Yucca Mountain, Open For Business 366
John Galt writes: "It seems the Feds have finally decided that Nevada will host the government's nuclear waste repository." The Yucca Mountain project has been in the works for a while. Here is a cutaway diagram.
No Maps... (Score:2, Interesting)
Didn't the Soviets classify maps too, to "minimize the risk of providing potentially sensitive information that could result in adverse impacts to National security"? (Quote from the site.)
Brave new world, indeed! Am I the only one who misses September 10th?
Yucca flats? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yucca flats. If that's the case, it makes sense
to build a nuclear waste dump there.
In case you didn't know, that area was used for
a large proportion of 'on continent' nuclear
testing done in the 50's and later.
http://www.em.doe.gov/tie/lasnts.html
The land is toast, adding more embers seems
to make sense, in this case.
- Penguin Kicka.
hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sub-Seabed (Score:5, Interesting)
Vol. 276, Jan. 98, pp. 60-65, Burial of Radioactive Waste Under the Seabed.
Holes could be drilled hundreds of meters below the seafloor in geologically inactive areas. Canisters spaced around 10 meters appart could be lined up around the bottom. Removal (in case something goes wrong) would not be a problem with a rentry cone at the top for a future drill.
It turns out the mud under the seabed has a consistancy of peanut butter, ideal for slowing the spread of any radioactive waste.
"Around 1,000 years later the metal seathing would corrode, leaving the nuclear waste expodes to the muds. In 24,000 years (the radiocative half-life of plutonium 239), plutonium and other transuranic elements would migrate outward les than a meter."
Unfortunatly this soulution is sometimes grouped with "ocean dumping" an therefore prohibited by international law.
(quick google search)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/
Re:One quote jumped out at me... (Score:1, Interesting)
Yucca Mountain is on a fault line (Score:3, Interesting)
-S
Re:hmmm... Nope (Score:1, Interesting)
Things would not get sucked back into the Earth's core, the best you could realistically hope for is some recycling/mixing in the mantle.
Earth cut-away [educ.uvic.ca]
Sorry I could not find a diagram depicting mantle flow; also mantle flow is a current "hot-topic", nobody can say for certain what the flow looks like. This means it would be very difficult to predict when/if the stuff would come back up in a nearby oceanic ridge, hot-spot (Hawaii, etc.) or volcano (volcano's go hand-in-hand with subducting plates, read trenches).
This means the risks are still too high/unknown, just as in the case with the "booster rocket to the sun" idea. Both excellent ideas but until we can minimize the risk let's bury it in Nevada's backyard.
Marking the Site (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a design competition [halcyon.com] about this - my favorite is the Landscape of Thorns.
Shoot it into the sun? (Score:4, Interesting)
Give these numbers, that would require about 15,400 launches to get the nuclear waste off the earth and out of earth orbit. The rockets that we would most likely use for this have a failure rate of about %5. This would make about 800 failures. 800 failures in which 5000 lbs of nuclear waste could potentially be spread into the atmosphere and the air.
I know these numbers are just numbers, and statistics are just statistics, but I think it shows that the risks for launching nuclear waste into space are unacceptable.
More Radiation in the Capitol Than at Yucca (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, read that again. The pedestal for the statue of Roger Williams (Rotunda/Senate Chamber Hallway, U.S. Capitol) gives off about 30 microrem per hour... more than the proposed standards for radiation at the perimeter of Yucca Mountain. Just to put it in perspective.
A Participant's Perspective... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been closely following the Yucca Mountain investigations since the mid-1990s; my garage has hundreds of thousands (really!) of pages generated by various parties involved in this effort. I doubt DOE will continue to be so free with its literature, in light of "security cenrcenrs" raised by September 11th.
But I digress.
In a nutshell: "Approval" of the storage facility has been a foregone conclusion since the studies first began. Yucca Mountain was the only site studied, and any "problems" discovered have been ignored or glossed over.
The real problem is a lack of planning -- it isn't just the "Internet generation" who can't think ahead. Back when we began building nuclear power plants, no one thought about what we would do with the waste -- and so it now sits in over a hundred locations around the U.S., in hardened canisters sitting next to power plants. Because no one looked ahead fifty years ago, we now have a crisis on our hands, and little chance to make a rational decision.
The problem at hand: Nuclear waste needs to be stored somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the only site selected for study. There may not be a rational, safe solution to the problem of nuclear waste -- and so Nevada's residents may take it in the shorts because of short-sighted and selfish politicians and
I say "may" because Nevadans are unlikely to lie down and "accept the inevitable." They're a feisty bunch, especially the ones who don't live in Reno or Lost Wages -- er, Las Vegas. The Ages Brush Rebellion is gaining strength again in the American West; confrontations between federal officials and local residents continue to rise.
You don't think this issue affects you? If you really think freedom is important, you might want to consider that Nevadans will be hosting nuclear waste that they did not create, as dictated by the federal government on behalf of big, stupid corporations. (Note: I like lots of businesses, even big ones -- but I have great disdain for stupid companies and people who impose their mistakes on others.)
For a somewhat different perspective on the issue, consider this article about the people who actually own Yucca Mountain:
Stealing Nevada [coyotegulch.com]
That article (which I am currently updating) has been published all over the world (search Google for it) in print and online. It won't make much difference, of course, because most people only care about right and wrong when it affects them directly. It's too bad, really; what the federal government is doing today with national IDs, intelletual property, and waste dumps is the direct result of letting them push other people around.
Good luck to those in Nevada, Shoshone, Paiute, and other-American alike. You need it...
Re:Problems.... (Score:3, Interesting)
In any engineering discipline, there are all sorts of problems which need to be solved. Just because those problems exist doesn't mean they can't be solved. In fact, you usually do something called 'risk reduction', which means you sit around and think of solutions to a problem, and backups to those solutions.
Many public problems with the government (and the private sector, too) are the results of a 'common sense' approach to engineering projects. "I know how long it takes to drive to the grocery store, therefore the government should know, to the dollar, how much it would cost to build the most technologically advanced strike fighter in the world ten years before they do it."
How to warn people away (Score:4, Interesting)
Ideas bandied about included making the surface from dark stone tiles so it would be too hot to approach or making some huge symbol on the ground to warn people away.
The main problem, though, was whether anything you do to warn people off would actually end up attracting them. Imagine making a huge warning that future generations or visiting aliens think is just something cool like the lines at Nazca.
NO NO NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
A. Subduction zones move material two directions. Soft material on top of the plate is scraped up and piled into mountains. Only the hard rock plate goes down. So anything we drop will go up, not down. You might as well put it in a mountain of your choice rather than a random mountain of the future.
B. It takes for ever for anything to happen anyway. Geologically, Yucca is just as good as subduction. By the time anything happens, it will only have moved a few feet anyway.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How to warn people away (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.halcyon.com/blackbox/hw/wipp/wipp.ht
Re:Problems.... (Score:3, Interesting)
hawk
No way, 3 reasons: (Score:1, Interesting)
1) Would the plant output as much energy as it takes to fire it's waste into the sun and refine the module, chemicals, etc. from ore, etc.? It could be that creating nuclear power, if we have to do all this, is actually causing an energy drain rather than a supply in the long run.
2) Whenever you fire something off of earth that doesn't return, your upsetting the balance of mass on earth. Granted there is a lot of mass on earth, but the fact remains the more we shoot into space the less we have on earth. Remember, heavy elements are much more rare than lighter ones.
3) Heavy elements are not good for fusion controlled reactions (such as the Sun). Anything heavier than iron is an endothermic fusion process. Thus, firing heavy elements into the Sun is poisoning it. Granted it has a lot of mass (much moreso than the Earth), but it is something to consider for well into the future..
Remember on #2 and #3: Our ancestors felt that dumping waste into rivers would be no big deal since the volume of water was so much more massive than what one settelr family disposed of. I bet they didn't know that it would only take 150-200 years for rivers to actually have enough crap in them to catch fire. You can say earth / sun are so incredibly massive that it wouldn't matter, but history has taught us that's not always true later on down the road.
Re:ACK! (Score:2, Interesting)
Finely-divided plutonium or uranium is really only hazardous if it gets into your lungs -- if it gets into your body by eating or whatever, your body will just get rid of it (since is causes cancer and it not simply poisonous, it is only dangerous if it hangs out in your body for a long time).
SNAP-9A burned up at a pretty high altitude, so the plutonium, even when divided, was spread over a huge amount of area, so by the time the plutonium got to the ground, the density of plutonium dust in the air was probably extremely low, making the chances of breathing in enough plutonium to cause cancer extremely low.
Lung cancers caused by uranium or plutonium inhalation are pretty easy to diagnose, since you can easily detect the radioactive material. As far as I know, there are no cases in the literature of increased deaths due to lungs cancers as a result of radionuclide inhalation in Madagascar following the SNAP-9A incident, so chances are the density of plutonium dust in the air at ground level in Madagascar was too low to have a reasonable chance of infecting anyone.
Last thing -- plutonium and uranium are wicked heavy -- even though the "dust" was in the air, it won't stay suspended for long, so the low density of particulate matter at ground level combined with the limited amount of time the dust remained suspended is likely the reason why their weren't excess cancers due to radionuclide inhalation in Madagascar.