I live next to a Nuclear Waste Dump

Takes 250,000 years to decay to safe levels for humans.  Bury it in containers rated for 50 years.  What could go wrong?

Sierra was a little upset that we didn't stop and see "Uncle Turtle" when we came down for Easter.

Welcome to the fight, T.

They're trying to open the former nuclear bomb factory and current Superfund nuclear waste dump up at Rocky Flats for public recreation.

http://www.dailycamera.com/guest-opinions/ci_30915162/anne-fenerty-keep-...

Nuclear energy is still the best long term bet. We just need to recycle the nuclear fuel like every other country.  It's not a problem fundamental to nuclear energy, it's a US policy issue.

One man gathers what another man spills...

The chattering class’s call for action on “climate change” overlooks a crucial point: to succeed, we need to increase reliance on nuclear power, the cleanest technology available, despite the vocal opposition from those who fear another Three-Mile Island or a more-serious disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Compared to electric generating plants fueled by coal and other fossil fuels, nuclear plants have a very light “carbon footprint.” Current public policy, however, favors solar, wind and other “green” energy sources, largely because used nuclear fuel remains radioactive, and policy-makers can’t decide what to do with it.

What we ought to do is what other countries do: recycle it. Doing so would provide a huge amount of zero-carbon energy that would help us reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

A major obstacle to nuclear fuel recycling in the United States has been the perception that it’s not cost-effective and that it could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Those were the reasons President Jimmy Carter gave in 1977 when he prohibited it, preferring instead to bury spent nuclear fuel deep underground. Thirty-seven years later we’re no closer to doing that than we were in 1977.

France, Great Britain and Japan, among other nations, rejected Carter’s solution. Those countries realized that spent nuclear fuel is a valuable asset, not simply waste requiring disposal.

As a result, France today generates 80 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear power, much of it generated through recycling.

As for concerns about proliferation, the reality is that no nuclear materials ever have been obtained from the spent fuel of a nuclear power plant, owing both to the substantial cost and technical difficulty of doing so and because of effective oversight by the national governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The nuclear fuel recycling process is straightforward. It involves converting spent plutonium and uranium into a “mixed oxide” that can be reused in nuclear power plants to produce more electricity. In France, spent fuel from that country’s 58 nuclear power plants is shipped to a recycling facility at Cap La Hague overlooking the English Channel, where it sits and cools down in demineralized water for three years. Only then is it separated for recycling into mixed-oxide fuel.

The nuclear material that cannot be recycled is imbedded in glass logs, where it will remain until France builds a deep-underground repository for unusable waste.

The United States now stores more than 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel at nuclear plants around the country. Disposing of “used” fuel in a deep-geologic repository as if it were worthless waste – and not a valuable resource for clean-energy production – is folly.

Twelve states have banned the construction of nuclear plants until the waste problem is resolved. But there is no enthusiasm for building the proposed waste depository. In fact, the Obama administration pulled the plug on the one high-level waste depository that was under construction at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

The outlook might be different if Congress were to lift the ban on nuclear-fuel recycling, which would cut the amount of waste requiring disposal by more than half. Instead of requiring a political consensus on multiple repository sites to store nuclear plant waste, one facility would be sufficient, reducing disposal costs by billions of dollars.

Some will say the United States can’t afford to build a nuclear recycling facility. But such a plant already is under construction at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River nuclear reservation in South Carolina. That facility will produce mixed-oxide fuel for generating electric power, not from power-plant waste, but from surplus plutonium now in U.S. weapons stockpiles.

By lifting the ban on spent fuel recycling we could make use of a valuable resource, provide an answer to the nuclear waste problem, open the way for a new generation of nuclear plants to meet America’s growing electricity needs, and put the United States in a leadership position on climate-change action.

If France and other nations can do it, why can’t we?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/why-doesnt-u-s-recycle-...

>> not to mention. earthquakes, terror attacks, blah blah blah.

This is fear mongering. There have only been more than 20 nuclear and radiation accidents involving fatalities. Climate change is real and will affect everyone.  We need clean energy now!

Solar isn't feasible presently. I'd have to spend $20,000 to get solar panels on my house to replace a $100/month bill.

How do you recycle spent fuel? I didn't know that was an option.

It's not safe, and that article is nonsense.

"The nuclear material that cannot be recycled is imbedded in glass logs, where it will remain until France builds a deep-underground repository for unusable waste."

Well. That's a bit inconvenient, isn't it?

Read up on the Hanford site in WA if you want to grasp the true life cycle of nuclear reactors and their waste.

>> How do you recycle spent fuel?

https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/recycling.html

You could power the entire US electricity grid off of the energy in nuclear waste for almost 100 years (details). 

Takes 250,000 years to decay to safe levels for humans<<<<<<<<<<<<

not bad- it takes 138,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri at our present average spacecraft speed. We're ahead of the game.

Nuclear energy is not safe, and it never will be. These waste recycling fantasies have been around for almost 75 years, and yet there still isn't a full-cycle technology in place to manage the waste.

I don't want to go to Alpha Centauri or use nuclear power.

Although using nuke power may have a low carbon footprint, building the plants and mining and moving the fuel def. does not.

>> "The nuclear material that cannot be recycled is imbedded in glass logs, where it will remain until France builds a deep-underground repository for unusable waste."

>> Well. That's a bit inconvenient, isn't it?

Not really. France's nuclear waste isn't the same as ours. Since ours runs through the cycle only once, it's radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. France's fission waste products decay to safe levels within 300-500 years.

There's a bunch of shit stored in Humboldt, too. While they did decommission the nuke plant near Eureka, all of the fuel is still stored onsite in dry casks right on the coast, forty feet above sea level. Again, worth repeating, what could possibly go wrong?

A 41 foot tsunami?

It really bums me out that scientist/engineers have essentially solved humanity's energy and environmental problems and people are just too dumb to accept the solution.

I'm going to go listen to a tasty Morning Dew and weep for our children.

Tidal flow turbines FTW.

The life cycle of the waste isn't necessarily the issue, Ender; although the half life of certain radioisotopes are (in)famously long. 

The fact that there isn't anywhere to safely store the unusable waste is the issue. It's totally disingenuous to suggest that we've safely solved the waste issue without a long term storage solution.

I would make the argument that there is no long term solution. The warning linguistics alone are basically insurmountable.

I personally am too dumb to understand the recycling process, but if the scientist/engineers have figured it out and it's so great, then why isn't that happening?

Solar will be feasible once a global grid is created (past our lifetime) and possibly low orbit collectors.

>> if they can do something with it or control it, why the fuck are they not???

Because some of the byproducts of recycling the waste can be weaponized. And that was politically unpopular in the US decades ago when we made policy.

Lol

That's completely disingenuous, Ender. C'mon man. 

The nuclear power industry has a massive waste problem. Lets focus on that little inconvenience. Where are we going to put this waste? How is it going to be safely contained? Who is going to manage it through the entire life cycle?

One theory is to send it into the Sun.

What could go wrong?

Isn't that the subplot of Superman lV, Ned?

Art Robinson wants your pee!

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=art+robinson+wants+your+pee&spf=381

St Mark, All waste is not equivalent. Nearly all of our waste is "high-level", where just 0.2% of France's is due to their preprocessing. France has a plan to store this particular waste in a deep underground bunker. Read more here: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100810/full/466804a.html

Turtle found one dumb scientist, so we can go ahead and discredit science as a whole.

  Just a little ancillary commentary.  

On one hand,  I was born by that Hanford nuclear facility in Washington. Perhaps that helps explain my sometimes rude boorish and odd behaviors.

On the other hand, my dad while working  there was exposed to a little spill in his lab.  Perhaps that has contributed to the fact that he will be 101 years old in August. Edwin has seen it all

>> actually this is a pro science position...

65% of scientists polled favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while only 45% of the public does.

87% of scientists polled agree the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity, while only 50% of the public does.

http://www.pewinternet.org/interactives/public-scientists-opinion-gap/

I didn't say all waste is equivalent, Ender. I said waste is a problem; a big one, actually.

There isn't anything particularly revolutionary about the French digging a waste repository. As the article mentions, we've made our own attempt at such a solution. It has been a complete failure. Maybe the French can do better, but they still have the long term management issue, regardless of the stability of the repository (which I seriously question, btw. Nobody has successfully stored waste long term as of yet, so the jury is very much out on the feasibility of such an endeavor.)

Regarding the seemingly magical properties of French nuclear waste, what you're representing there does not account for all of the products produced from fission, does it? Again, I think you're being disingenuous in your position. Cherry picking nuclear energy industry talking points without addressing the bigger picture waste issues isn't science; it's politics.

^swish!

>> Cherry picking nuclear energy industry talking points

I linked Forbes, wikipedia, whatisnuclear.com, nature magazine and pew polling in this thread. Which one of those sources is the nuclear energy industry? The only one you could argue is even biased is The Independent Institute's think tank article from Forbes and that's a anti-climate change bias, not a pro-nuclear one.

>> what you're representing there does not account for all of the products produced from fission, does it?

Yes, it does.

>> Nobody has successfully stored waste long term as of yet, so the jury is very much out on the feasibility of such an endeavor.)

Yes, but there is nearly complete consensus that our current course of action will definitely wreck the environment through global warming.

>> what you're representing there does not account for all of the products produced from fission, does it?

>>>Yes, it does.

No it doesn't. You're ignoring the transuranics. You can't talk about the fission products without accounting for the heavier elements produced in the process. Anytime you're creating plutonium in any amount, you've ultimately got a long term waste problem on your hands. Period.

>>Yes, but there is nearly complete consensus that our current course of action will definitely wreck the environment through global warming.

You can count me in that consensus. We just disagree completely on nuclear energy being the solution.

>> No it doesn't. You're ignoring the transuranics. You can't talk about the fission products without accounting for the heavier elements produced in the process. Anytime you're creating plutonium in any amount, you've ultimately got a long term waste problem on your hands. Period.

Conventional light-water reactors can also "consume" plutonium, if need be. "If I was going to try to get rid of 100 tons of plutonium, I'd burn it in a light-water reactor," Cochran says, by making it into the mixed oxide fuels. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-reactors-to-consume-plut...

From the article:

"Nor is the U.K. alone in considering fast reactors as a solution for eliminating plutonium. Japan's has built a fast reactor known as Monju to recycle its used nuclear fuel. France had one for awhile, too, but it has since been shut down due to difficulty operating the plant as designed. In fact, most such fast reactors have proved difficult to run reliably. "At one time or another, [fast reactors] were a priority program in the U.S., Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Russia," notes physicist Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "They were largely failures in all those places and in two nuclear navies, so one should think twice before trying it again."

Fast reactor technology has been around for a long time, Ender. It has never successfully solved the plutonium problem.

>> Fast reactor technology has been around for a long time, Ender. It has never successfully solved the plutonium problem.

Which is why my quote referenced conventional light-water reactors to address the issue.

And the problems left with fast reactors are just engineering problems. The science is already addressed. We can solve this problem, the political will just isn't there.

there are miles of saltmines underneath New Mexico where storage is feasible.

>>France s fission waste products decay to safe levels in 300-500 years>>

Thats like 7 minutes in nuclear alien radioactive  life form time....300-500 years?

So, if they buried it ALL today...and never created, recycled, and buried anymore....ever....we d be good in 2517....

Cool

You mean like these "saltmines"?

https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nucle...

>>>Which is why my quote referenced conventional light-water reactors to address the issue.

My bad. Conventional light water reactors also can't successfully address the issue. Again, the nuclear industry promises waste eliminating technologies that never actually come to operational fruition. Meanwhile the waste piles up, and we've got nowhere to store it. So the problem is handed down to the next generation, and the next, and so on. 

The long-term containment and management outlook for radioactive waste is very dire. As I mentioned earlier, even the basic linguistics of warning future generations about a waste site are basically insurmountable. That doesn't even begin to get into the technical issues associated with storage and containment, which are monumental. 

The nuclear industry has asked the world to avert its eyes as it has dumped radioactive waste across the globe for generations. This problem is not going away, and the fact is that there are no currently operational technologies in place to safely manage the waste cycle from reactor to long term containment.

>> radiation = bad

Solar energy is radiation from a nuclear fusion reaction.

Third arm might come in handy, Turts.

I was always under the impression that a combined energy plan was the best one. 

No. The energy tech that gets us to a sustainable, apocalypse-free future hasn't been invented yet.

>> why does every building not require it? why not small wind turbines on each house?

It's incredibly ironic that you complain about the costs of housing and then demand regulation to make it more expensive.

And to answer your question, small scale solar/wind installations are inefficient.

Had a neighbor who got hired on to do some remediation at Hanford. He had a Ukrainian wife. The FBI dropped by to ask me questions about him. Standard background check. They wanted to know if he drank, did dope, had loud parties or strange habits.

I told them I waved when I saw him out mowing the lawn.

Anyway he said it's a real mess up there. Thousands of rusty barrels of nuke waste all leaking into the River. They're trying to figure a way to encapsulate it in glass.

Ender, would you be interested in starting a consulting firm with me?

We'll call it Doomsday Solutions, and we'll specialize in large scale sustainable energy technology.

Hanford is bad, Stu. That's an environmental catastrophe that makes the rest of the Complex look like rice pudding, which is saying something. They've got enough waste up there to fill Mile High Stadium from the field to the nosebleeds. It's a mess.

Remediation is such a relative term when you're talking about these legacy DOE sites. If anybody is interested, I can give you a breakdown of the current situation up at Rocky Flats (the plutonium trigger manufacturing facility fed by Hanford that pushed triggers down to Pentax for warhead assembly). It's a straight up disaster, posing as a pristine wildlife refuge.

We just settled the class action property damage suit after 25+ years of litigation (my dad's house was 5 miles downwind, and he worked at the plant during the "clean up" years). Between the ineptitude of the DOE, the contractors, and the EPA; the country has a nuclear waste problem that isn't getting solved any time soon, I promise you.

Nah, I'm no scientist, I just enjoy arguing on the zone. 

I wish we had the option you guys do in Colorado to volunteer to pay more on your bill to build clean energy infrastructure. I remember Olson talking about that and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.

http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/power-plant-plans-to-bury-radioactive-...

Yeah I hope those options are going to become more and more prevalent, Ender. 

We could start a company called 'Fuck You. No, Fuck You Inc.' I think there's a market, man.

Turtle, I'm closing the deal on a potentially lucrative partnership here.

Please be nice to Ender.

Science schmience.

I always got the heebie jeebies as a kid when our family car went past San Onofre. I guess I always half-expected the plant to blow up. My ex told me the water by the SONP plant is warmer than other surf spots. I'm surprised surfers there haven't grown fins, frankly.

Stingrays like it there. We're going there Friday morning of our camping trip in September

just to walk the trails and throw rocks in the water.

What about Thorium?

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/thorium-energy-solution/

I thought this was interesting, but I'm gullible for any kind of corporate conspiracy. 

"Who Killed The Electric Car?" was a fun ride too.

>>>>>but everything "science" brings us is good....it doesn't matter if we can't as a species fully understand, harness nor control it. but because we can unleash it...we should....because, science..

Science is just about what is and how it all works, You're talking about technology here - whole 'nother kettle of fish..

ts on a fucking earthquake fault man....two of them actually. and is 100 yards from the fucking ocean. also easy fwy access. shit, you can park next to the thing. not secure.<<<

Geeze, turn on the minimal common sense light ,eh.

I'm a simpleton, but I see what salt, used to melt snow, does to concrete around here...I reckon you'ld be catching three eyed polka dotted fish after about two months...

Even Thomas Dolby...

They use calcium salt for winter snow control now instead of sodium salt.  Much better for the environment (it's basically limestone), but hell on Infrastructure and your vehicle (rusts steel twice as fast as sodium as it has 2 chlorine particles for every calcium).

Nukes and sharks

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/california-beachgoers-bind-woman...