Oops - Yucca Mountain nuke waste dump is on a fault line.

[bananas]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2176842,00.html

US nuclear dump plan in danger after seismic shock

Fred Attewill
Tuesday September 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The most expensive public works project in the US was today in disarray after it emerged that a planned giant nuclear dump would be located on a faultline.

Rock samples from deep within Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, showed that the fault runs directly beneath the site where the US federal government planned to store 70,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste.

<snip>

Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.

"It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he told the paper.

<snip>

[pnwmom]

1. Idiots! n/t

[NMDemDist2]

2. this isn't news, the opponents of the site have been saying that for years

Duh!

they were afraid to drill sooner for fear the cash cow would dry up :banghead:

[ThomCat]

8. Exactly! This isn't a newly discovered fault line.

x(

[slackmaster]

It would be hard to find a place in Nevada that ISN'T on a fault line

[kestrel91316]

10. Well, they can go ahead and put it in White Pine County, where they want

to put THREE coal-fired power plants and steal all the water out from underneath. It's just a damned desert with nobody there, right????

http://www.whitepinechamber.com/things_to_do.htm
http://www.nps.gov/grba/
http://www.greatbasinpark.com/

[Whoa_Nelly]

3. it's been known for years that Yucca Mountain is on a fault line

In fact, it's on quite a few fault areas.

Having lived in NV for 20 years, this has been one of the reasons tmany in the state have been fighting to stop the completion of this faciltiy, with the main reason being that many in NV oppose making the state a nuclear wasteland.

[MrModerate]

4. Even if we never build another nuke plant . . .

Unlikely, given how fossil plants are contributing to, ya know, the potential death of our species (and a few million others) -- We would still need a repository for the spent fuel (and other high level wastes) already on hand. Yucca has been screwed up from the git-go by succeeding generations of DOE apparatchiks under Administrations from both parties.

I'm convinced that we'll start building nukes again (a few have just recently started the licensing process), but even if you're the most antinuclear power activist on the planet, you should support some reasonable storage regime and location(s) that are superior to the higgledy-piggledy methods we employ now.

Apparently it ain't Yucca Mountain (sheesh!). But something.

[losthills]

5. Crawford, Texas...

[MrModerate]

6. That's the sort of "out of the box" thinking that . . .

Might eventually solve this problem.

Congrats!

[bananas]

7. There were supposed to be two sites - on on the east coast, on the west coast

What happened to the one on the east coast, where most of the waste is generated?

[XemaSab]

9. Didn't see THAT coming...

:eyes:

The state of Nevada is a giant, giant fault line. :P

[phantom power]

11. I wonder what we should do with it.

Well, actually I have my own opinion about what we should do with it, but I wonder what anti-nuclear opponents of Yucca think we should do with it.

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. Well...

The first thing we should do is start reprocessing and recycling it. If you're serious about fission, you know that's true. The resulting high-level waste should be vitrified.

Next, rather than putting all of our eggs into one basket, each state should be made responsible for providing suitable short and long-term disposal sites for waste generated there. (It's really not fair to expect one state to accept the waste generated by all of the others.)

Commercial nuclear generating facilities should be charged a disposal/management fee for waste they generate. Fees should go into a trust-fund to create and provide future operating expenses for storage/disposal facilities.

[NNadir]

13. And your point is what?

Let me guess, a magical earthquake is going to occur in the next 5000 years, all the canisters are going to be ruptured by it, crawl out the ground, haul their ass to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and concentrate in the skin of cute little blonde haired five year old girls, killing as many of them as were killed by dangerous fossil fuel waste - about which the Rio Tinto/Walmart/Royal Dutch Shell paid anti-nuke community couldn't care less - in the last 25 minutes?

What, you've never bothered to learn the chemistry of actinides and fission products to see if they are as mobile as dangerous fossil fuel waste?

Why is that I wonder?

As it happens, the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo operated for hundreds of thousands of years in land that has been <em>rain</em> forest for hundred of millions of years. By definition the reactors were in <em>porous</em> rock, since there was no way for them to go naturally critical otherwise. In the nearly two billion years since the reactors operated, the radioactive products migrated less than 100 meters.

Of course, I will bet there is not ONE dangerous fossil fuel apologist who could give a rat's ass if any of their fantasy sequestration projects might ever <em>leak</em>.

I will be covering the recent report in <em>Environ. Sci. Tech</em> (2006) on the external cost of dangerous fossil fuel waste repositories, none of which actually operate on significant scale, none that have been spec'ed, none of which have been sited, none of which have been ordered, and none of which could handle more than 20 minutes worth of dangerous fossil fuel waste.

In general, we all understand that Yucca Mountain will never operate, nor should it. Nuclear materials are too damn valuable to throw away just because there are lots, and lots and lots and lots of anti-nuke scientific illiterates.