Nuclear waste storage undergoes simple shift

[NVMojo]

In the world of nuclear waste, simpler is better.

That's the case with the so-called "new path" that government scientists embarked on this week to improve the design and safety of the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In another respect, it's also the course spelled out by independent experts in the Oct. 21 issue of the prestigious journal Science.

For different reasons, the simple-is-better philosophy appears to be gaining momentum among scientists for tackling what many of them consider to be a huge environmental problem: how to safely dispose of the most lethal radioactive materials on Earth, the stuff left over from splitting atoms to generate nuclear power.

more...

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Oct-29-Sat-2005/news/4021464.html

[FloridaPat]

1. You put them in an earthquake prone area pray for the next 2000 years

that they don't leek and find the water table that would make the SW USA uninhabitable.

[NNadir]

2. This of course is nonsense.

At Oklo, the so called nuclear waste from the naturally occurring reactors there didn't go anywhere for billions of years. It was smack damn in one of the wettest places on earth.

http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml

People are under the illusion that radionuclides run around like rabbits, because people love terror. They don't. The obsession with so called "nuclear waste," is rather dubious, since there are other wastes from other forms of energy that are actually killing people.

[FloridaPat]

3. I visited England several years ago. In Bath, there was a shop that

had a poster that said(MOL): if the Romans had nuclear energy, it would still be dangerously radioactive.

There have been too many stories over the decades about large cans of different deadly chemicals leaking. Love Canal. New Orleans even. We are not that good that we can produce tons of highly radioactive materials and safely put the somewhere for thousands of years. We don't know what we're doing and we have a government that doesn't really care. Then there was 3 Mile Island, which was a partial meltdown. A total meltdown would have made most of the water in the NE US undrinkable.