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This is ridiculous. NIMBYism at its worse, even when the BY in NIMBY is a desert where nobody lives. I think nuclear power is one of the few things Conservatives and Liberals can agree on, so why do we have to have stupid things like this come up and block it?
Did it have one under other presidents before him?
Funny, Germany has had exactly the same mess for decades with its storage location in the state of Lower Saxony, whose people and politicians ask themselves why they would get the radioactive crap of the entire nation
This is ridiculous. NIMBYism at its worse, even when the BY in NIMBY is a desert where nobody lives. I think nuclear power is one of the few things Conservatives and Liberals can agree on, so why do we have to have stupid things like this come up and block it?
This is one of the few things Reid and Obama have gotten right. Yucca Mountain is opposed by the majority of Nevadans.
As far as NIMBYism goes it seems to me those states that produce the bulk of the nuclear waste should look toward a means of safely storing it in their own back yards rather than insisting we store it in ours.
How do countries like France which produces the overwhelming majority of its power from nuclear deal with waste? It isn't like they have a desert location to stow it..
How do countries like France which produces the overwhelming majority of its power from nuclear deal with waste? It isn't like they have a desert location to stow it..
Some countries, including France and Germany, send some of their radioactive waste to Siberia where it rots in containers placed on the ground - under the open sky
Or reprocess the waste! Goodness sake. It's recyclable!
It's more complex than that.
There are many different types and levels of nuclear waste. The spent fuel, contaminated materials in the reactor itself, intermediate level waste, and low level waste.
Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 17 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life two million years) and Pu-239 (half life 24,000 years). Nuclear waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.
There have been proposals for reactors that consume nuclear waste and transmute it to other, less-harmful nuclear waste. In particular, the Integral Fast Reactor was a proposed nuclear reactor with a nuclear fuel cycle that produced no transuranic waste and in fact, could consume transuranic waste. It proceeded as far as large-scale tests, but was then canceled by the US Government. Another approach, considered safer but requiring more development, is to dedicate subcritical reactors transmutation of the left-over transuranic elements. An isotope that is found in nuclear waste and that represents a concern in terms of proliferation is Pu-239. The estimated world total of plutonium in the year 2000 was of 1,645 MT, of which 210 MT had been separated by reprocessing. The large stock of plutonium is a result of its production inside uranium-fueled reactors and of the reprocessing of weapons-grade plutonium during the weapons program. An option for getting rid of this plutonium is to use it as a fuel in a traditional Light Water Reactor (LWR). Several fuel types with differing plutonium destruction efficiencies are under study. Transmutation was banned in the US in April 1977 by President Carter due to the danger of plutonium proliferation
...
Radioactive waste typically comprises a number of radioisotopes: unstable configurations of elements that decay, emitting ionizing radiation which can be harmful to humans and the environment. Those isotopes emit different types and levels of radiation, which last for different periods of time. Non-ionizing emissions like neutrons, aren't good. Neutron capture often results in neutron activation, inducing radioactivity from destabilized nuclei.
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This is ridiculous. NIMBYism at its worse, even when the BY in NIMBY is a desert where nobody lives. I think nuclear power is one of the few things Conservatives and Liberals can agree on, so why do we have to have stupid things like this come up and block it?
