[Approx. Read Time: 3 minutes] The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada was to be the permanent long-term storage site for spent fuel and other nuclear waste. It was scheduled to be completed over 12 years ago. Decades of development and $20B later, project canceled.
Do not mis-conclude that nuclear power shouldn’t be used because there is no way to store the radioactive waste. Radioactive waste will stay radioactive for centuries and there is no way to make it un-radioactive. It can however be transported and stored safely inside shielded containers so that no radioactivity escapes to the air, soil or water. The proposed containers were designed with multiple layers of safety so that multiple different parts would have to fail at the same time for radioactive contents to be leaked. The DOE built a prototype container, left it on train tracks and hit with a locomotive. The thick titanium container remained leak-tight. 
The proposed Yucca Mtn facility had provisions for monitoring the integrity of the containers and for detecting and containing any container leaks within the facility. Even if despite the lottery-winning odds of all the layers of safety failing simultaneously, and radioactive material got into the soil at Yucca Mtn, the ground water is hundreds of feet below the surface and radiation can only travel about 10 feet through soil. That’s why the military now does all their nuclear weapons tests by detonating nukes buried deep in the ground. The detonation implodes the ground and they can calculate from the radius of the implosion what the effective blast radius in air would be. (The blast radius underground is way, way smaller than in air.) This underground testing of nukes that dwarf the WWII nukes in power is done in the remote deserts of Nevada. Can you believe that?! The same state whose not-in-my-backyard politicians have undermined all efforts to complete the Yucca Mtn project, claiming Yucca Mountain to be not 1,000,000% safe enough has over 1,000 implosions in their desert. Two decades and $20B have been spent making Yucca Mountain’s design risk as ridiculously microscopically miniscule as possible. How much time and energy was spent ensuring each of those potentially far more dangerous nuclear weapons tests would be safe? A tiny fraction I’m sure – but still enough. No one’s getting sick from the tests.
The reason for canceling Yucca Mountain is not technical infeasibility, but politicians and uninformed constituents who think it’s a lot more dangerous than is. Uninformed fear, that’s all it is. We can allow reprocessing of spent fuel – which we need to else we run out of uranium in 30 years - however 90% of the waste planned for Yucca was other contaminated material besides spent fuel. This waste is useless. France has been reprocessing spent fuel for decades without causing nuclear proliferation or anything. France’s energy is 85% nuclear generated. The US’s energy is 20% generated by nuclear power, 75+% by fossil fuels.
Which energy source are you for? Fossil plants can produce electricity 24/7, when the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining, and fossil units can adjust power output on demand. Wind and solar can’t. A small fossil plant can produce as much energy as a zip-code’s worth of wind farms and solar power equipment. Accounting for the vast quantities of trees and wildlife habitat that has to be cleared to build a decent-sized wind or solar plant, wind and solar energy are not as green as they’re touted to be. All that land and equipment that has to be bought makes wind and solar energy a lot more expensive to generate than with a fossil plant. Most of what little wind and solar generation the US has wouldn’t exist if not for government mandates (cap and trade program). As for wind power creating jobs, 2 European counties reported the higher energy costs were destroying more 2.4 jobs for each 1 that wind farm building was creating. Solar would be the same because it is just as unconcentrated (whimpy) an energy source as wind.
But if we keep burning fossil fuels forever, we send the whole planet to eventual doom from global warming. Carbon emissions can’t be isolated from the environment but nuclear waste can be. We don’t have to cause global warming. We don’t have to bulldoze zip codes of land and pay $6,000/yr electric bills for power produced exclusively by renewables. Our lights, heat, air conditioning, TV and refrigerators can continue to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Nuclear power is affordable, carbon-free, 24/7 energy, we just need to get the government on board with reprocessing and Yucca Mountain. With reprocessing of spent fuel, there’s enough uranium to last centuries. We can either leave our current nuclear wastes at nuclear power stations across the country or send it to the remote Yucca Mountain with an over-engineered facility for isolating the waste indefinitely from the environment.
Let’s look at this as an opportunity. After all, the spent fuel is still there and still the responsibility of the government to dispose of, so eventually there must be a solution.
So - what’s the opportunity? The staff at the NRC who would have been going through their overkill review of the Yucca Mountain application, that’s what. Now they can do something useful and unexpected, like making a small-reactor review process that gets (say) Toshiba’s 4S reeactor licensed, or Hyperion, or the B&W modular. That last would be even better if they (regulator and manufacturer) cooperatively build a process for licensing the _factory_, not just a reactor. It shouldn’t be too hard, unless the NRC chooses to make it so.
Call me Pollyana if you like, but Yucca has taken and was still threatening to take way too much effort. Get something more useful happening.
Gentlemen: in case you hadn’t noticed, since the UAE-CRU email release last November and the continuing exposure of the UN IPCC AR4 containing multiple exaggerations, falsehoods, non-peer-reviewed conclusions (to wit: GlacierGate, AmazonGate, Africa-Gate, Sea-Level riseGate), the ‘global warming’ issue is on life-support.
Here’s an excellent expose’ on CO2 concentrations vs heat retention:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/#more-17114
That isn’t to say we should allow or promote pollution, but let’s at least be honest about defining ‘pollution’.
Whether or not Yucca Mtn remains a viable idea is worthy of discussion after you read this on Thorium:
http://energyfromthorium.com/ — particularly note Kirk Sorensen’s presentation to TEAC2 on March 29, 2010.
Overall, I appreciate your blog and find it very informative, in particular, the Fact Sheet(s). I hope and trust you will use sound judgment in choosing your topics and that your posts will represent thorough research.
Per Joffan’s comment:
Only very recently did the Yucca Mountain application reach the NRC for review. The Nevada politicians prevented the application from even going to people knowledgable enough to perform a reasonable review for nearly 20 years. Instead, the politicians imposed their own highly absurd requirements. When the DOE came up with a solution, the politicians would make up a new absurd requirement. They would also keep cutting funding for the project development as well.
If the NRC had been tied up this 20 years reviewing Yucca, I would have to agree. But it was politicians, not the NRC responsible for the delays. A projected $12B will have to be paid out to utilities because the government promised Yucca would be open by 1990 and their failure has a cost on utilities. It’s an easy win for utilities in civil court. Some utilities have already been paid out.
Per DocForesight’s comment:
I’ve seen some shows saying it’s mostly geological that global warming is occuring rather than a man-made phenomina. I’ve seen other stuff saying man is solely to blame. I’m sort of on the fence waiting for them to decide for sure. At any rate, we don’t want to be like China where the air is extremely polluted from coal plants. Ofcourse, we could burn natural gas instead and not have so much of those problems. And in fact natural gas has been 95% of what US utilities have built in the last 20 years. Natural gas has really been the only option on the table for new generation capacity in the US. Coal plant permit applications always get shot down by local protests, solar and wind aren’t affordable or practical. The licensing process for nuclear power following the Three Mile Island accident became prohibitively long and the NRC has only relatively recently come up with a faster licensing process (rougly 5 years for construction vs 1-2 years for construction of a coal plant). When you’re talking about a $5B loan with who knows what interest rate, you can’t afford to sit on that for a 15 year licensing process, you got to get that plant built and operating and start posting returns on that loan or you’ll lose your shirt. Even with the licensing process being only 5 years, a utility still has to meet their immediate increasing demand until that plant comes online. If demand for electricity doesn’t increase as fast as projected, they can put billions of dollars into a plant that isn’t needed. This is what happened at Bellefonte.
Smaller nuclear plants might be the way of future nuclear power. Especially if the manufacturing process was qualified so that licensing was really quick. Build a large reactor pod at a site with passive safety features, only needs refueling once every 20 years, ship that out to wherever it’s needed. American Nuclear Society president Tom Saunders sees this as nuclear power’s likely future.
Thanks for the posts, keep them coming.
DocForesight: there is no “Climategate”. It is a criminal misrepresentation of science fabricated by fossil fuel PR agencies, and the timing of the “leak” was also precisely chosen. There is absolutely no doubt among the climate scientists that global warming is happening and human fossil fuel burning is responsible. The problem is that the scientists don’t have multi-million dollar propaganda machines at their disposal, and are frequently very poor at talking to the media.
Of course you can call me a conspiracy theorist, but there is ample evidence for a systematic campaign of misinformation financed by the fossil fuel industry. Read “Climate Cover-up” for example.
Krzysztof Kosinski,
You’re absolutely right - climate scientists don’t have “multi-million dollar propaganda machines”………
“An Inconvenient Truth”
Total US Gross $24,146,161
International Gross $25,603,190
Worldwide Gross $49,749,351
Home Market Performance
US DVD Sales: $31,624,419 Weekly Breakdown
United Nations Climate Change Conference, 2009
Estimated Total Cost: $130,000,000
….they have multiple multi-million dollar propaganda machines.
That being said, allow me to rise above the mud-slinging that usually occurs between free-thinking pundits like you and me. I encourage you to consider the possibility that there are two sides to the issue of climate change. Okay, now consider that both groups of intellectuals (scientists, professors, environmentalists, engineers, etc.) are continuously conducting studies, experiments and gathering data to scientifically prove their particular side of the issue, or as it is sometimes referred to, their theory.
The ultimate goal for each side is to be able to produce conclusive, irrefutable and reproducable evidence that shall allow their theory to make the final transition to scientific fact. Until that time, neither side of this issue may lay claim to their theory as being right anymore than they can justly accuse the other of being wrong.
I have no doubt that you have no doubt that “there is absolutely no doubt among the climate scientists that global warming is happening and human fossil fuel burning is responsible.” Guess what? I respect your right to believe in your theory on that side of the issue at hand and I am quite certain that a portion of currently active climate scientists DO in fact believe that global warming exists and that it is caused by human activity. It is not productive for you to automatically accuse the other portion of being wrong because this is not logical without the sufficent proof and results mentioned above. It is simply the another opinion, the other side of the issue and another theory being scientifically tested.
To your final accusation of a “systematic campaign of misinformation (sic)by…industry”, I would have to agree with you insofar as ‘misinformation’ refers to any information related to an issue or theory as branded by opponents on the other side of said issue. It goes both ways, my friend, and free minds will determine their actions as they see fit. I believe you could easily replace ‘campaign’ with ‘free market’, but let’s leave that discussion for another time.
Best of luck in your future endeavors to find the truth you seek, Krzysztof.