Homeless nuclear waste (Maine Yankee)

[jpak]

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/09/15/homeless-nuclear-waste/

Standing on the end of Bailey Point, looking out on a cold, blue inlet of the Atlantic, you’d never know a nuclear power plant once stood here.

The massive concrete containment dome, the spent fuel storage pool, and the six-story-high turbine hall were all torn down earlier this decade, leaving a rain-soaked meadow of grass. The engineers and technicians who tended the 900-megawatt reactor packed up and left town a decade ago, when the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Station stopped producing power.

All that’s left is radioactive waste: the remains of the plant’s reactor vessel lining and the 1,435 spent fuel assemblies that passed through it over a quarter century of operations.

It has nowhere else to go. The owners of the defunct plant have put the waste in sealed canisters and placed them inside 64 two-story concrete silos that stand in regimented formation behind a 12-foot earthen berm and twin rows of razor-wire-topped fencing. Guards, insurance, maintenance, and other costs add up to $8 million a year, which is currently borne by utility customers. If it weren’t for the need to watch over the waste, the company would have been dissolved with the rest of the plant in 2005.

<more>

[exboyfil]

1. Pictures of this need to be brought to every discussion

about adding additional nuclear plants.

[NNadir]

2. One wonders, of course, whether there is one energy plant of any kind that

can claim that all of its waste from all of its operations can be contained indefinitely on the site generated.

I note, for instance, that the solar waste companies dump their waste in human flesh, much like the coal companies, the oil companies and the dangeorus natural gas companies.

The solar industry, in particular, has its waste dumping procedures ignored, mostly because it is a trivial and worthless form of energy.

According to the Washington Post, however, the effects are noticable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html

GAOLONG, China -- The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.

This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.

In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html">Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China

Of course, in bourgeois fundie land, it's pretty clear that poor people - Chinese or otherwise - don't count. They don't buy solar powered $150,000 Teslas with $50,000 paid by the government.

A "green" company? Only if you don't give a fuck. In fact, the solar industry could never, in a million years, or a billion years - given that solar waste and other electronic waste is diffuse, toxic, and has a mass/energy density problem - meet nuclear standards for so called "waste containment." I note that there are still a lot of dumb fundie anti-nukes living in Maine, not one of whom can demonstrate a single injury, never mind a death from the storage of used nuclear fuel in Maine.

Speaking for myself - as someone who understands nuclear science and who opposes deliberate nuclear ignorance - I would be perfectly happy to have the used nuclear fuel here in New Jersey, since anyone who actually understands nuclear science recognizes that this fuel is a resource.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be better than all the stuff that dumb anti-science fundies don't care about.

It only needs to be better than all the stuff that dumb anti-science fundies don't care about, which - given that it is the only form of energy that can contain it's by-products indefinitely, is.

[jpak]

3. What a steaming heap of obsessive-compulsive Larouchian sickfuckery

:rofl:

[NNadir]

4. I didn't think for a minute that you would do anything but DENY this toxic reality reported in the

Washington Post.

Your anti-science, anti-knowledge persepective has always consisted of denial, selective attention, the inability to read (including but clearly not limited to the Washington Post) and the production of childish smileys in the face of human tragedy.

In short, you are the quintessential fundie, a fundie being a person whose ideas are not subject to change by the presentation of any amount of information.

Have a nice fundie giggly face insipid day.

[jpak]

5. What stupid post

:rofl:

[Javaman]

6. more inanity by nnadir, hijacking the post to deflect from the original issue.

because that would put to close a look on his vaulted nuclear energy.

waste is waste, all industry has it, but please be concerned with your own before you start casting accusations.

but you enjoy being willfully ignorant in regards to nuclear waste. "Just store it some place, everything will be fine!"

It's like reasoning with a rock.

[jpak]

8. tee hee heee

:rofl:

[Nederland]

7. Just wanted to let you know...

...that I basically agree with you on the nuke issue. I just thought I'd leave a comment to that effect, given that almost all the comments you get here are content-free oppositional posts similar to jpak's above.

[madokie]

9. my o my

Only a fool can see nuclear power as a solution to our energy needs