler waste storage facility, why should they be forced to accept it?

How about states' rights?

Make each and every state deal with its own nuk-u-ler wastes instead of shipping it all over the country with the endless possibilities for problems...and sticking it in Nevada.
Click to expand...
The problem is, what state *wants* to be the nation's nuclear waste dump? No state does, but somebody's going to have to suck it up and take one for the team. And Yucca seemed like as good a site as any, and we had already invested decades of research and billions of dollars into it. Now we'll have to start from scratch.

Letting each state deal with their own waste is probably the fairest thing to do, but it's not practical.
 
Originally posted by: BoomerD
If the citizens of Nevada don't want Yucca Mountain used as a nuk-u-ler waste storage facility, why should they be forced to accept it?

How about states' rights?

Make each and every state deal with its own nuk-u-ler wastes instead of shipping it all over the country with the endless possibilities for problems...and sticking it in Nevada.
Click to expand...
Send it to france. They've supposedly figured out the disposal problem according to some nuke proponents here.
 
France's nuclear program has its share of problems, but they're still light-years ahead of us, especially wrt reprocessing.
 
Send it to Texas, and build a George W. Bush Nukular Waste Dump in Crawford.
 
Originally posted by: frostedflakes
The problem is, what state *wants* to be the nation's nuclear waste dump? No state does, but somebody's going to have to suck it up and take one for the team. And Yucca seemed like as good a site as any, and we had already invested decades of research and billions of dollars into it. Now we'll have to start from scratch.

Letting each state deal with their own waste is probably the fairest thing to do, but it's not practical.
Click to expand...

The research supporting Yucca was very biased and controlled by the Feds.

Everytime the research is brought into the open, more errors in it are found and/or bias toward releasing results.

Under Clinton, the goverment was pushing it. Bush continued the falacy that scientific analyis was to be done before a final decision. That promise bought him NV votes. That promise was immediately broken.

 
It should also be noted that the price of Yucca Mountain is not due to the difficulty in making such a sight its because of the political nature of the sight whereby you spend 100 hours talking for every one hour really working. Its not like the engineers designing the site, or the craftsmen building it pissed away all that money, it was the politicians who did it. If people stopping talking and started doing a nuclear waste repository could be built for a fraction of the time and budget that was pissed away at Yucca Mountain.
 
Originally posted by: Common Courtesy
Originally posted by: frostedflakes
The problem is, what state *wants* to be the nation's nuclear waste dump? No state does, but somebody's going to have to suck it up and take one for the team. And Yucca seemed like as good a site as any, and we had already invested decades of research and billions of dollars into it. Now we'll have to start from scratch.

Letting each state deal with their own waste is probably the fairest thing to do, but it's not practical.
Click to expand...

The research supporting Yucca was very biased and controlled by the Feds.

Everytime the research is brought into the open, more errors in it are found and/or bias toward releasing results.

Under Clinton, the goverment was pushing it. Bush continued the falacy that scientific analyis was to be done before a final decision. That promise bought him NV votes. That promise was immediately broken.
Click to expand...
Seems to me like most of the opposition is political. And again, what's a better site? It seems like a lot of people are willing to offer opposition, but few have alternatives.

Honestly, I doubt there is any "perfect" or even "really good" site out there. And obviously when you're making projections 10,000 years into the future there are going to be a lot of unanswered questions, I'm sure there are many possible contingencies that we will overlook.
 
Another vote for "rocket to the sun"

But seriously though, it's obvious a more permanent solution has to be found. While I'm not happy to hear the Yucca project is being halted, I think the continued use of it would slow development of a real solution. This may be a good move to help motivate an improved solution.
 
Originally posted by: geno
Another vote for "rocket to the sun"

But seriously though, it's obvious a more permanent solution has to be found. While I'm not happy to hear the Yucca project is being halted, I think the continued use of it would slow development of a real solution. This may be a good move to help motivate an improved solution.
Click to expand...

What a great idea that is...

Rocket tech is no where NEAR perfect (or even reliable enough to trust it to blast waste into space). If we get a space elevator, then fine I'm with ya. As long as we are launching it from Earth though, I'm 100% against it.

Unless we can use Kal-e-fornia as a launch site....
 
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