Six Questions for Daryl Thome, Member, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Advisory Committee

Sam Morris

Nuclear waste expert Daryl Thome, at his Las Vegas home Friday, says he believes storing spent nuclear fuel in Yucca Mountain is perfectly safe.

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Yucca Mountain

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Daryl Thome is an expert on nuclear issues. He responded to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster three decades ago and worked for the Environmental Protection Agency at the Nevada Test Site for many years.

Thome, 65, is a member of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Advisory Committee, which keeps the Clark County Commission abreast of Yucca Mountain issues.

Do you think Yucca Mountain is the right place for nuclear waste?

If I didn’t think it was safe in Las Vegas, I certainly wouldn’t have raised my precious daughter here ... I can’t imagine a safer place to store it.

You must be odd man out on that committee.

(Chuckles) I’m a scientist and what I try and contribute to the committee is a logical sequence of thought that is based on science, not emotion.

So, again, you have no problem with nuclear waste so close to Las Vegas?

The material is spent nuclear fuel, it’s not waste. And it still has great value. That’s why the Nuclear Waste Policy Act says if it’s stored underground, it has to be accessible for 50 years. Right now, it’s cheaper to mine uranium ... than it is to reprocess spent fuel. But someday that may not be the case.

You think we have a treasure trove here?

That’s right. And someday it will be retrieved.

In this age of water shortages, how would you feel about a nuclear-powered desalination plant somewhere along the California coast?

If I heard that was going to happen, I would jump up in the air and click my heels. If they did that, so much water would be available to the Southwest.

You grew up in Las Vegas (he was 10 in 1954, four years before the Nevada Test Site stopped aboveground nuclear bomb tests). Did you ever see a nuclear bomb test?

I hate to admit this. When I was a kid, they were around dawn and I never got up to see one. But I was young and my parents never dragged me out of bed, and now I regret that.

Discussion: 3 comments so far…

By dbltrbl

8/20/08 at 11:20 a.m.

Suggest removal

Now that's rich! Thome is throwing in the mix of reasons justifying Yucca Mountain repository the new claim that "spent nuclear fuel is not waste"! Add his claim that we possibly would pull out the casks for further use when 'uranium becomes too expensive to mine'. Las Vegas has more than paid our dues in support of national defense, to include other large areas of the state. When the scientific reports have proven Yucca Mountain geographically unsuitable for radioactive storage, DOE has turned around and changed the parameters, or simply buried the reports. Just another paid shill for an ill-conceived plan pushed forward at a waste of taxpayer dollars. I was here when those shots were all above ground, and when troops from Nellis were made to stand in trenches within eyesight of the shot, wearing nothing but their fatigues and a pair of sunglasses. "No" to Yucca Mountain and "No" to Daryl Thome.
By Impeach_Harry_Reid

8/20/08 at 4 p.m.

Suggest removal

Double Trouble:

Do you need some cheese to go with that wine???

In fact "Spent" fuel is only about 5% used; thus, it is not waste at all and will likely be reprocessed in the future. That's why the governing documents allow retrieval -- So we can pull it out of the casks again and use it...

Try using your brain instead of your emotions...

"You have a right to a clue... If you do not have a clue, one will be appointed for you..."
By theroyprocess

8/20/08 at 6:10 p.m.

Suggest removal

Letter to the Editor,

Moving nuclear waste from place to place
is not "clean-up"! Obviously you still have
it and will come back to you in your food,
water and atmosphere!

Nothing will contain nuclear waste. It will
continue to generate heat and has leaked
out in the first 63 years of the atomic age.
The first atom bomb "test" was in 1945.
More than 528 atmospheric tests have
been exploded. No one is immune.

Global warming is being used as an excuse
for many agendas. The longest lived polluting
agent is nuclear power. Comparing mortality
will not make you less dead! Don't be fooled
again!

The aim of nuclear power is to make plutonium
239 for atom bombs and create the BIG STICK
of political might. Electricity is made from the
heat which makes steam and turns the electric
turbines. The trick is to make you pay for your
own doomsday!

Nuclear terms are designed to confuse the
public mind. Nuclear waste...is not waste!
Spent fuel....is not spent, but actually more
radioactive coming out than going in as fresh
fuel. Depleted uranium ordinance is illegal
under the Geneva Convention and etc.

There is 'off the shelf' science that can reduce
plutonium 239 to zero radioactivity and produce
electricity from the heat. In 1979, after the Three
Mile Island accident, Dr. Radha R. Roy invented
the Roy Process for neutralizing nuclear waste .
It became an AP world wide news story.

Then president Ronald Reagan signed, "The 1982
Nuclear Waste Policy Act" which made geologic
isolation federal law! This put alternatives like
cost effective photon transmutation in limbo.

All one can do now is not build any more nuclear
power reactors, and photon transmute to zero
the so-called nuclear waste. This would both
neutralize the waste and create electricity from
the heat.

Albert Einstein once said, "Nuclear power is one
hell of a way to boil water".
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