Mikey will eat it.

Not to mention they just had a 4.4 earthquake close to
it

href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/06/14/ state1134EDT0052.DTL"

There has to be some way to lower the half life on that stuff. That's what they should be working on, not a permanent hazard.

I'd bet 7 billion some corporate is protecting a contract for the containers with a little help from their Congressmen.

Another broken promise. Well, hopefully the people who voted for Bush because he vowed not to dump nuclear waste in their state, will find a decent politician (and I use the term "decent" loosely) to vote for, next time.

Why don't they just fart until shiat starts running down their legs?

What a good idea...
You're a genius.

They also ship via over-the-road big rigs. This is nothing new, they have been moving stuff this way for many years. On my honeymoon, going through the Smokey Mountains, we got re-routed some 80 miles because a truck crashed going down a steep grade. Right now, it seems there is no real alternative to safe disposal of the stuff. Someone suggested using the shuttle to launch it into the sun....then someone mentioned the Challenger explosion...shut that idea down quickly.

Until there is an alternative to nuclear, this will continue to be a problem unfortunately. (BTW the honeymoon was in 1975, so it has been at least that long ago.)

lucky for us then that neccesity is the mother of invention.

If they ship it to Antartica, maybe the penguins will mutate fast enough to be ready to take the reigns of the planet by the time we blow ourselves up.

Slayer is numero uno (don't fark with me, or I will kill you). Therefore, I will read this. Good luck.

They should make a humongous 3-man water balloon launcher and hurl the stuff into the icy reaches of space. Make some use of the Gateway Arch.

Scrotar - Thanks...that cracked me up visualizing the arch that way.

Actually, Scrotar, NASA is looking into using rail guns to shoot payloads into low orbit...perhaps that technology could be modified to fit this particular task.

"Also undecided are whether the shipments would be mainly by rail or by truck and the design of shipping containers."

This is misleading. There are plenty of good container designs, many already in use for the shipments that already take place (the first part of the article even admits that these things are already shipped). The only thing that may be undecided is WHICH system to use. The article makes it sound like the DOE doesn't have any containers that can do the job.

The simple fact is that the Yucca mountain site will store the waste for the long long long term. Such a site is an absolute necessity. The waste CAN'T be left where it is. The chance of contamination through accident or simple leakage over time is far far greater leaving this stuff scattered all over the country, even if you take transport into account. You ship it once to a safe and permanent location and you're done with it. You can watch for leaks and guard the material against theft etc in one location. It is the only rational choice.

They plan on shipping this stuff on the Interstate 80, which is like, 7 minutes from my house.

Scary prospect.

OH!
I so dont want any of this stuff coming NEAR my beloved city of sin!
I VOTED NO on this crap!
GRRRRR
/rant

SHIP it safely??? It's going to be STORED on a VOLANIC FAULT LINE.

Do you have any IDEA what that MEANS???

It means there might be a sequel to the made-for-TV movie 'Atomic Twister'.

Waste not...Want not...

stick it up your arses!

Mutant chicks are easy.. they should store this stuff by my town.

Its a pity nuclear waste is so heavy, traditional "waste" from traditional oil/coal/gas power plants can just be dumped into the sky and it floats away, just like the political problem it represents, no worries eh ?

Nobody seems to consider the environmental impact of gas and oil pipes, or how earthquakes and terrorists could attack them, or the huge pollution caused by transporting huge amounts of coal.

Nuke is the bad boy, but nuke is the way to go, cleanest state in America is Vermont and its also mainly nuclear powered.

http://www.gilder.com/AmericanSpectatorArticles/TuckerNuclearMay-June.htm

What a waste before Carter the plan was to take the spent fuel and recycle it untill their was not much fissile material left vastly reducing the need for a long term repository.

The best place for this waste is actualy in the deep oceans. Put it in the subduction zones after it has been vitrified and its on a 100-900 million year round trip to the deep mantle. By the time it comes back to the surface the cockroach men or whateverthe hell is around then will find it completely harmless.

White Raven is totally completely 100% correct.

Jashter, I can see I-80 from my house, about 30 seconds away. It's kind of scarey, but the alternatives are worse.

Don't care when or how, but the best routes would be those that go thru Kentucky and Arkansas.

To whoever suggested altering half-lives -- Can't be done. It's not a chemical process, it's statistical and not subject to influence.

As for all who moan about transportation problems -- Have you ever seen one of the casks it gets shipped in? They're subject to all kind of stress tests, like being hit by trains going at 90mph, and they don't come close to rupturing.

The problem with activists is that it takes 30 seconds to tell someone nuclear is bad, but it'd take a day or two to sit someone down and explain how everything works and show them how it isn't bad.

I ain't reading the article, since I already know what it's about.

How do I know?

The daily show!

Why the hell can so many news stories from the daily show be also found on Fark?

DrUnne: Aren't they also vitrifying (sp?) the stuff?

People talk of it leaking and getting into water which doesn't quie happen when the stuff is glass.

Why not seal it in flimsy plastic barrles, put Chinese government stickers on it and throw it in the sea? Problem solved.

Timmyneutron:

The best place for this waste is actualy in the deep oceans. Put it in the subduction zones after it has been vitrified and its on a 100-900 million year round trip to the deep mantle. By the time it comes back to the surface the cockroach men or whateverthe hell is around then will find it completely harmless.

thinking about it in a terrane accretion context (the newest subduction/plate tectonics idea where little bits of stuff stick to the sides of continents because it's too buoyant or sticky to sink), it's kind of a scary thought. but still, the timescale is so long for subducted stuff to move anywhere (about as fast as your fingernails grow...on the order of a few mm to cm/year), it probably wouldn't matter much unless something went horribly wrong.


out of the whole yucca mountain concept, the transportation stuff doesn't bug me. nor does the fact that an earthquake can rock the area (they planned for that already...it's subject to a lot of small earthquakes to begin with). the idea of groundwater contamination also doesn't scare me too much (three miles down, or something like that, in a very confined aquifer...plus they've designed some really nifty containers to hold the waste...you wondered where your tax dollars were going?).

the thing that bugs me the most is the fact that all of that spent nuclear fuel can be used again through some process that re-enriches it, if you will. because people fear that the terrorists will get ahold of it, they won't let anyone reuse that shiat. therefore, it piles up and this is what we have to do with it. biatches.

www.mapscience.org
Use this site to find out how close you live to a proposed nuclear route.

Behind the Yucca Mountain project

Let's see, if the nuclear waste is kept where it is, it will simply continue to contaminate the sites and leak into the groundwater (most of the existing facilities are not built well). But, they don't want to allow it to be transported to Yucca Mountain (despite the fact that nuclear waste is already routinely transported around the nation). And they don't want to store it at Yucca Mountain.

It seems like these critics don't like any solution and never will. Yucca Mountain is probably the best solution. Not perfect, but it is the best.

The scariest part is, even if the waste is sent to Yucca Mountain safely, it still won't get all of it out of your state. The DOE was busted yesterday for lying about that.

Are there any New Mexico farkers or DOE farkers who know about WIPP? I did a project there in college. Is it ever going to be operational?
For those who don't know WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Program) is a site just outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico where the gov't was planning on storing low-level nuclear waste. The storage facility is located underground and has been supposedly geologically stable for the last million years or so.

the article in National Geographic about Yucca quotes one of the government scientists who helped design it as saying they tested containment based on 40 year old tests which they felt were obsolete, and that a government 'watchdog' group only describes the science upon which Yucca is based to be 'weak to moderate' in reliablility.

Madchatter- I checked out that website. What's even scarier than seeing how close you are, is seeing how close places like the Sears Tower are to the routes

I just checked the WIPP website and they have been operational for 3 years.

KevinofOZ--these sites will not contaminate groundwater, they are located beneath the water table. As far as construction, they are just hollowed out mountains with a few support beams. They are designed to be backfilled once they are full.

White Raven, you really need to read this:
http://www.ewg.org/news/story.php?id=886

Yucca mountain won't hold all the waste- it would barely hold any of it. The Department of Energy has been lying this whole time.

It's all a conspiracy! Nuclear power is the devil!

Do the people bashing the waste storage know the first thing about nuclear waste, what radiation is, etc? I work with a reactor, handle radioactive materials, and I only glow slightly at night. Fearmongers are the ones that are the real evil.

The politicians are missing a huge opportunity. The answer is simple. Hook the railcars full of the shiat onto Amtrak trains. Rather than just handing Amtrak $200,000,000 to keep it running, PAY them to haul it to Yucca Mountain.

Does anybody remember the opening of one of the naked gun movies where president Bush Sr. was meeting with all of the energy company heads. Mr. Sununu (this spelling doesn't look right) was introducing their orginizations, society for more coal energy SMOKE, nuclear was KABOOM. How appropriate.

Heheh heheh hehe -- I used their website's "email your senators" page to send a warning that these messages are the parroted concerns of those temporarily scared by the website's misleading statistics.

Hey look! I live by a nuclear path!

Kinda Scary, isn't it?

They could just shoot the stuff at the sun where it would be destroyed.

Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest form of energy we've got. I wish you greenies would edumacate yourselves and quit wasting all of our time with your unwarranted, unfounded propaganda.

I love how you guys think the mapscience info is misleading, since it all came straight from the department of energy. "Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest form of energy we've got. I wish you greenies would edumacate yourselves and quit wasting all of our time with your unwarranted, unfounded propaganda."

Um, sounds like you're spewing some propaganda yourself there, Bill O'Reilly.

If you can, read the National Geographic article from the July 2002 issue (it should be at your local library if you don't get it). Fairly unbiased (I thought). Just remember they keep all of that waste sub-critical during transportation, so don't expect a mushroom cloud to be hanging over your house just because it's near the freeway.

WIPP gets a lot of really low-level stuff, like medical wastes and the sort. I've had some tests where they injected radioactive tracers, and I bet the needles ended up there.

Half-lives don't necessarily indicate how dangerous something is, just how long it will be radioactive. Generally, the longer the half-life, the less intense the radiation.

Thank you very much White Raven, Dr.Unne, and Farked_up_repugant_shiate. The real facts are out there. I live and work with radiation. I live 5 miles away from the nuclear power plant where I work each day. And you get more radiation from sleeping next to your wife/husband/whatever each yeah than I do from working at the plant. That's right, people are naturally radioactive (potassium 40). In small amounts (which is all we are really ever exposed to), radiation is not going to kill you. In fact, some research suggests it may help your cells. But that's a different topic.
Yucca is a good plan. It goes a long way towards reducing the number of terrorist targets by consolidating all of our spent fuel. The shipment is not an issue. You have probably driven right next to trucks holding nuclear fuel and not even known it. The shipment casks are indestructible. They have been tested extensively to ensure integrity. Why would the industry allow something that was not safe? No one is trying to harm the public. We need Yucca so we can continue to provide America with 20% of the energy it uses each year.
This is a topic near and dear, but I'll get off my soapbox. UC out.