Court ruling could revive PFS spent nuclear fuel storage project

[FBaggins]

A federal district court decision on Monday overturned decisions by the
US Department of Interior that had blocked construction of a commercial spent
fuel storage facility in Utah and remanded Private Fuel Storage's right-of-way
application and lease of tribal land to Interior for further consideration.

Following a series of delays in the US Department of Energy's repository
project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, in the mid-1990s, PFS, a nuclear utility
consortium, said it would build an away-from-reactor spent fuel storage
facility that would allow its members to move up to 40,000 metric tons of
spent reactor fuel from their reactors.

Though PFS obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to
build and operate the spent fuel storage facility, Interior's Bureau of Land
Management denied the consortium's request for a right of way across tribal
land owned by the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, saying there were too
many unanswered questions about the project.

Interior also denied approval of the PFS-Goshute long-term lease of
Goshute tribal land on which the facility would be built. The court remanded both of PFS' applications to Interior for
reconsideration.


http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews.aspx?xmlpath=RSSFeed/HeadlineNews/Nuclear/3886769.xml

[wtmusic]

1. Sure glad we threw Yucca in the toilet

so we'd have to resort to this far more dangerous alternative. :eyes:

It's gotta go somewhere, folks.

[txlibdem]

2. "Spent fuel" rods? Only 5% of the U-235 is used in current reactors

Would you fill up your gas tank, drive 10 miles, then drain the tank into an underground reservoir beneath your garage? I think I can answer for us all that it would be foolish to do so. Yet that is exactly what we do with nuclear fuel today. France, Russia, and Japan reprocess these "spent" fuel rods to make new fuel rods for their reactors. This reprocessing can be done on site to avoid any concerns of transporting, I favor this method.

[sabbat hunter]

4. I agree 100%

after reprocessing there is very little "spent" fuel.

[txlibdem]

6. And with some minor mods to the reactor

we could make fuel rods out of Thorium, a far more plentiful material than the current Uranium we use in our nuclear power plants.

The only reason why we went with Uranium over Thorium nuclear reactors is so we could make nuclear weapons. Those decisions were made 50 years ago or more and we live in a far different world now. We should migrate to Thorium for our nuclear power plants.

For those interested, more info about Thorium for power plants is at http://energyfromthorium.com/

[jpak]

3. yup - still no solution to spent fuel disposal

just shuffling the deck chiars

[FBaggins]

5. Just like we haven't solved global warming

but people still drive cars.

Nobody is going to give up all the cars while they wait for a solution.

[madokie]

7. Nuclear energy is the biggest farce ever perpetrated on the American public

Many of us seen it for what it really is many years ago too.