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Senate Passes Energy Bill That Kills Yucca Facility
The bill, passed by a 85-9 vote, also covers hundreds of water projects being undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Yucca Mountain project 90 miles (145 kilometres) from Las Vegas was designed to hold 77,000 tons of waste, but has been strongly opposed by the Nevada delegation, which had been outgunned in its efforts to kill it.
The move fulfills a campaign promise by Obama to close Yucca Mountain, which was 25 years and $13.5 billion in the making. It would, however, leave the country without a long-term solution for storing highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.
The waste disposal problem has become worse since the federal government scrapped plans to open Yucca Mountain. Instead, radioactive fuel rods are now stored in large concrete and steel canisters on the grounds of nuclear plants around the country.
The 1987 law requiring waste to be stored at Yucca Mountain remains on the books, however, so the project could in theory be revived.
The Yucca Mountain project would still receive the $196.8 million budgeted by Obama for work on the site - and to keep several hundred employees working - though the money won't go to ship waste there.
The House of Representatives earlier this month passed its own $33.3 billion measure covering energy programs and water projects that also contained the Yucca Mountain provision.
The two bills now go to a House-Senate conference committee to work out differences before a final bill can be sent to the president.
The Senate also adopted an amendment by California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to allow for water transfers to help farmers in California's Central Valley suffering from severe drought conditions.
The underlying bipartisan measure has money for a wide variety of programs, including clean energy research, and has more than 600 so-called earmarks for lawmakers, mostly for Army Corps of Engineers projects.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllWhat will they use the yucca site for then?
To guard and maintain a giant hole in the ground to throw $$$ into?
Sounds like a good analogy for Obombya's plan for AfPak & Iraq...
Or a symbol of Owebama's fiscal policy with the Bankster bailouts...
I'm sure it would work as a high security detention center. I wouldn't be surprised to find that is already underway.
Ah. Don'tcha love truly massive waste!? I bought a juicer once for two hundred dollars and then didn't use it, so I understand.
"The waste disposal problem has become worse since the federal government scrapped plans to open Yucca Mountain. Instead, radioactive fuel rods are now stored in large concrete and steel canisters on the grounds of nuclear plants around the country."
Another half-truth from corporate controlled corporate media. Here is the rest of the story:
Current methods for storing spent nuclear fuel:
When spent fuel is first removed from a reactor, it is placed in a special pool of water contained in a steel-lined concrete basin. The water cools the spent fuel and protects workers and the public from radiation. After it has cooled considerably, SOME (emphasis mine, some but not ALL?) commercial power plants and government facilities move the fuel to dry-storage containers made of steel and/or concrete to shield radiation. The containers are either placed upright on concrete pads, or stored horizontally in metal canisters in concrete bunkers.
See complete story at:
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0338.shtml
These "special pools" of HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE water, made so by the storage of these "spent" fuel rods, are often "protected" by flimsy metal buildings such as you've seen around the country housing agricultural equipment, stores, shopping malls, etc. A tornado or a strong hurricane would rip them to shreds and spew highly radioactive "spent" fuel and radioactive water over an area potentially of hundreds of square miles. So, yes, let's close Yucca mountain after borrowing $13.5 billion dollars to be repaid with interest by taxpayers in order to build it. Nice. Real nice.
Fools are in charge.
The rods are deeply submerged under water in the pools, which are effectivey deep water-filled concrete trenches. No substantial building over them is required becasue the water and below-ground pool walls are the containment. No known tornado could remove very much water, much less blow the very dense and heavy fuel assemblies out.
The amount of radionucleide contanimants in the water is very small.
Similarly, the fuel is safe with regard to a hijacked plane attack. Hitting water at high speed is just like hitting hard rock.
But yes, we will still need a long term repository someday and Yucca Mtn. was the best site after an incredibly exhaustive amount of research and testing.
Tornadoes have ripped foot and a half thick concrete pavement out of the ground. Tornadoes have been known to hurl automobiles and even tractor trailers hundreds of yards. I don't know how dense and heavy a fuel assembly is. Does it weigh more than a fully loaded tractor trailer? Do you live near a nuclear plant? Would you live near one? Have you ever seen a waterspout? Do you really believe a tornado could not suck all of the water out of a storage pool? Would you like to have that water showered upon your home?
Maybe 28 years ago, my boss (a geologist) took a fat government research contract. The government wanted to know which one of three sites was best for burying nuclear waste.
The first site was Deaf Smith County, Texas. No way! That's a prime agricultural area.
The second site was in Hanford, Washington. Worse! That's smack in the floodplain of the Columbia River. You'd have to be crazy to put nuclear waste there.
The third site was Yucca Mountain. Well, the first two sites were plumb crazy, so Yucca Mountain just has to win by default, whatever the place's faults (cheap pun not really intended, just hard to avoid language) might be. Anyways, that decision took my boss about two minutes to explain.
Now we see the final exclusion of Yucca Mountain. No, it wasn't that safe a site. Nowhere is safe. Nuclear waste can never be kept safe for 100,000 years on this planet's surface. Shooting nuclear waste up into space currently has perhaps a 1% launch failure rate, so that won't exactly work either.
I notice that the AEC is permanently storing much of its nuclear waste at Hanford, Washington, in the floodplain of the Columbia River. When you're smart and prestigious and take a government contract, remember that it's nothing to do with you, the government just doesn't care what you think, not one whit, and will do the exact opposite.
Blackberrys growing by the Columbia below Hanford are radioactive.
Radioactive groundwater 'plumes' are being swept into the Columbia and on to Portland.
But the nuclear power industry makes ever so many DU weapons to use on civilians.
The nuclear power industry has nothing to do with DU weapons.
Where do you think the DU comes from? Santa?
Walk in peace.
You don't seem to too familiar with the science of Geology, or what was really entailed in the search for a repository aren't you?
If Obama practices realpolitik, he now has an enormous chit that Harry Reid now owes him. In an ideal world, he should use it to make sure that the pending Health care bill that the Senate is currently gutting has at least a public option, if not Single Payer. Unfortunately, that is not the case at the present time.
So where is the radioactive waste going?
Joe
It can sit at the plant sites for 100 years or so if necessary - not a bad thing, because sitting in small quantities at the surface, any leaks of radioactive materials can be easily can be detected and fixed. But eventually, it has to go to a permanent site where regular monitoring can be minimal, because the electric utilities will go out of business, won't have the resources to manage the waste, or might want to use the plant site for something else.
Something to keep in mind is that the volume of all the high-level spent fuel waste from commercial electric power is very small - all of it geneated so far could fit on a single US-football field (not counting the end zones) about 8 feet deep.
Yucca mountain was a good site. Eventually the project will be rejuvenated.
I am always confused at the objections over long-term nuclear waste storage. They all seem to be based on an assumption that humans are destined to regress to some kind of illiterate stone-age state with all historical records destroyed - so humans will no longer be able to monitor and manage the waste. And, if that is the the case, and even if radioactive materials are released, the elevated cancer rates the area around the waste facility will be insignificant compared to the return of all the things that killed primitive humans before that were 30 years old.
Of course, if humans go extinct altogether, the radioactivity will have insignificant impact on the short-life-span wildlife near the site on what after all is just a tiny part of the earth.
We have been very lucky to date . The perils of transporting the radioactive material on U.S. highways ahd train rails with all the accidents increases the chance of danger for more Americans. I thought I read where a foreign country was transporting this radioactive waste to the Yucca facility. I don't approve of toxic waste being shipped or transported to underveloped countries but isn't that what usually happens . This energy bill might save us from being one step closer to becoming a third world nation. Sometimes I wonder if we would be told if an accident happened and radioactive waste escaped. I believe every community near the nuclear plants should have their own geiger counter to check the air quality routinely.
"The Senate also adopted an amendment by California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to allow for water transfers to help farmers in California's Central Valley suffering from severe drought conditions."
Those farmers aren't permaculturists. So it's certainly not wise to dole out public resources to them. Only permaculturists can make efficient use of public funds. The resource-intensive farming methods deserve no resources because they are unsustainable. They help drive the global warming that's causing their own drought. They're wiping out their own yields with the ozone they create. Besides, who wants their monoculture product anyway? If Feinstein and Boxers' corporate farmers had their way, 6 billion people would have only one genetically cloned variety of walnut, almond, and pistachio, etc. Feinstein and Boxer are working feverishly to wipe out diversity in the world's food supply, doing everything they can to help their monopolists corner world food markets. They are wiping out thousands-years old farming traditions in Mexico and elsewhere with their godzilla agriculture.