Obama to kill Yucca Mountain nuclear site

[Kratos]

Mountain of Trouble
Mr. Obama defunds the nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain. Now what?


BY STRIPPING the funding for the nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, President Obama has succeeded in killing the contentious project that remains unfinished 22 years after Congress selected the site. He compounds the error by not offering an alternative. If the president's vision for a clean energy future is to be believed or is to come to fruition, nuclear energy must be a part of the mix, and the safe disposal of its radioactive waste must be given more serious consideration.

The project has burned through $7.7 billion. It was supposed to start accepting spent material from the nation's operating nuclear reactors (now numbering 104) in 1998. Our longstanding support of the Yucca Mountain facility has been grounded in the belief that the center of a desert mountain 1,000 feet underground and more than 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas was an appropriate place for the nation's nuclear waste. Instead, storage is spread over 121 above-ground sites located within 75 miles of more than 161 million people in 39 states.

There's more than a modicum of politics at play in Mr. Obama's decision. The president keeps a campaign promise to shut the site down. By doing so, he pleases Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). And he potentially secures the swing state's place in the blue column; the Silver State hadn't voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996 until it went to Mr. Obama in 2008. That's not to belittle the concerns of Nevadans. There have been worries about radioactive seepage into groundwater. But scientists have long maintained that corrosion wouldn't threaten the integrity of the storage containers for at least 10,000 years.

Now that the Yucca Mountain project is dead the obvious question is: Now what? As a senator in 2007, Mr. Obama suggested in a letter to Mr. Reid and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, "finding another state willing to serve as a permanent national repository . . . ." He also called for redirecting resources to improve the safety and security at plants around the country until a long-term solution is found. Those alternatives, however unlikely the first one is, are more than he offered when he cut off Yucca Mountain's funding.

In the coming weeks, Energy Secretary Steven Chu will announce plans for a meeting with key stakeholders to discuss nuclear waste storage. A report is expected within a year of the meeting. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the dry cask storage of nuclear waste currently employed is a safe short-term solution. Thankfully, "short-term" in this case is defined in decades. But until the Obama administration comes up with a real alternative, the president's promises that nuclear power will be a part of our clean energy future will remain unkept.

[Kratos]

Obama’s Nuclear Reservations
Political squabbling over how to store waste could hold back the industry.



It was one of Barack Obama's big applause lines. At nearly every campaign stop, the candidate promised to end our dependence on foreign oil and slash carbon emissions 80 percent by midcentury. "I will set a clear goal as president," he said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. "I will tap our natural-gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology and find ways to safely harness nuclear power." He also promised to back biofuels and wind, water and solar power. The crowd cheered.

Now all he has to do is make good on the promise. But despite all the inspiring talk about windmills and solar panels, it's difficult to see how Obama will reach that goal without relying, in large part, on nuclear power. Commercial reactors currently provide 20 percent of the nation's power—but accounts for 70 percent of the country's emission-free energy. "We cannot get to the reduction of CO2 in a big way without relying on nuclear energy even more than we do today," says Mujid Kazimi, the director of MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Systems.

So does that mean Obama will become the nation's cheerleader in chief for nuclear power? Not likely. Obama has been cautious whenever he's been asked about the issue. In a "Meet the Press" appearance in May, he hedged when the subject came up. "I think we do have to look at nuclear, and what we've got to figure out is can we store the material properly? Can we make sure that they're secure? Can we deal with the expense?"

Not exactly a full-throated endorsement. Obama's lack of enthusiasm is easy to understand politically, especially given the apprehension many voters have about the safety of nuclear-power plants. Three decades later, Three Mile Island still haunts—despite the pleas of industry advocates who say the technology has improved to the point that accidents are almost unheard of. Most Americans probably have no idea that there are 104 commercial nuclear-power plants currently operating in the United States today. None has suffered a malfunction that led to a major leak of radioactive material. Nuclear-power proponents often point to France, which depends on nukes for 80 percent of its power.

A bigger problem than the safety of the reactors themselves is what to do with the deadly waste they produce. Nuclear power is praised for its zero carbon emissions, but it comes at a price—radioactive fuel rods that remain toxic for thousands of years. If you're looking for a reason to feel queasy about building more nuclear reactors, this is it. While politicians bicker over where to put it all—nuclear waste is the ultimate "not in my backyard" dispute—the stuff is piling up. As things are now, a lot of it is simply stockpiled at the plants, submerged in open pools of water for as long as five years and eventually sealed in steel and concrete casks. "You have more than 100 reactors storing waste on-site, under what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls a temporary license, in the worst of all possible places," says Rochelle Becker of the ******** for Nuclear Responsibility, a nonprofit that monitors the nuclear-power industry. "In California, it's stored next to earthquake faults. In the rest of the country, you find that most waste is sitting very close to water supplies."

Nuclear-power companies pay a fee to the Department of Energy to pick up and store the waste, which by law becomes government property once it leaves the plant. But Energy is already 10 years behind schedule, and has no place to put it. The Feds want to store it in a vast facility inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas, where it would be closely monitored and far away from neighborhoods, earthquake zones and water supplies. Shipping the nation's nuclear waste to Nevada sounds good to just about everyone—everyone, that is, who doesn't live in Nevada. The state's officials, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are against it and have kept it from opening. This is where Obama, who has strongly criticized the Bush administration for putting politics ahead of facts, could step in and provide leadership on a national problem that will only become worse as more nuclear plants are built in coming years: plans for 26 new reactors are currently awaiting approval.

But don't expect the new president to demand that Reid clear out of the way. Nevada was one of the states Obama fought hard to win, and he wooed its voters partly by coming out against opening Yucca Mountain. "[T]here are still significant questions about whether nuclear waste can be stored safely there," he wrote to a Las Vegas newspaper. "I believe a better short-term solution is to store nuclear waste on-site at the reactors where it is produced, until we find a safe, long-term solution that is based on sound science."

Sounds reasonable enough. Except that sound science already comes down firmly on the side of Yucca Mountain. "The best option is deep geologic isolation," says Per Peterson, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in radioactive-waste management. "It's based on 50 years of research and development, and a very broad, widespread and strong consensus that it can provide appropriate and safe disposal of waste." Good luck finding a nuclear-waste expert who'll tell you Obama's stopgap solution—let it pile up and deal with it later —has anything to do with "sound science." Sound politics is more like it.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/170348/page/1

[Kratos]

no comments?
this is a big deal, what we're going to do with all the waste
and this is the only green energy that makes sense, even if it's glowing green lol

[spywizard]

we'll sell it to china along with grain..

[-Ender-]

"the president's promises that nuclear power will be a part of our clean energy future will remain unkept"

that quote kinda says it all.
so, according to some of what I've read elsewhere there has been about 9 billion spent on this project to date. Started in 87...so 87 to 09 is a budget of $409090909.00 a year. With that in mind...
Did the government actually spend that much on a hole in the ground?? or was the money actually going to fund projects that we don't know about??

And does the president just want to take the money for use elsewhere?? then where is it to be used??

now...I don't know about you, but I don't think that it's the greatest idea to store the suff in a dormant super volcano.
I'd vote for shooting the crap into the sun.

[spywizard]

i guess it's money better spent than on a car company that is bankrupt..

or a bank that has no money..

or king obama's new plan to force all people to pay for a gov run health plan through increased wage taxes.. oh that plan is being put in place by ted Kennedy and company.

[-Ender-]

Awh heck...... maybe he's taking the funding to support a secret project that creates power from some advanced science.....and he'll unvail it in the future and totally justify his actions and amaze us all.......
will you hold your breath?

[Kratos]

"now...I don't know about you, but I don't think that it's the greatest idea to store the suff in a dormant super volcano.
I'd vote for shooting the crap into the sun.

supervolcano? nothing is doing there anymore, they've been carefully watching the site since 1978. You count on a few feet of lead sheilding and cement now...why not a few miles of rock.

send it into space lol...the dry casks are like 127 tons or something
lets see at 12-18k per pound to send something up...you would vote for that?
and as for safety...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JkSnnDMWBU
yeah, I think I'll trust a dormant pile of rocks

This is simply what we need to do until we invest the few billion in new reactor technology that burns most of the waste leaving us with much less to store. If we start today we could have new reactors up and running in 30 years...making nuclear power truely safe.

but instead we're going to throw the money at useless wind turbines, because it's popular, and it's about votes.

[-Ender-]

i agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics

however, watching a chunk of old volcano for thirty years is about like throwing a glance a hot chick doing 185mph past you on a superbike.

[Tigershark]

I do not get this. Nuclear energy is the cleanest energy we have.

[-Ender-]

I do not get this. Nuclear energy is the cleanest energy we have.

It's not as shiny and clean as you may think.

We've got 150 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste currently stored at 121 sites around the nation.

[Kratos]

i agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics

however, watching a chunk of old volcano for thirty years is about like throwing a glance a hot chick doing 185mph past you on a superbike.

so what do you think we should do?
and stay grounded in reality for a min
we aren't planning to build a space elevator
if we did it won't be for at least 75 years before it starts operating
it won't be able to lift the casks...they'd be too heavy and we have 100k of them already.
it only gets you to geo-stationary orbit if we did...not a place you want to leave nuclear waste.
still a very high lift cost to even get them there
if we built a space elevator, I can think of better uses for it then keeping it tied up in use for forseeable future working garbage disposal duty

the geologists know their shit...even a volcanic erruption would bring minimal nuclear impact to the surface. the odds are 1/10,000 in the lifetime of the spent fuel of something like that happening anyway.

for your space elevator...1/10,000 for every year that it will get struck by a big rock and be destroyed.

the hole in the ground is way cheaper

[amcon]

well, that should tell all of us - were he is aligning him self... imo not with the best intentions to "save" our country...

[-Ender-]

and stay grounded in reality for a min

That will take some of the fun out of this.

the hole in the ground is way cheaper[/QUOTE]

Cheaper, yes.
A good solution, no.
Squirriling a bunch of shit down a hole waiting for it to go away isn't a great prospect. They have no way of knowing what a couple of hundred years is going to actually do to one of those casks.

I think that when Ward, June, and the Beaver were coming up with this energy source they should have limited it to small scale reactors for Navy use or at least applied some foresight to the waste that the grandkids are going to have to deal with before setting sail, full steam ahead.

As for what I think we should do:
I know that my voice doesn't carry far enough to matter. And since there arn't many options, I guess we'll shove it in the mountain after Obama gets out of office and the new guy can redirect the funding back to project completion. This project halt will quickly be overlooked until after Obama is out of office. And then HAVE to be addressed by another Pres. down the road as it will become critical at some point.
Much like the middle east during the Clinton admin.

[Kratos]

They have no way of knowing what a couple of hundred years is going to actually do to one of those casks.

This project halt will quickly be overlooked until after Obama is out of office. And then HAVE to be addressed by another Pres. down the road as it will become critical at some point.
Much like the middle east during the Clinton admin.

How about he faces this instead of his re-election but at the same time works to reduce spent fuel by funding new reactor technology...instead of all the stupidity he's currently interested in funding.

The casks are pretty damn strong...but they don't need to last more then 100 years. The whole idea is the rock becomes the cask, once you seal the tunnel so although the waste will remain in the cask and they will last for a very very long time...you don't even need them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o8haMIVcL8

[-Ender-]

How about he faces this instead of his re-election but at the same time works to reduce spent fuel by funding new reactor technology...instead of all the stupidity he's currently interested in funding.

Since energy was one of his big campaign subjects you'd think he wouldn't have stopped this project......
Is it starting to sound like he was spewing alot of empty rederick?

looking back all I can remember is "change", CHANGE, change, bla blah.

well I guess stopping a project that's already 9 billion dollars of the way toward completion is.....change.

actually it's just fvcking stupid.

[-Ender-]

and thanks Kratos..
Now I'm just bitter and pissed off about the whole thing....
I hope that freaking guy is doing something with the money!
something worthwhile!!
and where did all the money come from!?!?!
I think some of it was mine and yours!

[xlxBigSexyxlx]

Yes we can!

[Tigershark]

It's not as shiny and clean as you may think.

We've got 150 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste currently stored at 121 sites around the nation.

Can't we just blast it into space.

[Kratos]

and thanks Kratos..
Now I'm just bitter and pissed off about the whole thing....
I hope that freaking guy is doing something with the money!
something worthwhile!!
and where did all the money come from!?!?!
I think some of it was mine and yours!

you're welcome