Nuclear waste: Back to Yucca Mountain?

[phantom power]

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- There are 65,000 tons of radioactive waste sitting at nuclear power plants close to major cities around the country.

The government and the industry say it's safe where it is for the time being. But in the age of terrorism and tsunami-ravaged nuke plants, many have their doubts.

...

shortly after taking office the Obama administration, a staunch supporter of nuclear power, scrapped Yucca Mountain permanently and formed a commission to find a new location.

Now a group of Congressmen, backed by the nuclear industry, is trying to reverse that decision.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/06/news/economy/nuclear_waste/index.htm

[madokie]

1. When it comes right down to it I'm not so sure there is a safe place anywhere

to store the nastiest of the bunch. Some of the low level radioactive material yes but the rest I'm not so sure. its kind of like the cart got in front of the horse when they started building the power plants without a viable solution to that one little sticky problem. Makes me wonder if maybe the people who were pushing for nuclear energy for our power plants were maybe fundies believing that jebus is coming back to rescue them before they have to deal with it. I find no other explanation for this but I agree I'm not the smartest one out there trying to figure it out. All I know for a fact is the industry as a whole has lied to us from the beginning about the waste. It was so plain when we were stopping PSO from building the proposed Black Fox nuclear power plant near here. You could see it in their eyes whenever we questioned them about that one problem, it was like looking at a deer caught in the headlights, they had no answers for us then to this day they still don't have any answers.
I don't even want to hear how coal power plants are worse when it comes to nuclear waste either cause that dog don't hunt anymore, if he ever did.

What we should have done when they started building the coal powered power plants was to make sure they used the gasifier rather than direct burn of the coal. That one thing would have increased the efficiency even if they didn't co-gen as the natural gas plants are doing today. Just burning the coal using a gasifier allows about a 40 to 50 percent less co2 production with no other changes. In other words we didn't have to be where we are today because if they'd used gasifiers and also added co-generation we'd need far fewer of the coal power plants to begin with with a hell of a lot less coal to be burned resulting in a hell of a lot less co2 in our atmosphere..

http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-the-environment/coal-use-the-environment/improving-efficiencies/
We've known about gasifiers for years so don't tell me this is only a new development either.

do some reading on the subject if you will.
coal gasified power plants.

[GliderGuider]

2. So what do you propose we do?

It has to go somewhere eventually...

I'm still in favour of vitrification and deep storage. I've hear proposals to drop the canisters into subduction zones and simply return it to the mantle of the Earth, but I suspect that was never a politically viable suggestion.

Where do we put it?

[madokie]

3. As I said I'm not the person that needs to be working on that

Heres what I think, first when you find yourself in a hole stop digging, in other words stop making more of it at least until they figure out a safe and viable way of dealing with the waste. I think the waste should be categorized into maybe three different categories and dealt with differently for each. Some of it isn't as dangerous as others and it shouldn't have to be placed in the same places as the more dangerous stuff is. That would help in the amount of waste that needs real long time storage

I and a bunch of others of us knew enough early on that this was going to be a problem and needed to be dealt with before we started the balls to the wall building the plants to begin with. When we were asking these questions back then the nuclear boys treated us as if we just fell off a turd wagon that morning when in reality the problem was we were smart enough to question them and they didn't like that because they had no answers for us. A certain poster we don't see around here much anymore reminded me of the nuke boys back then, Talk down to us treat us like we were lepers all because we called bullshit on what they were proposing to do.

What I think we should be doing in the mean time with the coal plants is the ones that are newer is to be converting them to using a gasifier, not to capture the co2 but to make less to begin with and adding co-generation to them as the natural gas plants are doing to increase the efficiency. That would allow us to turn off some of the more polluting coal plants as well as the older and more dangerous nuke plants while we ramp up our alternates. You see we already have the infrastructure for the converted coal plants in place I'm talking about so the price wouldn't be as much as building new gasifier plants from start would be. With the ultimate goal of doing away with both coal and nuclear as a means to produce our electric.

I'm also well aware that a couple posters are going to be jumping all over me for what I just typed telling me how stupid I am in so many words and how what I propose can't be done for first one reason and then the other but I'll just ignore them as they really don't have all the answers either. Alternates are where we should be but it'll take time to get there and what I'm proposing will help in buying us some of that time thats needed in getting there.

[GliderGuider]

4. That sounds eminently reasonable to me. More reasonable than my solution, anyway

Which is basically to switch it all off and start getting used to the dark... :evilgrin:

[madokie]

5. I'm all for that too

since we've lost most of our manufacturing base and since we're only getting about 20 percent of our power from nukes I think we can deal with them being shut down without it being too much of a hardship, especially the older and more dangerous ones. The coal plants is another story as we get too much of our electric from them that it would be suicide to shut all of them down at once. We're going to have to at some point but we still have some time to work if we get busy and stay busy working on fixing this. My personal preference would be to work to shut down the older and more dangerous of both nukes and coal plants.

[GliderGuider]

6. See, there you go being all reasonable again.

I'd like to just switch off the whole kit and kaboodle. No more nukes, no more fossil fuels. If you can't do it with hydro, it doesn't need doing. Some days I get totally fed up with being reasonable. A boy can dream, can't he?

[pscot]

7. Scrapping Yucca Mountain was almost entirely a political decision

The science, as I understand it, seemed to indicate Yucca Mountain was about as safe a spot as we'll find. The prep work has been done. It could be operational way sooner than any other (non-existent) option. Fukushima has shown it's not a good idea to leave large quantities of radioactive waste lying around. Nevadans won't like it, but no matter what solution is proposed, someone is going to piss themselves. Scroom. Let's just do it and move on.