Comments on: The danger of spent-fuel rods and the Yucca Mountain project

By: patworth

patworth — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:33:11 +0000

I agree with ulan2345….Recycle and reduce…Since Yucca Mountain is about ready, we can send a much smaller amount.Billions of dollars have already been spent on studies and building, and still no storage. Taxpayers cannot afford more. Recycling nuclear will cost, but better to start now than spend billions more looking for alternative and end up in the same place we are now.

By: ulan2345

ulan2345 — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:20:46 +0000

A much better solution does indeed exist. It’s called recycling. Recycling nuclear fuel would allow us to conserve precious resources and reduces the amount of waste we must send to a repository like Yucca Mountain. Every nation with a significant nuclear sector, with the exception of the U.S., recycles its nuclear fuel. Recycling makes nuclear energy more sustainable — We should take this opportunity to reconsider this option.

By: TheBWRexpert

TheBWRexpert — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 03:26:07 +0000

To “kyle7624″: How many launch accidents are experienced every 100 attempts? Do you really want to risk spreading nuclear waste across the planet? Whoops, has already been done by the surface and atmospherice testing of nuclear weapons. It seems almost anything can be done for the cause of “national security”. Perhaps we see now that dealing with spent nuclear fuel should be such a cause.

What is wrong with placing nuclear wastes into casks and lowering those casks into the deep ocean subduction zones and letting plate tectonics carry them back deep into the molten core from which all radioactive minerals originated? The Russians have already done this in the Artic but they did not bother to seek out a deep subduction zone.

By: Stewinthefat

Stewinthefat — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:15:12 +0000

Firing nuclear waste products at the sun seems a little extreme. Firing heavily refined nuclear waste at Mercury using Delta IV heavy payload rockets ?

By: halloween

halloween — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:27:44 +0000

Store them underneath the white house, put it back in their own backyard.

By: TownDrunk

TownDrunk — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:30:37 +0000

No source of energy is without a tradeoff. since 2010 people were killed when an oil platform exploded and the oil well spewed oil in the gulf for several months. miners were killed in a WVA mine. coal, oil and gas spew tons of carbon into our atmosphere by the second. i’m having a hard time understanding why we are not working harder at making a nuclear a better long term option. the technology is there to do this safely. we just need the will.

By: kyle7624

kyle7624 — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:24:29 +0000

This may seem silly but why can’t we put this stuff in rockets and shoot it at the sun?

By: thothy

thothy — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:48:20 +0000

Thank you cyberleptic for saying what is truly honest. Furthermore, since we’re on the subject of earthquakes, do you know the real reason why they cancelled the Yucca Mountain project? I believe there were three small scale earthquakes less than 20 miles from the mountain. Are you telling me that humans will be able to safely store radioactive material in a fault-encrusted zone for 500,000 years?

By: John2244

John2244 — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 06:52:53 +0000

We treat radioactivity as its some magic force. Natural radioactivity is all around us. If we added up all the natural radioactivity on the planet. It dwarfs by a factors of millions what we produce in fuel rods. If you look at the radioactive elements in space its zillions of times more. But thats why our planet special circumstance has allowed life to evolve. We have water, we have oxygen, and we have many 100′s of other perfect things – including a zone with a low amount of radioactivity. Why wouldn’t we put it deep in the earth? There have been giant natural nuclear reactors below ground and its never hurt us. Any event that would push those up is so gigantic that the radioactivity gets dispersed to a safe level. The other irony is by destroying our atmosphere by burning oil we risk damaging our protection from cosmic radiation which we much worse than any nuclear plant meltdown. We always talk about global warming but there are elements of climate change that could kill us all within 20 years; one of those is a drastic increase in stellar radiation.

Solution: Make nuclear plants, demystify radioactivity, accept we will have some deaths from accidents, minimize these accidents by getting rid of waste below ground, understand that fossil fuels risk killing more people but in a less dramatic fashion and invest in lowering the cost of tidal, wind, solar, geo energy which every intelligent scientist knows will provide 100% of our energy in 100 years anyway. All we have to do is make it a few more decades – during this time storing concentrated radioactive material in the very small habitable zone that we live in not very smart. Yucca is a good idea but we need a few dozen of these sites that would compete for the business around the world.

By: pavlaki

pavlaki — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:17:42 +0000

So you would rather we waste our valuable hydrocarbon reserves,remain dependent upon unstable regimes for our energy supplies, create CO2 and pollute the world today? And please don’t suggest windmills will cure all or that we should all cut back – it will never happen.