Posted on 12/09/2014 2:07:45 PM PST by raptor22
Nuclear Waste: While Keystone XL remains a focus, the long-stalled repository for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nev., deemed safe in a recent report, is also good for the environment and for our energy future.
The ghosts of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima continue to haunt and hinder the nuclear energy industry. Yet a report released Oct. 16 may revive both the spent fuel repository and the nuclear energy industry with it.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) report, mostly finished in 2010 but delayed by Yucca Mountain foes such as the Obama administration and soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, says that the facility does meet the NRC requirements for environmentally safe storage of spent nuclear fuel.
Four years ago, the Department of Energy tried to kill the project by shutting down the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which was in charge of the Yucca project. The DOE told the NRC that it wanted the licensing application for the project to be withdrawn, but the NRC's licensing board wouldn't allow it.
Like the Keystone XL pipeline, the Yucca Mountain project, on which upwards of $14 billion has already been spent, has been studied to death. That money would have been wasted.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
The Federal Government needs to either open Yucca Mountain for receiving nuclear fuel, or refund the $14,000,000,000 back to the nuclear utilities that paid for it.
NUCLEAR ENERGY PING
Absolutely!
And from thence to the rate payers who REALLY paid for it.
Just saying I think that the Federal Government is in violation of the contract.
Just a wee bit.
NUCLEAR ENERGY PING
whenever the msr variants of the lftr thorium reactors are built—all the nuclear waste will suddenly be very valuable—because all of it can be burned by the molten salt nuclear reactors.
These wastes in effect will give the USA an unlimited supply of nuclear power virtually forever.
“Sorry to tell you, but fission has been dead for 35 years, and it ain’t commin’ back. “
Sorry to tell you, “86V309” (lol) but fission is absolutely going to be a going concern until the advent of LENR and/or fusion. Even current nuclear tech is by far the cleanest, cheapest reliable power around - and regardless of CO2 coal power is dirty.
There is the question as to whether the US or China will be the leader in next-gen nuclear. I’m hoping it’s the US. :-)
Sadly, it all depends upon which GOP congressmen are getting paid to suppress nuclear power, suppress it because the sources of the payoffs are the oil producing Middle Eastern countries who, while they do fund the Brookings Institution, also have CPAC in their pockets with Grover Norquist and his crony, publically committed to finishing his father’s, an ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) founder, work of turning the U.S. into a Sharia compliant state, Suhail Kahn, on CPAC’s board.
The media dismiss the eminent black attorney, former president of the Borough of Manhattan, Percy Sutton, who was proud to help Obama get into Harvard, but who “didn’t need financial help because Barack’s patron, Alwaleed bin-Talal, is one of the wealthiest men in the world”. Oil is fungible. The Saudi family needs protection and our congressmen need their two or three homes and incomes more befitting the influence they wield. Keeping oil prices up is about survival, something the Saudis understand well. They will suppress nuclear power and buy any politician they need for their own survival.
It is the same game, play to the ignorant as with global warming. Our media are flooded with ads, lies, about how much money you can save by installing solar panels, when the energy flux density makes that claim nonsense. Most people don’t appreciate what low flux density means, and that is why the ads work. Let’s protect people from the Three Mile Island disaster, the greatest nuclear holocaust on U.S. soil, which caused no injuries or deaths whatsoever, and which sister plants continue to operate safely and keep people warm, and power the Chevy Volts of the proletariat and the Teslas of the wealthy. Protect the Japanese from Fukushima, which diesel generators failed in their Tsunami, and which hurt not a soul from radiation, in spite of the nonsense about picocuries of isotopes in the ocean, less than we get in mineral water. The Japanese economy dove further into the red as their manufacturing base was deprived electrical power until they finally did what they had to do, and resumed nuclear power generation and building of new reactors.
The public also buys the Chernobyl disaster hype for which most of the human damage came from the coal-generated electricity which was needed to power the city of Chernobyl with one of its reactors off-line, and the tragedy to lives of the families who lost jobs in Ukraine because of the political reputations being protected. Coal electricity generation costs about 200 lives/year from pollution of the air with a variety of insults, including more radiation than is emitted in normal operation by commercial nuclear plants.
Three people died directly as a result of the Chernobyl reactor’s non-commercial (military) design, and its almost complete lack of containment. Chernobyl is an ancient design, like the Fermi graphite pile in Chicago in the 1940s, designed to produce near weapon’s grade plutonium. The energy was a benefit, not its design purpose. The twenty to forty illnesses to citizens during the ensuing twenty years did not exceed the rate of leukemia deaths in many cities nowhere near nuclear reactors, which is not to say the radiation was good for health. (Though as Taiwan discovered, when a major apartment complex was found to have high radiation levels caused by accidental mixing of Cobalt 60 into steel manufactured, and cancer levels over ten years in the family-filled complex dropped precipitously, radiation may have health benefits, and the levels in Taiwan were way over what we consider safe here.)
It is all about political power, and implicitly, money. There has not been so safe a source of electrical energy in human history as nuclear generated electricity, but ignorance has made nuclear energy more valuable to those peddling fear to the ignorant, so they can earn their commissions from management, management being those who subscribe to “The Religion of Peace”, who sadly include not just our supposed president, but his predecessor, his Director of National Intelligence, his CIA Director, ...
And name it after reid
The GOP should do a bunch of things that require them to grow a spine. Don’t hold your breath.
Well ultimately it may be a distinction without a difference but actually the waste disposal fees come out of operating fees and not a charge to customers so really it comes out of profits. It probably is different from state to state. If at the end the utilities can't get the government to accept the spent fuel or recover their storage cost from the DOE you can imagine who will end up holding the bag.
Yes, Yucca Mountain would piss off Reid.
I live in NV and I’m all for it. If people had any clue how much hazmat passed them on the road every day they’d be cleanin’ their drawers frequently.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.