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Nuclear Waste Piles Up With No Disposal Plan
WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of tons of potentially lethal radioactive waste have been piling up across the nation for more than a generation, but the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently.
"Everybody realizes that the collapse of the Yucca Mountain program means many years of on-site storage with no end in sight. Even the people who want nuclear power don't want waste in their backyards," said nuclear expert Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. (adapted photo from Flickr user Robin Wood e.V.)
After axing a multibillion-dollar plan to bury the
waste beneath Yucca Mountain, Nev., President
Barack Obama has asked an expert panel to
recommend alternatives.
But the panel's report isn't due until January 2012. And the group's recommendations aren't binding on the White House or Congress.
In short, the country's political leaders are no closer to a safe, permanent disposal plan for nuclear waste than they were a generation ago, when nuclear power became widespread and the Cold War was in full swing.
The nation's accumulated 70,000 tons of extremely radioactive, "high level" waste — uranium and plutonium — has sat in "temporary" storage in 35 states since at least the 1950s.
"The country at large is beset by a whole host of problems, so it's not surprising that they aren't paying attention to this," said nuclear expert Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "Everybody realizes that the collapse of the Yucca Mountain program means many years of on-site storage with no end in sight. Even the people who want nuclear power don't want waste in their backyards."
The waste will continue to pile up as the nation's 104 nuclear power plants win license renewals from federal regulators. It's expected to reach 153,000 tons by 2055, according to a November report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative agency.
Commercial nuclear waste, which is solid, is stored in deep pools of water at many power plants. Some of it also is stored in huge steel-and-concrete containers called dry casks, which cost about $1 million apiece, according to Rod McCullum, a waste expert at the power industry's Nuclear Energy Institute.
Jim Riccio, a nuclear energy analyst at the environmental group Greenpeace, said the Obama administration should tell the industry to move more of the fuel rods from pools, where they're more vulnerable to terrorist attack, to dry casks.
"Dry casks are not perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better," he said.
In addition to the commercial waste, about 91 million gallons of high-level liquid waste is stored at South Carolina's Savannah River Site, Washington state's Hanford Site and the Idaho National Laboratory. That waste comes from making fuel for nuclear weapons during the Cold War era.
The defense waste is slowly being converted into glass rods through a process called vitrification to allow for more efficient storage and transport.
David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said current on-site storage methods are safe and will contain the radiation for the foreseeable future.
So federal lawmakers feel they can put off making tough political decisions about what to do with the nuclear waste, said John Gervers, a nuclear-waste consultant in New Mexico.
"It's going to continue to pile up," he said. "Ultimately, there has to be someplace (where) all that waste has to go. In my opinion, a permanent repository is the way to go."
The White House says even if the expert panel recommends a permanent "geologic" resting place for the waste, such a repository won't be built at Yucca Mountain, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the home state of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
A 1982 law set a 1998 deadline for building a permanent disposal site, but it didn't happen.
It wasn't until 2002 that Congress, acting on President George W. Bush's recommendation, fixed up Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $10 billion for exploratory work at the site, including building a deep tunnel.
Soon after becoming president, Obama announced he would cancel the Yucca Mountain project — a decision that South Carolina, Washington and some other local governments are fighting in federal court. Those state and local governments have teamed up with the nuclear industry to argue before the NRC that the administration can't terminate work on the project, only Congress can.
The nuclear energy industry is pushing for an interim storage facility where spent fuel rods could b e stored while a geologic repository is built.
The government also should allow the industry to recycle the used fuel rods to extract all possible use from them, said McCullum at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Though legal in France, such "reprocessing" has been banned in the U.S. since 1977. President Jimmy Carter outlawed the practice that year, citing the potential for countries to use the plutonium byproduct to make atomic weapons.
MORE ONLINE:www.gao.gov/new.items/d1048.pdf, to access the Government Accountability Office's "Nuclear Waste Management" report, issued in November 2009.
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Show AllI was just at the tom bearden website (the "energy from the vacuum/free energy generation" guy). In his list of contents is an article on how to neutralize nuclear waste in 9.1 minutes.
This article provides additional evidence that the real definition of a nuclear power plant is: the most expensive means ever devised to boil water.
however it could have deleted our interest in the middle east 30 years ago with proper management,the cost seems minuscule in that light.
& we could then fight over South African uranium deposits.
Why wouldn't "proper management" include having a way to dispose of waste *before* creating it?
As of 2010, "Proper management" of nuclear energy remains a fiction. Governmental systems suffer from governmental bureaucracy. Private, government-subsidized systems, like that in the US, are worse, since they regularly ignore whatever damages they will not personally have to underwrite. Differences in perceived self-interest between construction workers and management lead to extensive monkeywrenching when the workers realize they will lose their homes if the plant goes up on schedule. So the social structures intrinsic to such a plant constitute severe mismanagement.
Furthermore, the technology leaks, whoever manages it. The primary fluid goes by the core. The secondary fluid goes through the primary fluid in metal tubes so that the heat may be conducted so that the secondary fluid may "flash" to 100% steam before striking the steam generator blades.
The metal in the tubes rusts rusts rusts rusts rusts.
Should that be any surprise? Engineers have worked with dozens of water treatments and distillations, and classified more than two dozen types of resulting rust, but they all do essentially the same thing: they create leaks.
All this is within a few years, but the half-life of some of the toxic substances stretches for many times the entirety of human history.
And after the half-life, half is left.
And again, tom bearden seems to be pointing to a POWERFUL alternative to nukes, on his website. Rather than boil water with nukes to spin the rotor in the stator to produce electricity, he's talking about accessing a permanent electromagnetic "wind" from the "vacuum" to flow across windings to produce electricity. I'm just a bluecollar electrician. Maybe someone with science & engineering cred can explain this better.
A permanent repository for high level waste needs to be found as the DOE is obligated to do, and the problems are almost all political, not technical.
But to get an idea of how small the volume that is "piling up" is, here is all the waste, generated by the single-unit Maine Yankee power plant over 24 years of operation:
http://www.maineyankee.com/images/upload/1-5-06isfsi1.jpg
And most of that volume is the thick-walled casks themselves, not the waste.
The rest of the former plant site now looks like this:
http://www.maineyankee.com/images/upload/10-1-05site2.JPG
"...the problems are almost all political, not technical."
Yes, nobody wants that junk in their back yard.
I would rather live on Yucca Mountain or next to the Maine Yankee site, than in my current home downstream from a huge, practically unregulated, shale-gas fracking field to the southeast, and downwind of a coal-burning power power plant to the northwest, any day. People seem to often be only mildly, or not at all, concerned those things in their backyard, yet get filled with dread, fear and loathing about nuclear waste stored under far stricter regulatons, a half-continent away.
Popular fear of nuclear power is based on the misconception that there is something extrordinarily more hazardous and persistent about radionucleides than many toxic and hazardous chemical pollutants (some with far longer half-lives) already in the air and water.
Nuke shills always take the position that the only two energy choices are dirty coal and nuclear.
I take constant actions against the fast tracking of dirty coal plants, against mountain removal mining, against pollution of all kinds, and in favor of strengthening environmental laws.
There are other possibilities than these two, and the rest of the world is leaving us in the dust.
Nuke energy is another disaster too.
You should not have to live near fracking, nor should we be building nuke energy plants.
Solar, wind and hydro--what are we waiting for?
"In short, the country's political leaders are no closer to a safe, permanent disposal plan for nuclear waste than they were a generation ago, when nuclear power became widespread and the Cold War was in full swing."
This is the crux of the nuclear waste/weapons issue: there simply is no way to safely and permanently dispose of this stuff PERIOD. This "stuff" can have a half-life of tens of thousands of years (plutonium), but even relatively short-lived human-made radioactive waste such as depleted uranium (DU) has been proven to be dangerous for humans and other living things in the numerous war zones where the US military rains it down upon tens of thousands of people -- including US troops.
Irony is not dead. Using the last of the oil to provide power to turn highly hazardous nuclear waste into a little bit less hazardous nuclear waste.
Future generations are going to have a field day with this. If they are still alive.
nuclear power must be produced and controlled and the profit gained by large corporations who enright their megarich stockholders
so it is far more attractive than solar and other means which can be harnassed by regular people
so its all about controlling the profits
NUCLEAR ENERGY - THE MOTHER OF ALL BIG LIES
THE BIG LIE NO.5: SAFE & PERMANENT STORAGE IS POSSIBLE
"... Despite the absence of a long term storage strategy, the industry is re-licensing existing reactors as they approach assigned closure dates. In the absence of a long-term storage solution this policy is effectively turning reactor sites, many located in populous areas, into de facto long term storage facilities. ... Even if Yucca Mountain did open, its storage capacity is now already being reached with existing waste production.
“Interim Storage” Proposal Troubling
In response to perpetual uncertainty, in the FY 2007 Energy & Water Appropriations bill Congress is considering what is being termed “interim storage.” This hastily considered plan would rush the transport of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel onto roads, rails, and waterways in order to store these highly radioactive wastes at “interim” surface storage sites.
Among the most troubling provisions of this plan is that it would give the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) authority to site a waste dump within a state over the objections of the state and local governments. Thus, in the absence of a viable plan for moving the waste somewhere else, “interim” storage sites would become long-term “overflow parking” for high-level radioactive wastes with nowhere else to go.
Historically, as well presently, the nuclear industry and the federal government consistently promote waste storage options which unnecessarily compromise public health and security. In fact, the most widely supported method for radioactive waste management is hardened onsite storage that has security and accountability measures built into the design. However, rather than address these complex safety and security issues, the nuclear industry continues to masquerade as if the waste problem were a non-issue, with a silver-bullet solution waiting.
The claim is often made that radioactive waste still contains 95% of its useable content and can be “recycled” as fuel for new, proliferation-proof reactors. This reality would, by extension, nullify a need for long-term storage and the associated quagmire of the Yucca Mountain site. However, these claims are being made outside the bounds of historical experience with reprocessing or the attendant ec onomic considerations, technical barriers and geo-political realities.
This notion of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is not a new one. The separation of plutonium and uranium from spent fuel was launched in the 1970’s as part of a plan to make breederreactors the dominant technology by 2000. However, this plan never materialized due toexorbitant costs, unmanageable pollution and the proliferation of weapons useable nuclear materials as well as the unfulfilled promise of waste eradication.
Falling far short of the promised boom, only a handful of reprocessing facilities were ever built and even fewer have been able to remain operational.
The only private commercial reprocessing facility to operate in the U.S, West Valley, was such an environmental and fiscal disaster that it was successful in reprocessing only one year’s worth of fuel in six years of operation, and the estimated environmental clean up is estimated to eventually cost at least $5.2 billion.
Furthermore, the three federal reprocessing facilities which were used to separate plutonium for the U.S. weapons program, the Hanford Reservation in Washington State, Idaho National Laboratories and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, are often characterized as among THE MOST TOXIC LOCALES ON THE PLANET.
Just as no country has been able to engineer a solution for radioactive waste, no country has been able to safely or economically reprocess waste and achieve a closed-loop fuel cycle. In fact, Japan’s Rokkasho reprocessing plant took twelve years to build and cost three times more than estimated to build.
A study commissioned by the French government found that reprocessing is indubitably uneconomical, having cost around $25 billion in excess of a typical once-through cycle, and cannot make a even a meager contribution to the reduction of long-lived radionuclides in waste.[A FRENCH/GERMAN TV DOCUMENTARY recently exposed that thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste have been transported clandestingly by the nuclear industry to RUSSIA, where the containers are simply STORED IN THE OPEN AIR! (the number is so large, it can be detected with GOOGLE EARTH!)while pretending, that they are "recycling" the waste (France operates the only reprocessing plant on the European continent in La Hague, Normandy]
Despite these problems, nuclear proponents still describe reprocessing as “recycling,” creating the false impression that 100% of wastes will be turned into reusable fuel, thereby eliminating the storage problem. Similarly, they have claimed that reprocessing will reduce the volume and radioactivity of resultant waste to such a degree as to render the legal capacity proposed for disposal at Yucca Mountain sufficient to solve the waste emergency currently facing the U.S. In actuality, waste storage capacity is determined by heat radiated rather than by volume, rendering this claim totally insubstantial.
However, despite this propaganda, the multiple waste streams involved in closed-loop fuel systems results in total waste volume, including vitrified and intermediate level wastes, in considerably larger amounts than that of the original spent fuel, and still requires long term storage.
REPROCESSING AND PROLIFERATION
Due to the high volume of fuel being handled at reprocessing facilities, it is virtually impossible to account for total plutonium output to within even tens or hundreds of kilograms, making it feasible for stolen plutonium to go undetected for years.
This is of concern because a simple nuclear device only requires six kilograms of plutonium, making this uncertainty in stockpile accounting of utmost concern ...
THE BIG LIE NO. 6: CONTRIBUTION TO ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
THE BIG LIE NO. 7: NO ELEVATED CANCER RISK
FOR MORE SEE:
http://alternativeenergy.procon.org/sourcefiles/falsepromises.pdf
http://www.greenaudit.org/Papers.htm (health risks exposed)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXgmGLXuG6U
..."the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently"
This article proves one more time how ignorant journalists are these days ..
YOU CANNOT "GET RID" OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE, let alone "PERMANENTLY"
NO MATERIAL CAN WITHSTAND THE NEGATIVE IMPACT OF HIGH RADIOACTIVITY FOR AGES ...
(irradiation changes the microstructures of materials: mechanical properties (i.e. yield strength in steel), dimensional stability can no longer be relied on
For more on the subject, google for:"irradiation creep", "wall-thinning", "stress-corrosion","corrosion-fatigue", etc. discover that "some things are just not supposed to occur" (quote from a Reactor Materials Workshop) and that "complex interactions on the nanoscale are not fully understood"
"It appears that after 30 yrs of much detailed and in-depth research, the sum of all radiation effects does not add up entirely to the full behaviour of a material exposed to continous irradiation at elevated temperatures."
And yet the sorcerer's apprentices are still at work ... already planning for "Generation IV" reactors in the US (the next level of madness)..
"David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said current on-site storage methods are safe and will contain the radiation for the foreseeable future".
The production rules of "modern" journalism must lead to "truth-avoiding journalism": reporting what one party said and then "balancing" it by repeating what the other said, is simply BS ...
It is the job of the press to find out who is telling the truth and who is not ... instead they report everything as a kind of "opinion" and the reader can then choose which opinion he prefers ... but with such crucial and life-endangering issues we need a reliable basis for a value judgement ...
In earlier days (after "Atoms for Peace" was launched) The Walt Disney company published a children’s book, “Uranium and other Miracle Metals, “ in which nuclear-powered cars, planes, and space shuttles would transport Americans on the highways, in the air and outer space ...
Today, Disney has been replaced by cunning PR-firms and a docile media but the "perception management" goes on ...
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Yeah, come on all of you big tough dupes
The MIC needs mercenary troops
They carved themselves a costly jam
Way down yonder in IrafPakStan
So drop your joystick and pick up a gun
It's blood-for-oil profits fun.
And it's one, two, three
What're we deregulating for?
Failed banks, oil spills, nuke accidents?
Shitty food, cars, fracking and gas blow-outs?
And it's five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates.
There's plenty of time to wonder why
When your ass is long-term unemployed.
Well, come on general, though you're an ass
Your big chance has come at last.
The MIC will butter your bread
The only good haji is the one who's dead
You know that oil can only be controlled
When we hold countries at the end of a gun.
And it's one, two, three,
Prog bitches on their ass
Too farted out to organize
Got to check their dividends;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Scared or old or spoiled as shit
Pointless toothless gutless gits.
Huh!
Well, come on Wall Street, don't move slow,
It's investment bank a-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made:
Endless War using market laundered tax money!
Just pray that if they're mer-cen-ar-ies
They don't start hitting pols in trade.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we piling up ?
Nuclear waste, dead fish & national debt,
Next stop is Karachi, Sindh.
And it's five, six, seven,
Few defense cuts, Robert Gates.
There'll be plenty of time to wonder why,
Over-extended empires die.
Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to IrafPakStan.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first Tea Bagger Party hag
To have your son or daughter home in a bag.
And it's one, two, three
What are we pissing away?
Don't care; gotta check my mutual fund
Next stop is Sanaa or Tehran.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
There'll be plenty of time to wonder why,
Over-extended empires die.
Washington, clueless and gropping in the dark, as usual.
Pour it on the gays
Light water reactors all leak through the metal tubing, which rusts within a few years even when not damaged in installation.
Without imputing bad motives to anyone in particular, neither NRC nor industry assurances of safety can be trusted. All of these institutions are like black holes of information, withholding unfavorable information from employees as well as the general public.
If other types of plant are superior to the obviously flawed and dangerous light water plants, why does the industry not insist or at least suggest another type of plant?
(This is not a rhetorical question, BTW.)
Everyone who is pro-nuclear power plants should have at least one barrel stored in their back yard!
Better yet, in their basement if they have one. After all those casks are extremely safe, and would provide an excellent heat source in cold weather.
Category 3, HURRICANE KARL, right now, is hitting Vera Cruz, Mexico, point blank.
The Laguna Verde nuclear plant is located right there, center of target. Okay...
From: http://www.allbusiness.com/operations/facilities/832399-1.html
"Another complaint by Greenpeace is that the location of Laguna Verde puts it at the mercy of the annual hurricanes that pass through the region. But the CFE believes that the risk of hurricanes doing any damage is minimal, despite the fact that in 1995 Hurricane Roxanne lifted the roof off the storage warehouse, leaving thousands of barrels of toxic nuclear waste exposed."
Of course, in the news, there is NO MENTION of the Laguna Verde Nuclear Plant.
And so it goes, Mr. Murphy, and so it goes.
I am no expert but it seems to me that, unless the entire nuclear waste is shot into outer space, there is no "safe" place on the entire Earth to dispose of it. It remains radio-active for thousands of years. We'll manage yet to kill ourselves...one way or the other. Homo Sapiens turning into Homo Stupidus,ending up Homo Exctinctus. Smart, eh?
Obviously, putting it in space, (not in orbit, fire it into the sun) would be the best solution, but knowing the reliability of our space program, would you want hundreds of rockets carrying tons of radioactive waste lifting through our atmosphere?
Another way of safely ridding ourselves of not only nuclear waste, but most of our other toxic byproducts, is to use the subduction zones. The various continental plates are slowly moving. Some ride over others, which are pressed down into the heart of the planet (called subduction) If we were to drill into the subduction zones near the boundary and pump the waste down into them, they would gradually carry the nuclear waste into the heart of the planet. The heat down there would effectively melt and disperse them, to appear perhaps millions of years from now as new deposits, to be mined and cause trouble for the next civilization dumb enough to use it.
There would be no place to rob, no storage area for someone to stumble upon in the future, no accumulating stew of radiation in concrete Colonel Sanders cartons.
There have been science fiction stories that have used this technology. Science fiction has often become science fact. In my opinion, this should be looked into as a permanent solution for the disposal of nuclear and toxic wastes.
Remember, "civilized" man has only been around for some seven to ten thousand years. We are talking about permanent, safe storage for a few hundred years, of stuff that will continue to exist for, in the case of DU, half life 4.5 billion years. If we put this garbage into the heart of the planet, the heat and pressure will take care of it.
Why don't we just dump it all on Muslim babies? So long as we ARE going to be killing babies, we might as well do it on the cheap.
Sadly there is truth in your joke. It's called depleted uranium.
We provide it to Iraqi and Afghani communities free of charge in the form of 30mm shells fired at the rate of 3,900 rounds per minute from a Gatling-type cannon which is carried by an ugly Army aircraft nicknamed the "Hog".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#Weapon_systems
I guess people forgot about ocean dumping of nuclear waste. It hasn't been that long and I think Russia is still doing it in the sea of Japan.