all aboard! next stop, yucca mt.

July 9, 2002 6:09 PM

all aboard! next stop, yucca mt. the proposed yucca mt nuclear waste storage site has been approved by the senate. while only a handful of senators believe "we are being forced to decide this issue prematurely," and others are concerned with "thousands of waste shipments crossing 43 states" - most worry only about the risk of the next proposed dump site being in their state if yucca mt falls through. apparently the buildup of toxic waste at the power plants is getting pretty bad - "I believe it is a safe repository," said Lott. If the country does not find a central place for the waste, he said, "we're going to have to shut down" the nuclear industry. is shutting down the industry a bad thing? if the waste produced by these methods is so deadly and destructive... why aren't we questioning the risk/reward factor of nuclear power plants, instead of just worrying about where to stash the glowing green ooze? they've spent 4.5 BILLION dollars just researching the yucca mt site... could that money have been spent on developing clean power generation and maybe even helped fund its deployment?
posted by ggggarret (15 comments total)

Um. Maybe nuclear power is clean power generation? You get little waste for a lot of power. Even if the whole nuclear power industry was shut down today (which would cost a whole lot to dismantle), the nuclear waste that is just sitting in open pools would have to go somewhere.

My question is where do other countries (like France) dispose of their waste? A google search revealed they are in the same position we are in.
posted by geoff. at 6:15 PM on July 9, 2002

Maybe nuclear power is clean power generation? You get little waste for a lot of power.

It's true that the mass of the waste produced in nuclear power generation is less than that of the waste produced by most other modes of power generation. Nuclear plants do not, after all, dump tons of CO2 and particulates into the atmosphere. The trouble is, the waste produced by nuclear plants is, pound for pound, much more dangerous than that produced by other modes of power generation. I'd rather deal with a ton of carbon dioxide than a microgram of plutonium.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:24 PM on July 9, 2002

I think that on a year-of-life-per-kilowatt-hour, nuclear power comes out way ahead of anything else that has the potential to be useful in the quantities needed. And it's not like the Russians weren't able to cause massive ecological catastrophes with other means of power generation; Chornobyl was just a lot harder for them to cover up.
posted by jaek at 6:47 PM on July 9, 2002

prematurely

Well, yes, prematurely. As early as last month there was a sizeable earthquake centered in Yucca Mountain. Three years ago, one was so powerful it was felt in Las Vegas.

What concerns me isn't the transportation, but the rampant naievety by the scientific community that 10 years plus worth of research deems a spot "safe" for the next 10,000 years.

Or maybe transportation should concern me, since it's slated to come within a quarter mile of my apartment.

Or perhaps it's the fact that, in the next 25 years, as shipments of waste are being hauled across the nation, our nuclear power plants will be creating just as much waste as we're trying to dispose of.

I mean, if those castes are so safe and can withstand almost anything, can't we just shoot it into the sun?
posted by Psionic_Tim at 7:01 PM on July 9, 2002

Some senators worried that waste shipments might become terrorist targets or lead to radiation releases in a severe accident. They criticized the Energy Department for not clarifying how the wastes would get to Nevada and what routes it would take


This is a great resource for figuring out how far from your home the route for moving the nuclear waste to Yucca is going to be.
posted by justlooking at 7:05 PM on July 9, 2002

can't we just shoot it into the sun?

Well...

It currently costs approximately $10,000 to put a pound of anything into orbit, with projects attempting to reduce this to $100 per pound within 25 years¹.

Yucca mountain is supposed to hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste¹.

At current prices, it would cost $1.54 trillion to launch that into the sun. In 25 years, it might be possible to do so for $15 billion. So in 25 years, it might be possible to launch it all into the sun at a price similar to the cost of the entire Yucca Mountain project. Of course, we have to do something with it in the meantime.

Then there's the fact that putting radioactive waste on top of a massive controlled explosion, the sort which has been known to become rather catastrophically uncontrolled in the past... well, it freaks some people out.

In short, nuclear waste isn't leaving the planet any time soon, so we have to find some place to keep it around here. A group of scientists decided that Yucca Mountain was a good place. Are there any real alternatives?

As geoff says, we already have a lot of waste (40,000 tons), so something must be done regardless of whether nuclear power continues to be used or not. Researching alternative power sources is good, but it cannot be done in place of researching nuclear waste disposal.
posted by whatnotever at 7:59 PM on July 9, 2002

"DOE is unlikely to achieve its goal of opening a repository at Yucca Mountain at 2010 [pdf]." And remember that it takes about 5 years of on-site wet storage before nuclear waste cools down enough to be transported or stored in dry casks. In other words -- and despite the overblown rhetoric of pro-Yucca folks -- on-site storage in neighborhoods with nuke plants will continue for as long as we have nuclear power.

And yes, I think on-site dry cask storage, paid for by the nuclear power companies, is a better solution than the more politically expedient Yucca Mountain. Until we phase out nuclear power altogether. Is there a more socialist industry in the U.S.? I can't think of another one whose answer to the question, "What are you doing with your garbage?" is, "The government promised us they'd take care of it."
posted by mediareport at 9:04 PM on July 9, 2002

The nuclear waste should be distributed in various environmentally challenged areas, e.g. spots along the California coast facing development pressures. The stuff is only locally dangerous, and will put an end to condominium building once and for all.
posted by quercus at 9:09 PM on July 9, 2002

Um, "DOE is unlikely to achieve its goal of opening a repository at Yucca Mountain by 2010."
posted by mediareport at 9:10 PM on July 9, 2002

Um, "DOE is unlikely to achieve its goal of opening a repository at Yucca Mountain by 2010."

Either way, does that mean that it's unlikely to achieve the goal of opening a respository at all, or simply unlikely to do it by 2010?
posted by krisjohn at 9:29 PM on July 9, 2002

oh, to live on
Yucca Mountain
with its wastelands and its noxious perfumes
You can't be twenty
on Yucca Mountain...

Ok; I'll stop.
posted by Perigee at 9:58 AM on July 10, 2002

The funny thing is that the emission standards for Yucca mountain are well below the natural background radiation in a building using marble or granite and yet we obsess about them while ignoring things like the radiation released into the environment by burning coal in the meantime.

Nuclear is the cleanest major power source we have at the moment. Things like solar are useful but too weak to eliminate the need for major power sources (on earth, anyway - I'd love to move industry into orbit where this isn't the case) and hydropower is hardly an environmental neutral even if you have enough sites for it.
posted by adamsc at 11:33 AM on July 10, 2002

does that mean that it's unlikely to achieve the goal of opening a respository at all, or simply unlikely to do it by 2010?

Did you read the link? It's an easy skim, really. One key element is the first full paragraph on page 10, which points out that the DOE is financially liable for damages accruing since 1998 for not living up to its past promise to take out the nuke industry's trash (paid for by you, of course). But to partly answer your question, the testimony claims it's unlikely the DOE will even submit a license application before 2006, which means that (using their own, very optimistic 7-year time frame from application to initial operation) Yucca won't open until 2013 at the earliest. If ever.

Can you say "politically expedient move that puts off the tough decisions until the current crop of politicians is gone"? I knew you could.

Nuclear is the cleanest major power source we have at the moment.

Utter nonsense straight out of the industry's most aggressive spin. How can you ignore the fact that we still have no known way to safely store nuclear waste over the long haul? The real point here is that if we invested even half the money into R&D for alternative energy sources that we've invested in nuclear over the past 50 years, it's a good bet we wouldn't need nuclear power at all.
posted by mediareport at 12:14 PM on July 10, 2002

Also, a lot of the claims to the cleanliness of nuclear power focus on the power plants themselves while ignoring the massive piles of uranium mine tailings or the millions of gallons of soluble liquid waste produced by refineries. It not a big suprise that the worst radition cleanup sites are processing plants.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:10 AM on July 11, 2002

The real point here is that if we invested even half the money into R&D for alternative energy sources that we've invested in nuclear over the past 50 years, it's a good bet we wouldn't need nuclear power at all.

Utter nonsense straight out of the alternative power industry's most aggressive spin.

Nobody's preventing basic research, lots of people with money claim they want it . . . what's stopping it? If there was a viable alternative power source which could support an industrial society, we'd be using it. Solar, hydropower, wind - they all assauge middle-class guilt while doing very little simply because they can't produce enough power.

People have the choice of reverting to a pre-industrial society (which would require most of them to die) or accepting some sort of pollution. I'd prefer to get rid of a great deal of known-harmful pollution in exchange for a small amount of possible long-term risk, particularly since the odds of being able to handle that risk improve with time.
posted by adamsc at 1:04 AM on July 12, 2002