Obama wants to cancel Yucca Mountain funding

Looks like the Obama administration has made a decision that the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is no longer a project that they want to fund, and has proposed that it be basically dropped from next years Department of Energy budget.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030303638.html

My own feelings on this are mixed. On the one hand, the Yucca Mountain site is really a waste of money, because the "nuclear waste" that would have been stored there (which is only labeled as "waste" because stupid Cold War political decisions prevent it from being reprocessed into useful reactor fuel) is perfectly fine being stored as it currently is, in sealed casks at the various nuclear power plants where it is being produced. So the loss of the Yucca Mountain site really doesn't take away a facility that we needed.

On the other hand, this decision seems to have gone through under heavy political pressure from anti-nuclear groups and Nevadan NIMBYism (Harry Reid obviously pushed for this), and on the political level, it isn't good for the American nuclear power industry. The last thing that industry needs right now is for people's unreasonable fears to be reinforced by political decisions that pander to them, especially coming from a popular president; it sets a bad trend.

What do you fine folks think of this issue?

That is, quite literally, what I think of that issue.

On the one hand, nuclear power is much cleaner than most other non-renewable sources we have and it's certainly a good thing for the world to have more nuclear power plants until we find a proper alternative (which we would still need to devote time/money to).

However, a waste of money is a waste of money. And in an economy like what we have currently, that doesn't stand.

So what do they plan to do with all the nuclear "waste"?

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Originally Posted by Anonymous D

So what do they plan to do with all the nuclear "waste"?

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As I said, it will continue to be stored in the same places it is currently being stored, which is on-site at the power plants producing it. Right now, every nuclear power plant in the US has a building where the spent fuel rods from the reactors are stored in big sealed casks. So the "waste" is distributed throughout the country at numerous different locations. The idea behind Yucca Mountain was to consolidate it all in a single ultra-secure facility; now that Yucca Mountain has been canceled, the "waste" will stay where it is, stored at nuclear power plants around the country, until the government figures out what they really want to do with it (which will hopefully be reprocessing it so that it can be used again, like every other country that operates nuclear power plants, because right now we are treating fuel as "waste" when it still has like 95% of it's usable energy).

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Originally Posted by Syme

The last thing that industry needs right now is for people's unreasonable fears to be reinforced by political decisions that pander to them, especially coming from a popular president; it sets a bad trend.

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Well the funny thing is, I agree, largely, the understanding that people having about dangers of nuclear power, materials etc is often bizarrely seperated from the facts.

BUT - is it not true that even this being the case, that the leadership of a democratic nations is intended foremost to respond to the will of the people? This is one example, but what of others where the beliefs of the people is different to the government, and may indeed be correct? E.G. torture and Guantanamo bay, Iraq invasion, Global Warming. If the government and the people disagree fundamentally on major issues, then it is the job of the govenment to attempt to sway their opinion in the direction the government believes is correct. If they succeed, then all good and well, but if they fail, then behooves a true and loyal government to serve it's people best by obeying their will, regardless. The realisation of scientific understanding, afterall, is brought about by testing beliefs and learning from being proven wrong.

I'd be more (and frankly often am) disturbed by democratic governments that chose to prioritise the financial needs of a given industry over the demands of the general public. I totally agree that scientific reality should be essential to the operation and direction of good goverment, and that scientific fact may say a certain thing, but if the will of the people runs in a direction overwhelmingly contrary to known scientific fact, it is the governments responsibility to properly inform and thereby affect a change to that will, not to simply ignore and override the will of the people.

Yeah, I mean I agree that this decision seems to represent popular sentiment (or at least popular Nevadan sentiment as expressed through Harry Reid, whose friendship is politically important to Obama and thus can get concessions from him when he needs them). I'm not necessarily saying the government should have bucked the populace on this one, and in fact the Yucca Mountain site WAS an unnecessary waste of money, so it was probably a good thing to get rid of. I'm just lamenting the fact that this decision--representative as it may be of the public will--is also probably going to help cement and validate anti-nuclear sentiment/NIMBYism. And that's a bad thing for the country, no matter how popular it is.

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Originally Posted by MrShrike

BUT - is it not true that even this being the case, that the leadership of a democratic nations is intended foremost to respond to the will of the people?

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What good is the will of the people if the people are misinformed and swayed by falsities?

Sure....but what good is the will of the government if the politicians are misinformed and swayed by falsities?

How do you have any assurance that one is more accurate than the other?

Ultimately, you don't, in my view. There are experts in government you might say, but so are there in the general public. So the clincher then becomes, what is worse; a government that always acts faithfully according to the will of the people, but sometimes in error because the people's will is in error, OR a government that always acts according to it's own will, even when it is in error, and even when the people declare it to be so?

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Originally Posted by MrShrike

Sure....but what good is the will of the government if the politicians are misinformed and swayed by falsities?

How do you have any assurance that one is more accurate than the other?

Ultimately, you don't, in my view. There are experts in government you might say, but so are there in the general public.

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But the experts in government actually play a meaningful role in making government decisions, while the experts in the general public don't play a meaningful role in forming public opinion. The government hired it's experts expressly for the purpose of advising and informing it's decision-makers; sometimes, the experts ARE the decision-makers. Public opinion doesn't attach a large amount of significance to the advice of the small number of experts mixed into the general public, though; the influence of the experts (or even of well-informed laymen) is directly related to the proportion of the general public which they comprise, and that proportion is small. The small number of experts in the general public don't have much sway on public opinion simply because most people don't consult the experts before formulating their opinion on nuclear safety. Public opinion on Yucca Mountain certainly didn't reflect the knowledge of the experts, because if it had, the public opinion wouldn't have been nearly so negative.

Again, I'm not necessarily saying the government should have bucked public opinion on this one, but it doesn't really make sense to claim that public opinion is just as valid as government decisions because the public has experts too.

Most on-site storage facilities in nuclear plants are nearing full. That was the original driver for the Yucca Mountain facility. I think the stat on it is that the originally planned size of the Yucca facility could fit less than half of the current nuclear waste. The reason Yucca Mountain is necessary is because of the ban on new nuclear facilities, many of these nuclear plants (and their associated waste storage facilities) are nearing the end of their original life expectancy and they can't be replaced. There is also the post-9/11 national security issue, in that a central storage location in such a location as Yucca Mountain would be secured from any sort of dirty-bomb attack.

The overall solution to the energy crisis is to decommission all coal plants, including "clean coal," at the end of their life span and ban new construction. Allow construction of new nuclear plants with waste reprocessing. Finally, finish the Yucca Mountain facility to store the end-product waste as necessary.

Obama is really just showing that he has no interest in change inasmuchas change is a reversal of anything that happened in the last 8 years and generally overextending the federal governments power.

But if waste reprocessing were allowed, Yucca Mountain (or any other waste storage facility) wouldn't be needed in the first place. Yucca Mountain exists mainly to store used nuclear fuel (the stuff from inside "spent" fuel rods), and that's the same stuff that gets reprocessed and reused when reprocessing is allowed. Your proposed energy solution sounds good, except for the part about finishing Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is unnecessary when fuel is reprocessed.

Except for the practical constraints on technology implementation. You can't pass a law allowing reprocessing and expect there to be any successful reprocessing efforts for at least two years. In all likelihood, it would be end up mostly implemented in new plants and would be prohibitively expensive in old plants nearing the end of their lives.

My understanding is that reprocessing is usually done at specialized facilities that take in used fuel rods from many power plants, rather than being done at each individual plant; it would be impractical for each nuclear power plant to do it's own reprocessing on-site. For instance France has 59 nuclear power plants, but all the reprocessing is handled at only two facilities, La Hague and Marcoule. All the plants send their used rods to one of those two facilities, which reprocess the fuel and send it back to the plants for re-use. So the age of the power plants shouldn't have anything to do with the cost or feasibility of reprocessing used fuel from those plants; reprocessing fuel from a 40-year-old plant would be no more expensive than reprocessing fuel from a brand-new plant.

It's true that there would be a gap of several years between a decision to allow reprocessing and the beginning of serious reprocessing operations, but would that gap be sufficiently large to necessitate, or even allow, the construction of a Yucca Mountain-type facility to store the fuel before reprocessing began? That type of facility requires many years to construct.

It's still expensive to retrofit from a supply-chain standpoint, and doesn't address the fact that, at the end of the day, reprocessing doesn't eliminate all waste. Nor does it address the issue of there being a ton of antiquated facilities nearly full with nuclear waste prone to attack.

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Originally Posted by Atmosfear

It's still expensive to retrofit from a supply-chain standpoint...

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Right, expensive it may be, but that's just the cost of doing business; the expense is perfectly worthwhile when put into perspective with the benefits of fuel reprocessing. Refitting the supply chains shouldn't be significantly more expensive for old plants than it is for new ones, either.

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Originally Posted by Atmosfear

...and doesn't address the fact that, at the end of the day, reprocessing doesn't eliminate all waste. Nor does it address the issue of there being a ton of antiquated facilities nearly full with nuclear waste prone to attack.

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I'd agree that there would still need to be some sort of repository for certain materials, but I'm definitely comfortable saying that anything like Yucca Mountain is really excessive if we reprocess fuel instead of just letting "spent" rods pile up. The French, for instance, do have a secure repository to store the waste that's left over after reprocessing, but it's much less of a production than Yucca Mountain would have been. And a lot of the waste in question (irradiated reactor components, garments, etc.) isn't dangerous enough to be useful to terrorists so I really see no reason it can't be stored on-site at plants, or just buried in shallow landfill-type repositories (this stuff often poses no danger of soil/water contamination).

Fusion reactors are really the future. Nuclear fission is dangerous and harmful with all the radioactive waste. I'm not sure what the estimates are, but some time down the road, I'm sure fusion reactors will have developed well enough to be a viable power source.

If you have no idea what nuclear fusion is, it's what the sun does. Hydrogen plasma at millions of degrees forming into Helium.

Fusion reactors may be the future but it's too long a way off to be relevant to this discussion. Nuclear power is really not as dangerous/harmful as a lot of the hippy protesters say it is. It's certainly makes a lot more sense to focus on this rather than coal, if only for the time being.

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Originally Posted by j883376

Fusion reactors are really the future. Nuclear fission is dangerous and harmful with all the radioactive waste. I'm not sure what the estimates are, but some time down the road, I'm sure fusion reactors will have developed well enough to be a viable power source.

If you have no idea what nuclear fusion is, it's what the sun does. Hydrogen plasma at millions of degrees forming into Helium.

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Fusion power, at least in the forms being explored right now, actually would produce some nuclear waste; for instance, heavily irradiated reactor components. It's very hard to expose materials to intensive neutron flux without making those materials become radioactive themselves via a process known as neutron activation. Although it is true that this would produce less waste than fission plants even with reprocessing. I wouldn't describe fission as "dangerous and harmful", though. The volume of waste produced is comparatively tiny and can be stored away safely with comparative ease. If the right steps are taken, nuclear power isn't dangerous and harmful to anyone. And, again, the most radioactive types of "waste" can be reprocessed and reused instead of being allowed to go to waste. Anyhow, fusion power is at least several decades away, so fission is our best bet for a while.

For the record, the form of fusion that occurs in the sun (proton-proton fusion, i.e. hydrogen ions fusing into helium) is NOT the same form of fusion that is being explored in current fusion research. Current fusion research focuses on the deuterium-tritium reaction, and to a lesser degree, on reactions involving helium-3. Proton-proton fusion is so much more difficult than these forms of fusion that some scientists doubt we will EVER be able to master it. Even if we do, it won't be happening for a long time.