Comment But There is no Waste Disposal Plan (Score 1) 426
Before any starts calling me a luddite, I should point out I was in the top 1/4 or my class in Cornell's EE school. Don't go there. I am an Engineer, and a very good one. The difference between me and a lot of the other posters is that I am not paid by the nuclear weapons (and oh yeah power) industry or any other purveyor of power generation technology.
Right now, there is no plan to store nuclear waste for any new power plants. The only planned nuclear waste disposal facility right now is the Yucca mountain site and it is apparently over committed already. Not to mention the fact that Yucca mountain is a science project, not something designed to good engineering principles.
First, let's talk about the scope of the problem: A million years. The EPA requirement for Yucca mountain requires them to plan for a facility lifetime of a million years. And it's only that short a lifetime because we can't predict the region to be geologically stable for anything longer than that. This means the nuclear reactor waste remains poisonous for MORE than a million years.
Right now, we think our best technology (satellites) are doing great if they last a few decades. Buildings we construct last for a few hundreds. The oldest man-made structures around (the pyramids) have lasted a few thousand years, but most have already failed at their intended purpose (protecting the possessions of the interned).
With the level of experience we have, any sort of design the claims to predict functionality for a million years is a fairy tale. Who do we think we are kidding?
