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Sunday, April 18, 2010 | 2 a.m.
The Obama administration has valid scientific and technical grounds for finding Yucca Mountain unworkable as a repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
As Nevadans have been saying for decades, the fact is that Yucca Mountain is an unsafe and unsuitable location for a facility that must isolate extremely dangerous and long-lived waste for hundreds of thousands of years.
This may be old news in Nevada. But this fact seems to be lost on my counterparts in the states of South Carolina and Washington, who are suing the federal government in a last-ditch attempt to revive the ill-fated nuclear waste repository previously planned for the Yucca Mountain site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The site is geologically active, with numerous earthquake faults and evidence of geologically recent volcanic activity. Even the U.S. Energy Department has acknowledged that the geology at Yucca contributes almost nothing to waste isolation and protection. Therefore, the Energy Department had proposed to rely almost exclusively on “man-made barriers.” The rock at Yucca Mountain is so porous and fractured, with pathways that permit highly corrosive groundwater to move rapidly through it to the aquifer below, that the Energy Department had to engineer ever-more exotic “fixes” in attempts to compensate for the site’s fundamental inadequacies.
The license application submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the Energy Department relies almost exclusively on “magic metal” waste disposal containers that must remain intact for more than a half-million years. The containers would then be placed in miles of tunnels lined with thousands of titanium drip shields to prevent water and other liquids from eroding the waste packages.
Ironically, in the license application it is now withdrawing “with prejudice,” the Energy Department did not plan to even install the drip shields for 100 years or more after the waste would have been put into the mountain. That’s if the drip shields could have been installed at all given the yet-to-be-invented robotics required to handle them.
Such futuristic measures were needed because of the high radiation and high heat environment, given the expected degradation of the underground tunnels over that time period, and given the huge percentage of the world’s titanium supply that would be required at an extreme cost to the country (over $10 billion and growing).
The fact that Yucca Mountain is a flawed site has been known for decades. Congress picked the Nevada site in 1987 not because it was the best site or even a suitable one; it was chosen solely for political reasons in spite of known defects.
If those decrying the decision to terminate the Yucca project today were as vocal in insisting that science, not politics, be the deciding factor in 1987, the nation might well have a functioning repository today, albeit not at Yucca Mountain.
The decision by the current administration to abandon the failed repository program and establish the Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future to evaluate current and new technology and forward-looking alternatives for managing spent fuel and high-level waste is not only scientifically sound, but it also represents the best chance for finally solving the waste problem in a manner that is in the best interests of the nation and the nuclear industry.
The blue-ribbon commission will re-evaluate the use of future nonproliferating reprocessing technologies to reuse spent fuel rather than dispose of it as waste.
The smartest, safest and most economical thing to do is leave the waste where it is (in perfectly safe, dry storage facilities) and invest in technologies that will reduce waste volumes and reuse the spent fuel while the nation scientifically looks for safe, workable and fair solutions to the nuclear waste problem.
Yucca Mountain would not solve any problems for the country or nuclear power. It would only defer them at a cost to the health and safety of Nevadans. Now, it’s time to focus on the science.
Nevadans have been saying as much for years. Now that the Energy Department is finally agreeing with us, the time has come to bury the idea of a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain once and for all.
Catherine Cortez Masto is attorney general of Nevada.
Let the State of Washington host this toxic nuclear disposal death pit in its own yard. Washington has been plagued for years by nuclear waste problems stemming from its own Hanford Nulcear Reservation. Decades of failed federal efforts to find safe and technologically acceptable methods for dealing with nuclear waste is at the center of this controversy. I cannot imagine any significant benefit that would inure to Nevada from hosting this waste on its own soil. The argument that this repository would provide much needed higher skilled and paying jobs to the local economy is a myth. Nothing really positive would be added by this repository. While the rest of the nation gangs up on the vast desert area as a dump for this toxic product, Nevadans must fight back and refuse to be part of this accumulated failure of multiple waves of administrations and congressional sessions to resolve this stubborn problem.
NV DEMOCRAT AG Catherine Cortez Masto says "The Obama administration has valid scientific and technical grounds for finding Yucca Mountain unworkable as a repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste."
---------------------------------
As with so many issues Masto is wrong.
Obama and Harry Reid are breaking the law and as evident by the lawsuits they got caught and will have to pay the price. The lawsuits will prevent the DOE license application from being withdrawn "with prejudice,without presenting valid scientific and technical grounds in the brief"
Harry can NOT run in 2010 as the guy who stopped Yucca - because it is not stopped.
Masto, Obama, and Reid should have let the NRC complete the Yucca license application to adjudicate the safety of Yucca. By allowing the NRC to finish Masto's comment about the safe "relies almost exclusively on "magic metal" waste disposal containers"
Masto says "The license application submitted to the NRC by the DOE relies ...waste disposal containers that must remain intact for more than a half-million years. The containers would then be placed in miles of tunnels lined..."
Nothing could be more wrong. The encapulated waste is placed in the mountain at the beginning not after 500,000 years. How could Masto be so misinformed.
Let Harry Reid's hand picked head of the NRC Jaczko make the safety decision not Masto.
What do Masto, Reid, and Obama have to fear from an NRC run by them
then Masto can expect these states who contributed millions to build the Yucca repository, expecting to move their waste to it, will sue Nevada for the return of their money.
So this is what she was working on when she refused to join sevreal other state to prevent Obamacare from being shoved down our throats!
The Obama administration's scientific and technical grounds for finding Yucca Mountain unworkable as a repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste is based on this coming mid term elections.
The Obama administration is pulling out all stops in trying to assist Harry Reid in his reelection bid. Obama has recently visited Las Vegas in a bid to help Reid's reelection efforts.
AND HELP IT DID. Harry Reid's favorably polling dropped anther 5 percentage points in the last month. Only 23 percent of Nevadans currently have a favorable opinion of Harry Reid....
Masto out, Harry out, Titus out, Gibbons out, we're going to clean house, so to speak!!!!
If we take all this at face value then what Masto is suggesting is that the Obama administration has taken the pseudo-science whipped up by the state of Nevada as gospel, and has never bothered to read DOE's license application which explains that the repository as proposed is likely to be safe for a million years in spite of certain earthquakes and in spite of very uncertain volcanic events. The science behind the license application has not been considered in making this decision, is what Masto is saying.
A new adminsitration has the right to change national policy, that is what elections are about. I am ready to put Yucca behind me. BUT when I read something like this, claiming the basis for the policy shift to be the near-fictions concocted by the state relabeled as science, then I get agitated!
To the state's credit, they did hire some very good and knowledgeable persons to help them critique the DOE's license application, and most of their more compelling arguments on the merits of that application came from one or several of those consultants, who hail from the UK. The NRC process would have forced DOE to argue their case in an open forum, addressing those very astute criticisms.
Would DOE have prevailed? I think the general sense was that DOE would have prevailed but with a large list of "conditions" tagged on to its construction permit, conditions that would have to be addressed with additional science and design work before being able to accept waste for disposal.
But now we have the authoritative voice of the state Attorney General making rather inane and laughably simplified scientific pronouncements and declaring that these are the considerations that support the change in policy regarding Yucca. To his credit Secretary Chu has not uttered the inanities that Masto is uttering. He simply says "it is not an option" (from a policy point of view) and "we can do better" (always undefined).
Having been involved with the science of Yucca for several decades it riles me up when I see someone make the whole enterprise look so danged stupid with just a few words that have so very little relationship to the real science underlying the license application.
Don't (falsely in my view) claim a scientific basis for the policy change, and I will put it all behind me. Elected officials, accountable to the electorate, ought to make policy decisions at this level.
But when the science staff is all gone (which will be very soon) don't rewrite history and caricature the science to bolster this new policy decision. We will answer from wherever we are working next, retired next, unemployed next, or even from the grave, perhaps, to say "No Ma'm, That's NOT Science!" when articles like this appear.
In response to Greenspun's editorial today, Washington and South Carolina did not derive cheaper fuel costs from the nuclear waste in their states. This waste is defense waste produced to defend America, of which Nevada and Las Vegas are part. They agreed to host the defense nuclear facilities based upon the federal government's promise to dispose of the waste. Obama and Reid are trying to break this promise.
Both Masto and Greenspun obviously have not read the License Application. Every objection they unscientifically present is addressed therein. Please, read the docuemnt for yourselves before listening to the political winds of distortion from Searchlight and Carson City.
Finally, reprocessing according the IEER creates over six times the amount of high level waste compared to just storing the spent fuel. There is nothing new that will magically solve nuclear waste to eliminate transportation and geologic disposal.
abe and dave, obviously you are 2 people who have actually done the homework and I am in total agreement with your assessment. I did a bunch of research back when Harry first said he was going to "starve" Yucca of funds, and I found that everything he said was unfounded, and the recent study by scientists and researchers are all bought and paid for by this admin to publicize the results they want to hear and that would be in the best interest of their cause. And Dave, I do believe alot of the waste is not from the defense nuclear plants, it is also from power plants and spent fuel from refineries as well as nuclear waste. If I remember correctly, Harrys first complaint was, we aren't a dumping ground, then it was transport, then it was earthquakes, then it was drip shields. I recall the research saying this waste is high level waste, but is refinable. Therefore, we could not only have a storage facility, where we recieve money, we could build a refinery to employ a bunch of people and sell the power which would bring in a bunch of money, but instead, we get to spend millions for Harry to fight against it, 8 billion in a lawsuit to be returned to the respective states, and no revenue for Nevada. We'll have windmills instead. Solar is so expensive, no one can afford it, even with the puney credit they give you.
For Abe VanLuik: The Department of Energy has admitted that the Yucca Mountain Repository leaks. If they did not agree to this flaw they would not have agreed to install titanium drip shields.
Seismicity is a problem at the site and the USGS recommended that surface structures at the Yucca Mountain site be earthquake resistant. Whether or not volcanoes at the site are unlikely is based on models. These models are only correct to the extent that all of the relevant variables are entered into the equation and weighted correctly. I think it would be worthwhile to have these differences subject to a "second opinion" by the scientific experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There are other differences relating to the repository. Some scientists think it should be located below the water table in a non-oxidizing environment The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, composed of scientists, has recommended that the repository be run as a"cold" repository, the choice of some other countries.
Lipton, my first real nuke-wasted job was at Hanford and I was charged with characterizing some of the sites used during the height of the cold war to dispose of reactor wastes, reprocessing waste, and plutonium finishing plant wastes. It was much later that the last running reactor there was made into a power producer, N-reactor, and it was running fine but it was a similar design to that used at Chernobyl so it was shut down even though it had a redundant double cooling system and nothing like Chernobyl would/could have happened.
Now there is a civilian power plant happily operating near the river, near the DOE site, but it is not a DOE reactor and its spent fuel is not government owned.
As to dave's comment about the volume of high-level waste produced in reprocessing, that expansion is true for the defense-related reprocessing process, hence the military side having to pay nearly a third of Yucca's costs for a tenth of the heavy metal inventory. But there is other information out there that talks about modified processes that actually reduce waste volumes, so I'd wait to see what those advanced processes, once they have been demonstrated at the pilot scale, actually produce.
The vision is that in the future we will have advanced reactors fissioning actinides and reducing the longevity of the wastes, and new processing technologies that reduce the waste volumes. Great vision but it all needs to be demonstrated.
UNLV has a very impressive research program into the advanced reactor/actinide "burning" technologies, in collaboration with other name brand universities and national laboratories, and I hope they can keep going in spite of what has happened in this state about things nuclear.
UNLV ought to be in the forefront of a pilot plant on the test site that investigates and demonstrates proposed new reprocessing technologies. That was proposed years ago by our two current Senators, who do, occasionally, have good ideas.
The test site is a poor site for a pilot reprocessing facility. It is a contaminated site. It would be better to have a reprocessing facility at a site with a low background radioactivity level so one could readily detect if the new facility is leaking or emitting radioactive materials.
Another consideration is whether first rate scientists would with families would would want to live in Nevada and the low priority it gives to education funding, to say nothing about pervasive gambling "opportunities".
I agree. We need to move past Yucca Mountain. That idea is dead. It will never happen.
If people don't like it? Tough. I agree wholeheartedly with the present administration. It's not going to happen. They can scream all they want and try to delay, but it's not going to help them. It's just going to waste their time, money and effort.
I could care less about dumb laws that were shoved down Nevada's throat awhile back. It's being corrected now because we have the political help we should have had back then and the funds are turned off forever. I'm tired of other States trying to force Nevada to do what they want. To hell with them... WE control Nevada. They don't.
I encourage Washington and South Carolina to keep spending money for lawyers, court reporters, bailiffs, delays, continuances, mounds of paperwork and whatever else and will be happy to watch it all wasted in a futile effort. Because when they go broke and the taxpayers of those two States start howling they are wasting money down a bottomless hole will they wake up and disregard their dumb agendas. Get ahold of someone else and whine. Because Nevada is out of the equation.
Nevada is controlled by Nevadans. Nobody else. And Senator Reid, along with President Obama and his administration are helping us fight these knuckleheads.
I haven'y heard the comment from DOE that they admitted Yucca leaks. susanne, can you please tell me where that is?
I remember Chernobyl. They never had a melt down, if I remember it right. It was, very very scarey though.
This is all very interesting to me. I also wasn't aware UNLV has a research program. With all the waste out there, there has got to be a way to recycle it safely and productively.
question abe. Obviously all this spent fuel, and nuclear waste has been stored undergound below the facilities that are now full and no where to take it, how is it they have stored this waste successfully, all this time, with no problems I have heard of, what is the big scare here? Other than Nevadans don't want it stored here. I don't quite see it as storing waste, I see it as a recycle, money venture.
@lipton,
Greenspun's editorial stated that both Washington and South Carolina's predominant waste was used to produce cheap energy. For these two states, even though they do have reactors, the vast majority of the waste is from defense activities to produce plutonium for weapons. These states expected the federal government to have the 1998 waste repository start date, not some date after 2030 which is what it will be if Reid/Obama are successful at derailing Yucca Mountain.
As to Colin stating that Nevada is run by Nevadans, who protects Nevada? The other 49 states and 310 million people that's who. Nevada survives off of these people, not the mere 2 million that live in the state. It appears that Democrat Nevadans want every benefit from nuclear power and none of the debt created by it. America should start boycotting Nevada's gambling, just like Obama has said.
Finally, the repository does not "leak". The drip shields are just a secondary corrosion resistant material designed to add redundancy to the system. The titanium was intentionally designed to be put in at the end prior to closure because the engineers and scientists fully expect the material to NOT be needed. A cost saving brilliant idea that is now being used against the design. Word to future designers - don't try to be too intelligent as the detractors won't understand what you are doing.
colin, you seem to forget, there's other states that helped foot the bill for building Yucca, and they have every right to expect their money back. and if you don't think so, then I think the fight vegas has to be reimbursed the money for the water line that never happened, is a moot point, don't you think?
I didn't think it leaked. So with this high level nuclear waste, how difficult would it be to build a refinery near Yucca to recycle all that waste?
susanne, here is where we differ in our perceptions: you say the repository leaks, I say it is free-draining, and what that means is that it will never be totally saturated even under a new ice age.
Seismic events will happen, and it is only responsible to build structures that will withstand them. Underground, earthquakes have little effect, it is the surface where energy is released and so surface facilities need to be reinforced. A funny story is the building in area 25 that was not built to Nevada code because it was built be feds on a fed reservation. It sustained quite a bit of damage like windows popping out after a mild earthquake with an epicenter very nearby. It was brought up to code, and ought to be fine in the next earthquake of this or even greater magnitude.
Nevada's code for large buildings is good in terms of requiring earthquake movements to be anticipated and designed into their structures, meaning they will sway and not be so rigid as to break.
The volcanism in the area is waning, the next volcano will be in the bottom of Death Valley near Ubehebe crater which at 3,000 years is the youngest volcano in the area. But that is my personal opinion. We brought in ten experts with widely diverse experience who looked at the data and modeled it in terms of how likely it would be for a new cinder cone to send an arm, or dike, through the repository. The average answer was several times one-in-a-hundred-million in any given year. That is not the sort of odds one lies awake over, except in Las Vegas where education, as you point out, is not in vogue and where belief in magic at machines that are ruthless money-vacuums is alive and well, as you also pointed out.
There was NWTRB advice to avoid uncertainties by keeping the repository cool, and in direct response we came down from where we were originally headed in terms of thermal design. We spread out the waste to assure that between every 'drift' with waste there would be a below-boiling zone to allow water drainage.
Many, including me, believe that the ideal repository is in a reducing environment, deep under the local water table and therefore away from oxygen. But Congress did not ask if Yucca Mnt. was ideal, it asked if it could be done safely here and the 2002 answer was yes, but it will cost you (partly in terms of buying barrier-metals). Congress' answer was loud and clear: do it! Go to licensing. And here we are.
What is the water table surrounding Yucca Mountain? Isn't the repository built in solid rock? Wasn't that one of the attracting features when looking for a "suitable" site? Wasn"t there like 10 different sites being looked at, with a long citeria list and Yucca being chosen as the best? I also heard rumor some time ago, that there had already been shipments of waste sent to Yucca, under the radar of course.
lipton and davelv:
lipton: Currently pools at reactors is where spent fuel is stored until they are full and then the fuel is moved into surface storage casks, massive casks with vents, made of metals and concrete.
Chernobyl was a graphite-moderated reactor and shutting off the cooling system allowed the graphite to catch fire. We don't do graphite reactors anymore except maybe in a research, small-scale setting.
davelv, I recognize that there is a hope in some people that further research will show the mountain does not need those dripshields. But that was for keeping water seepage away from the waste packages. The major reason to keep them in the design now is to keep rockfalls, predicted to certainly happen in response to earthquakes, off the waste packages for a very long time. So I am not sure they will ever be removed from the design IF a YM repository is ever built.
Another thing is the cost of doing a major change to the licensing basis a hundred or so years from now. It may be cheaper to buy titanium than to buy a new gaggle of lawyers to engage in a new protracted licensing process.
The reason to not install them with the waste packages is to enhance efficiency of cooling while the repository is open, and more importantly, to allow retrieval while the repository is open as required by NRC regulation. Why make potential retrieval more difficult until final closure?
The ability to retrieve is required until final closure, and final closure requires a license amendment with another complete review of the long-term safety basis. Not a good time to try and make a major change in the accepted and licensed design.
Setting aside money for drip-shields now at a decent annual rate will assure the money, and designs, are there for that future generation of workers to do the job. Can we be absolutely sure the work will be done and done correctly then? Can anyone compel the future? Have you tried doing this with kids or grandkids? No, we have to trust there will still be a federal or equivalent government with an NRC or equivalent regulator, and a DOE or equivalent responsible agency. When it comes to the long term future, I trust rock, even YM rock, more than I trust governments to exist in the long term.
Hence my being appalled at hearing we can safely store for several hundreds of years. Who is "we" and how do you know? But trusting in the properties of rock rather than the comptetence and will of governments and their agencies is no doubt an unfounded personal problem. Once something is codified into public-law, we can trust the government to execute that law in the future, right?
lipton, NO waste has been shipped to Yucca, period. there are no facilities to receive waste. Waste is being shipped to the low level waste site for federal wastes on the Nevada Test Site.
Yucca was selected from among other sites because it promised to be easier to build and operate, all the other sites showed the same ability as Yucca to provide 10,000 years of safety, the standard at that time.
It was during the time the sites were being judged that a decision was made to go for the unsaturated part of Yucca Mtn rather than deep under its local water table. An analysis had suggested a possibility of oxygen-rich water at depth.
Given that possibility, the idea then was to rise above the water table. Water would certainly have oxygen, but there would be very little water compared to what is under the water table!
The repository was proposed to be about a thousand feet below the crest, and a thousand feet above the water table. But the current warm and dry climate is not what is to be excepted for all time, so about 80% of future time, like 80% of the last half million years for which there is data, would be cooler and wetter (about 10 degrees cooler in summer and twice as wet, still a desert in the valleys).
So to guard against the increased likelihood of water seeping through the mountain in the future, the engineered system was beefed up. If you look at the fractures in the rock at the proposed repository level, perhaps up to 1 % have seen some seepage to some depth in the present climate, and up to 10% have seen seepage during wetter climates. Hence the precautionary design.
But the bottom line in the license application is what I personally consider an insignificant impact for a million years, a mean value of about 2 millirems per year to someone living about 12 miles away and using groundwater to an extent not seen today at that distance (it is like we moved a farmer from 40 miles away in the Amargosa Farms area to being 12 miles away instead, which is what the regulations prescribed).
abe, I want to thank you for your wealth of knowledge. This is very interesting, and you have shown me a great deal. I don't think most of us have the education to form judgements whether Yucca is a good place or bad place.Much more work needs to be done. I have, however, come to the conclusion, Harry Reid doesn't either, and he has been leading everyone down the primrose path. He hasn't been truthful or informative about Yucca Mtn.
Abe:
How firm is your conviction that earthquakes only cause surface damage? Rangers at Yellowstone claim that a very large, Richter 9+, in Alaska,changed the periodicity of Old Faithful and other geysers at Yellowstone National Park.Is there a chance that very large earthquakes may cause disruptions well below the surface, perhaps transmitting their force through the core of the earth. Now moving to the volcanism experts. Who selected them? I heard that there was quite a spread in their estimates. Some thought a volcanic eruption was 100 times more likely than other experts.
Abe: I will admit that probably the greatest threat to Yucca Mountain is the Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, a former staff member of Harry Reid. It amazes me that he was confirmed by the Senate by a VOICE VOTE. Why didn't one of the numerous Senators who support Yucca Mountain demand a roll call vote? Someone asleep at the switch?
HoustonJac, first off, calling and saying that its a myth that this was gonna provide jobs. Where your source? Where your proof? What documentation do you have to back the validity of your claim. Just another clueless person talking out of his a-shole. ColinfromLasvegas, you need to get a clue as well. First off, by saying that Nevada is run only by Nevadans is kind of an off-shoot statement. I thought there was 50 states, not the continent of Nevada. By saying that only makes the typical Nevadan even look more uneducated to the rest of the country. Federal taxes pay for your states 14 percent unemplyment benefits and SSI. Federal comes from all the states, so how about we have the other forty nine states not contribute to your states funds. Remember, Nevada is broke as hell and I think you need to re-think that next time.
"Federal taxes pay for your states 14 percent unemplyment benefits and SSI. Federal comes from all the states, so how about we have the other forty nine states not contribute to your states funds. Remember, Nevada is broke as hell and I think you need to re-think that next time."
Actually, "vegassucs," Nevada regularly pays more to the federal government in taxes than it gets back, so you're wrong on this count.
If anything, your argument is turned on its head, as Nevada subsidizes other states AND gets screwed with Yucca.
susanne, I don't want to get into personalities but I do not fear Jaczko, he is aware of the weight of his appointment to an INDEPENDENT federal regulatory organization. He is the Chairman, but everything the commission does is by vote, and the commissioners, new and newly appointed, are people I respect and trust to do what they really believe to be right.
About those renowned seismic experts from several recognized institutions, they did differ in their estimates, and the range was from ten times more likely than the avergae to a thousand times less likely, that is why a formal expert elicitation was used, to combine their estimates by probability, giving a range, as well as the mean value I mentioned before. The regulations specify the mean, the median is always used in financial data, but in this case it would have moved everything to the less-likely end of the spectrum, would have made the argument less cautious.
People who live in earthqauke prone areas know the safest places to be are underground. In San Francisco, where freeway bridges fell down, BART (their subway in the same area) was closed for inspection and then reopened with virtually no damage. Same news from several other quakes in large cities, in Japan for instance. I have a friend with the USGS who was sent to Turkey after its massive earthquakes and he visited one of he 1,000 year old underground cities right under a devastated area. He got a private tour and saw no damage. These "cities" were excavated as hiding places for the local Christians when there was religious war raging in the area. Google them, they are interesting.
Of course there are also cases where there have been underground changes, and deaths as a result, especially when the earthquake causes movement along a fault that is approached in a mine, for example, to allow extraction of mineralization along the fault line. But that would not be the case in most places, and would not be the case inside Yucca, which has two bounding faults acting like shock absorbers alongside the block that was proposed for repository use.
Sorry for the wordiness but few things in real life seem to have yes or no answers. Even as simple a question as "do you love me?" often requires a sonnet, unless the answer is really "no."
Abe: What is the justification for using the average rather than the median for the volcanism incidence estimate made by the ten volcanism experts? Susanne E.Vandenbosch
Ksand99, no offense, but your argument is that from every state. Every state claims that their taxes are more of the next state. B.S, I have to be honest, lived in Illinois, Virginia, New Jersey- Nevada's taxes are nothing compared to that of those states. Also, subsidizes what? Nevada? Your kidding? What states benefit from Nevada, its Federal taxes, you don't pay state tax and thats your politicians fault, not other states. Once again, federal funds are allocated and not marked from individual states. Also, please don't act like the rest of the country owes you anything, millions of tourist from other states do plenty to support a one-track-one-sided-we are our own- states economy.
abevanluik- applause for you, its true people. Earthquakes cause more damage above ground, please don't let political red tape jargon ruin over 20 years of scientific evidence.
Susanne, good to see that you are "monitoring" us Nevadans! We can use the adult supervision.
In case readers do not know, Susanne is co- author of "Nuclear Waste Stalemate: Political and Scientific Controversies" which predcted, as you can tell by its title, the current impasse.
Back to statistical terms: The mean is a normal-distribution statistic. The median is also a normal-distribution statistic, and for a truly normal distribution, they are identical.
As one gets into natural systems, distributions tend to be lognormal, meaning if you take the logarithms of the values they would make a normal distribution. As one gets more lognormal, the median separates from the mean considerably, with the mean being influenced by higher values even if they occur less frequently. So the mean begins to be greater than the median the more the distribution resembles a lognormal rather than a normal distribution. In the case of the Yucca Mountain system-level safety assessment results the difference is considerable. Yet the mean is still, even in such cases, seen to be the more acceptable measure, precisely because it is demonstrably more cautious.
In total-system-performance-assessment outcomes, the median is actually at the 50th percentile of the output, while the mean is right near the 86th percentile of the output. Some have felt that the median is the more useful value, but our regulators (with whom I agree) say it is the mean they are interested in for several reasons including communications as well as it being conservative in the case of a lognormal distribution.
I feel like a schoolboy doing an assignment on the blackboard with the teacher looking on with a grim expression. Don't forget that I need to pass to save face here, so please be kind.
Because of the increased earthquake activity
in California and Nevada, Yucca will never
be safe.
No man on earth can state that Yucca will be
safe.
YUCCA IS DEAD.
Yucca will be safe...
Only incompetent men.
Las Vegas is dead
I would also like to thank Abe Van Luik who in this blog, on our tour of Yucca Mountain, at conferences, and through e-mails has been very helpful to us as my husband Robert Vandenbosch and I were writing our book. He is acknowledged in our book but much too briefly considering his contributions, in retrospect.
"Ksand99, no offense, but your argument is that from every state. "
vegassucs, you really have no idea what you're talking about.
Nevada is a donor state:
"Nevada taxpayers receive less federal funding per dollar of federal taxes paid compared to the average state. Per dollar of federal tax collected in 2005, Nevada citizens received approximately $0.65 in the way of federal spending. This ranks the state 49th highest nationally and represents a decrease from 1995, when Nevada received $0.73 per dollar of taxes in federal spending (ranked 48th nationally). "
Nevada subsidizes federal spending in other states.
Darn, you "outed" me to all these nice people, and I had so carefully disguised my name!
You could have just said C- and I would have been happy.
I must say that when your book came out I was not thrilled with its not reflecting my optimism. It predicted a stalemate, and that is a good way to describe the current situation. I recently loaned your book to a coworker and said: "read these pages [I had them marked] and you will see that this was pretty well forseen by the VandenBosches." You two were right, I was wrong.
I will be moving on to work on another DOE project in New Mexico later this Spring, or so it appears right now. I hate leaving Nevada. While my mother was alive we had 4 generations here! We even got to take a 5 generation photo in her house, and shortly after she passed away. Life does go on, however, and it will even go on for me after Yucca is dead and buried.
I will be putting Yucca behind me as Ms. Masto suggests it is time to do. I will retain many fond memories of friends like you and Robert. If I recall correctly you two disagreed with some of my optimistic views of the future, and now that I have seen some of the realities you hinted at I am ready to say "you were right, I was wrong."
Nevada has been good to me. But what we were doing in nevada, in my wholly personal opinion, would have been safe, and helpful to the state and the nation. Few saw it that way. Oh well. It is not the end of the world for me, but we laid off thousands before me and I am not encouraged by what I am hearing about the survival of some of them.
This country is not good at safety nets, but now we are into a wholly different world of arguments and potential disagreements, and it is very late. Good night. --abe--
Dr. van Luik has provided a valuable history of Yucca in the course of this dialogue. Thanks, Abe.
The Dept of Energy provided no scientific or technical basis to support the decision to terminate Yucca other than to say (in the March 3 motion to withdraw the license application from the NRC) that, "the Secretary has decided that a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain is not a workable option." President Obama has referred to the principle that "decisions have consequences." He clearly made a decision in 2007 that it was important in seeking Nevada votes (as did other Democrats during the primary campaigns) to say he opposed Yucca. That pleased Harry Reid and Reid and Obama are together on Yucca and other issues. Now, after talking about it for a year, the administration has brought in a "blue ribbon commission" to find a more "workable" disposal strategy, that will likely take another 20 or more years to implement.
Secretary Chu has said that Yucca is "off the table" and that we can do better, but other than some expression that sufficient R&D and technology advances should yield a better solution in the decades ahead when he and Obama are long gone, Chu has never given a specific reason based on science why Yucca is not workable. Instead, we get the recitation of Nevada assertions like Masto gave as "facts."
Mr. van Luik:
I've said it before in these blogs, as I've attempted in my own small way to defend the proposed repository:
This state doesn't deserve you, though I suspect that you would not agree with me on that point, which is to your credit.
Here's the true unspoken fact that Nevadans should know as they gloat and cheer for the coming demise of the Yucca Mountain Project:
We Nevadans would be lucky indeed to have more people like Mr. van Luik working for important projects in this state. We would all be safer and better off with people of his caliber doing such work.
Instead, we are driving him and many others like him out of the state; many scientists and engineers have told me -- anecdotally, I admit -- that Nevada has acquired a "reputation" for being anti-science, and therefore they would never consider moving here, even though the landscape provides excellent research opportunities for geologists and seismologists especially.
Oh, well. There's always gambling, real estate development, and service industry jobs. That will keep Colin and other pseudo state's rights cheerleaders happy.
I, meanwhile, will quietly wish Mr. van Luik best of luck in his next project, and be happy for him that he has "escaped" Nevada, even if he is too generous to accept that characterization.
An example of Masto's lies:
"Even the U.S. Energy Department has acknowledged that the geology at Yucca contributes almost nothing to waste isolation and protection."
THAT IS A LIE.
Here's the truth:
The surface features and geology above the repository prevent or substantially reduce seepage into the drifts by damping episodic flow and diverting flow around drift openings through a combination of capillarity and thermal processes. Hence, the natural features of the site above the repository are expected to limit seepage to a few percent of the total percolation flux.
Similarly, the natural features below the repository prevent or substantially reduce releases by slow advective transport, matrix diffusion, and radionuclide sorption processes. These features also substantially reduce releases through a combination of low groundwater flow rates, matrix diffusion, sorption, and filtration of colloids.
All of this information is readily available on NRC's website and in the Yucca Mountain license application.
Thanks for taking the time and effort to articulate so carefully these movings and shakings.
Back when 'Too cheap to meter' was the billboard for nukies in our backyards, none of these details had rolled around to collective consciousness. We bought the baby.
Now the piles of spent fuel mound; Yucca's billions are apparently a repository of 'rush to dump and ask questions later!' kind of thinking we have all experienced.
Terrorists with eyes on goofing us up are probably salivating at the renewed prospects of readily available and horrible stuff to wreak havoc on paradise.
I say thanks:
to Obama for admitting it's a bad idea.
to Masto for clarifying it.
and especially to Susanne and Abe for sharing their life work on such a thankless labor of love.
Being a geezer revisiting this issue time after time since before the bomb, I've blown hot and cold on the nukes, climate change notwithstanding.
Look how the abundance has spawned such waste, greed and senseless overgrowth of worthless and even anti-cultural elements, especially in Vegas, but in Western culture in general, benefitting from abundant resources and technological advancement such as nuclear power.
Now facing the oft-hidden issue of nuclear waste storage to span a period of time that most people can't well imagine with stuff whose nukie-dookie remains dooky for eternity, we balk.
We have bitten off more than we can chew, in seven thousand lifetimes!
First, do no harm.
Too late for that! We're doing it all over.
wasn't the last earthquake in Nevada even worth mentioning back in the late 1800's or early 1900's? And isn't the majority of the quakes here, in the northern portion of the state?
lipton,
500,000 years
and you are inquiring about a couple a hundred miles.
By then the lines will be blurred and double-crossed.
Gambling with nukie-dooky. Fast and loose.
I like to think ahead, but,500,000 years ahead is a tad much, don't you think? and in 500,000 years, IF, there were people here, they would probably laugh at all the old scaredy cats worried about a little nuclear waste.Or by then, nuke anything will be obsolete, and they will have something else to worry about.
and speaking of looking ahead, Nevada can expect a bill for 8 billion to pay back the states that contributed to the building of Yucca.
Very good article. I also very much enjoyed the dialog above.
When we look to the future of physics it is not likely that anything like nuclear waste would be sitting around for long. Indeed it just may be that one eras trash is another eras treasure. Looking at the nuclear equation (Wiki) for the Traveling Wave Reactors mechanism proposing to use waste as fuel is inspiring at this time in Nevada History. It is refreshing that Bill Gates is pushing this new effort.
In the ending of his history on nuclear physics: Inward Bound, Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Abrahm Pais tells a little story. I believe it is fitting for the discussion and letter above:
A visitor to Washington D.C. was traveling in a cab and noticed the statue of the woman seated with a book on her lap near the National Archives. Inscribed on the base of the statue was the phrase:
" What Is Past Is Prologue"
Puzzled by this inscription the visitor asked the cab driver what it meant. To which the cabbie replied " It means you ain't seen nothing yet".
Dunping nuclear waste in a hole in the ground
is old science.
Yucca will never be safe.
We need to move into the future.
Recycle nuclear waste at each site.
Several years before 9/11, I took a fellow of middle-eastern descent through a major energy plant in the US, as directed by my boss. After our study of the facilities, we sat over a cup of tea and I found out things about the gentleman that continue to frighten me.
A radical extremist, he talked of the evil of George W Bush, the governor of Texas, and spoke of horrible events to come. He even wrote down on a blue post-it note the date, 9/11. I remember seeing it upside down. I asked about it," one one six?" "No, 9/one one", he said.
After the attack, of course I called the boss to see if he remembered the fella. Nope. I called and spoke to the federales, but, you know that guy knew about 9/11 years before it came down, had inside info on nukes, was basicly a bad element looking to do harm and he's still out there.
airwave, that is very frightening, and these threads is probably not the best place to vent that scarey event.
Teamster, it it were feasible to do that, wouldn't you think the smarties in Washington would have thought of that already? Efficiency and cost comes to mind.
abe or dave, why can't that be done? what teamster asked.
Recycling, the way it is done right now, is a very messy business. You cut up the fuel rods, remotely, with saws and dispose of the metal parts without fuel in them. Parts with fuel are then lowered into a nitric acid bath and dissolved, then the liquid is treated chemically to separate out several different types of chemical/isotopic constituents. The fissile materials are mixed with the non-fissile uranium to custom make a mixed plutonium/uranium oxide fuel for use in reactors.
The leftovers, in solution, are neutralized and concentrated and poured into molten sand and cooled to make glass logs of high-level waste that are disposed of in a repository. These are complicated processes. To do them in an environmentally responsible way requires lots of good enginering, design, and operational care and discipline. To do this at many sites on a small scale is madness.
To do it in one or two centralized locations makes good sense although it will drive up the price of nuclear electricity. Reprocessing to make mized-oxide fuel is more expensive than buying new fuel made with uranium ore that is then enriched to bring its fissile uranium content up to where it will help sustain criticality inside a reactor.
All of this effort, simply to boil water! But boiling water to make power is a noble pursuit!
One way to do this differently is to build several new reactors around the country that are much like the Canadian CANDU reactors. These are heavy-water, instead of light-water, reactors. They can use un-enriched nuclear fuel, with uranium straight from the mines. But they require deuterium in their water to control the neutron flux that sustains a critical reaction. There is always a catch.
The point is that CANDU reactors could "burn" (NOT an accurate descriptive word) US reactor spent fuel and reduce its radiotoxicity some and create more energy. You still have to dispose of spent fuel, but you have gotten lots more energy out of the original fuel.
There are other processes on the drawing boards of research institutions across the world, and hopefully this is the sort of thing the Blue Ribbon Commission will be sorting through and making recommendations on next year. There is nothing simple about this problem. Burying the spent fuel presently on hand makes good sense to me, contrary to Teamster's opinion, because reprocessing, once it gets going, will --if the facility is large enough-- be able to take care of new fuel arising from reactors. You would have to have two such facilities to reach back in time and take care of the "legacy" spent fuel that exists now already. That is not a reasonable investment for the nation to make, in my --never humble but aways personal-- opinion.
Yucca Mountain should have never been built in the first place -
- but now it's there and the local economy needs the jobs & the storage fees -
- In fact we should take a cue from the Alaska pipeline, the nuclear storage fees should totally fund the state of Nevada.
Once upon a time someone launched a theory that packing the spent fuel onto a space ship and reassigning the nuclear activity to a space life was a good idea.
In fact, it appears no less desperate than Yucca.
"Launch it. No. Bury it!...No..."
If we truly gave a hoot about our kids and theirs, we wouldn't be making the stuff in the first place.
Our trust in a magic fix from the future is another way of kicking the can down the road because we want the juice but not the can it comes in.
That's sensible, but tell me who cares about sensible? It's about 'my whatever!'
It's okay to take whatever we want and leave paradise trashed.
Remember when a dead whale washed up on an Oregon beach?
They wrapped the whale in explosives.
Film crew caught the action: plunger, whale blew all over crowd, film crew, beach, etc. Stunk for weeks.
what would you have them do with the dead whale? why were these people so close when they did this, knowing what would happen? I must say, there was no dignity for that whale in what they did, so why exactly did they choose to do this vs disposing of it in a dignified manner? and what does that have to do with the subject?
So, its ok to take "certain" things you want and leave paradise trashed?
I still believe that we should store nuclear
waste, at each site, until we decide how we
can best handle it.
We have our work cut out for us.
abevanluik.......
Great post and opinion.
It was good news indeed to hear that Abe has another job. I am concerned for those who have not been so fortunate so far. Many have experienced a decrease in their home values and decreased value of their pension account in addition to losing their Yucca Mountain job. It must seem overwhelming especially in a region where unemployment is already high. Some may have to leave family and friends and move to another region. For eight years I commuted over 1500 miles to visit my husband.I could not find a job in the same town.
I'm not a physicist but maybe this is going to the right crowd, just a question, off topic but I am curious to know how far out this idea is.
If you produce Hydrogen from sea water using perhaps something like solar, wind, wave generators ...... and then burn it to generate electricity ..... now it's been a long time but I seem to remember from chemistry class in high school, the byproduct is H2O .... right? You produce water .... clean, clear, water?
The Yucca Mountain ball is still up in the air. On June 29 the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied DOE the right to withdraw the Yucca Mountain license application. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the power to overrule the ruling of the ASLB. Even that is not the end of the matter. No matter how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules there will be appeals to the Federal DC Court of Appeals which plans to hold hearings in September. Susanne E. Vandenbosch