Obama’s Nuclear Reservations

The thing that bugs me the most when people talk about nuclear waste is that they don't bother to compare it to waste produced by other power sources... coal generates about a thousand times more waste per year in slag than nuclear, and it is just as toxic, full of heavy metals, arsenic and other stuff. And that doesn't even include the toxic gases released into the atmosphere, as well as the greenhouse gases. Why don't we require the same level of waste containment for coal that we do for nuclear?

I dont live in Nevada but that so-called sound science sounds unfair. Once you can put yourself in their shoes and will swallow it, dont push it.

some amateurish suggestions:
1) Nuclear power is created by the heat of the nuclear reaction to create steam. Has anyone tried to use Einstein's photoelectric effect to generate current? By that technique any radioactive material could be used to generate electricity and not be considered radioactive waste. Perhaps there could be many cycles left in the "waste".
2) I have always been impressed by the effeciency and excellence of the Saturn moon rockets. Why not encase "waste" in some impregnable matrix which could be recovered in case of an accident, re-engineer and re-design the Saturn rockets and shoot loads of packaged waste to the Sun? They would never arrive but would remove the toxic elements from the Earth.

Promoting nuclear power inevitably leads to a show of support for Yucca Mountain, NV as a high-level nuclear waste repository site. While Per Peterson could be right in saying that deep geologic isolation is the best option for irradiated fuel and high-level nuclear waste, his endorsement of Yucca Mountain is misguided. The site???s design is not ???deep geologic??? but rather tunnels inside a mountain that are 1,000 feet higher in altitude than the neighboring farms sharing the groundwater. The Yucca Mountain rock will not isolate the waste. The tunnels will only provide a parking spot for the metal containers until they are corroded by inflowing rain and snowmelt and the radioactive contents disolve into the groundwater and head for the farms and dairy downstream.

There is no ???widespread and strong consensus??? that Yucca Mountain can provide appropirate and safe disposal of waste as Peterson claims. He is parroting the claims of the U.S. Department of Energy and the fantasies of the commercial nuclear industry. Every regulation, rule or standard governing the requirements for a repository had to be changed or eliminated to accommodate the site.

And finally, shipping the nation???s nuclear waste to Nevada does NOT sound good to just about everyone. More than 125 national and/or regional organizations oppose the shipping campaign that is often referred to as ???Mobile Chernoybl.??? Moving the waste from power plants to Yucca Mountain in Nevada would place more than 50 million people within the ½ mile region of infuence which is the distance that radiation from shipping containers can be detected.

A few counterpoints to Daniel's post: 1957 - US National Academy of Sciences determined that deep geologic storage was the best way to manage nuclear waste. 2001 - National Research Council (part of the Academy) affirmed that deep geologic storage was the best option. The international community believes in the efficacy of deep geologic storage (including: Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States). The US government has been safely operating a deep geologic disposal site for nearly a decade in Carlsbad, NM which has received nearly 7,000 shipments without a single accident resulting in the release of radioactivity.

With regards to the inevitable accidents: the safety record of the nuclear industry is far and away significantly better than that of the chemical industry, to the point that not a single death can be directly attributed to a nuclear accident in the US.

By and large, the cost of disposing of waste from the commercial generation of electricity is paid by only those who USE that electricty, as per the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (1982).

Deep storage of nuclear waste is "sound science" only insofar as one accepts as a reasonable risk certain unknowables (such as the long-term stability of these geological formations, particularly in regards to the level of surrounding water tables). Once again, for our short term benefit we are leaving problems to future generations. Besides that, the cost of supporting a ramped-up nuclear power infrastructure (fuel that is not domestically available; securing both generation and storage sites; transport of hazardous materials; public health from inevitable accidents) seems like money poorly spent when dollars could be put towards a long-overdue upgrade of our national electrical transmission system that would in turn allow us to take advantage of a mix of renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc) located in optimal locations around the country. As a tax-payer, I am far more comfortable with the technical challenges faced in moving towards clean energy than I am with the known problems in supporting something as historically problematic as nuclear power.

Daren Briscoe,

Please read up on "reprocessing":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
"The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, announced by the secretary of the Department of Energy, Samuel Bodman, on February 6, 2006, is a plan to form an international partnership to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in a way that renders the plutonium in it usable for nuclear fuel but not for nuclear weapons."

The science hasn't been brightly highlighted yet, but on-site storage along with reprocessing is the best technical solution to the problem.

Cheers,
Joe Gorse

We've already figured out how to build reactors that are fail-safe and can burn nuclear waste as fuel. Old weapons-grade material too. Check out Prescription for the Planet, available at Amazon. Read it, then email Obama and ask him to get with the program.

I wonder if we could pile all of the spent rods onto a spacecraft and shoot it into deep space.

"SO HELP ME GOD."- I think that if God were to really help you he would allow you to case off the extreme hate, bitterness, resentfulness, and un-Godly feeling that with which you are obviously consumed.

"WHY THIS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN"- The reason this was allowed to happen is due to a wonderful social and governmental sytem called Democrasy! A majority of the people of the United States of American felt that Barack Hussein Obama and his party had a more positive vision for what the United States should be doing in the next four years, so they voted for him in a general election. If he does a good job, gets things done, and maintains his contract of faithfulness and trust with the people and the Constitution, he may be reelected. If not maybe someone else will be elected. Most people in the United States, including most who voted for someone else, hope he is successful. People pray that his will happen.

This is in contrast to the negative intolerant ways of people like the terrorists in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose modus operandi is to destroy people and their creations in order to force them to give in to negative thinking of a few who want to dictate how things should be. These recent terrorists appear to have connections to Al Qaeda or are a separate Muslim terrorist hate group. Muslim terrorists are anti-God because God does not bless people consumed with hate, particularly if the hate is done in the name of God. Muslim terrorists stupidly listen to mortal men who call themselves mulahs and who tell the terrorist sheep that they will go to heaven and be greeted by beautiful virgins by killing others in name of God. But God does not approve of such things, and these hate-filled sheep will never go to heaven.

A wise person said that "the best way to defeat noxious ideas is with better ideas. The best way to combat falshood is with truth." The philosophy of the Al Qaeda terrorists cannot succeed because they are noxous ideas that are full of falsehoods.

I think God would like you to stop your life of hate and start on a road of hope and peace. This is true whether you are a right wing extremist pro-Bush American Republican or a righ wing extremist Muslim-terrorist supporter. It is actually hard to tell from you posting since in many ways they sound the same..

This article: "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. Previous experience on solar energy development in Germany as well as wind farm construction in Texas indicate that each of the renewable energy, i.e solar, wind and biofuel can achieved just a few percent of electric power generation by conventional coal burning power plant. Without nuclear power, it is believed to be impossible to replace the current conventional power plant (which consist of 50% of total power generaion) by using renewable energy in ten years as Al Gore proposed early for CO2 reduction .

As pointed out once or twice on this thread, the article does not mention U.S. reprocessing of U.S. nuclear waste as part of the solution before anything is buried. This is apparently what France does successfully. Reprocessing first makes more sense than trying to dig up deeply buried waste some time in the future; this would not be likely to happen, anyway. I have not seen any explanation why the Dept. of Energy does not require reprocessing. Is this option being blocked or political reasons?

One win-win-win solution (sort of) would be to build U.S. reprocessing facilities using U.S. made parts made by U.S. workers, and operated by U.S. employees to separate the different radioactive components and repurify the materials needed for the fuel rods in new U.S. made reactors. This U.S. made recycled material could be used to fuel the additional U.S. made state of the art nuclear reactors that are built by U.S. workers to increase the amount of U.S. made electricity produced to cut the amount of non-U.S. petroleum. More jobs, less nuclear waste, less imported oil.

Does anybody have a reference that explains what France does with the radioactive material that is not useful for energy production? Any references as to what we could do with it?

I CANNOT TOLERATE THIS LUNATIC, INSANE , FANATICAL & HYSTERICAL SUPPORT FOR THIS ROOKIE SENATOR ( OBAMA ) AS PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.A. IT DISGUST ME WITH EXTREME ANGER & PITY FOR ALL THOSE WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THIS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AT THIS POINT & TIME OF OBAMA'S POLITICAL PURSUITS & AMBITIONS. I DEEM THIS A FATAL ERROR IN JUDGMENT & PREDICT DEEP REGRETS AROUND THE WORLD - SO HELP ME GOD.
Kabil Azad Khan.

A policy of not rushing into repositories, storing spent fuel and probably reprocessing it at some stage in the future looks the right one from all standpoints. This doesn't however mean that waste repositories will never be needed - they must still be planned for and developed, especially for cleaning-up the US's historic radioactive waste legacy - but the quantities of commercial waste destined for them will need to be optimised and much reduced. The affordability of nuclear waste disposal may well decide the long term economic future of the nuclear industry, both in the US and probably world-wide. Ian Jackson, Author "Nukenomics"

waste that takes a thousand years to decay does not mean "emission-free." that's a very shortsighted and narrow idea of what emmisions are.