Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste issue
POLITICS
IN WASTE
Fred Schwab’s April geologic column
does a fine job outlining the
history of how the Yucca Mountain
site was both selected and then rejected for
political reasons. Basically, the
same fate befell its predecessor as front-runner
in the nuclear waste derby: the Hanford
Reservation in central Washington.
Hanford was in the running largely
because it already was a nuclear
waste site and it was rejected
because, as with Harry Reid of Nevada, an
influential senator, Al Swift, fought
to kill the project. President Obama’s
“blue ribbon panel” of experts came
up with nothing new and basically
recommended that we start over.
Recently, the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant at Carlsbad, N.M., has had two leaks,
the first since it opened in 1999 to
accept military weapons waste.
In 1990, the National Academy of
Sciences concluded that it is impossible to
locate a repository site that meets
the Department of Energy requirement of less than a
1 in 10,000 chance of an unfavorable
event compromising the facility. It is
time to either create more realistic
criteria or abandon nuclear energy
altogether. Of course, the latter would
still leave us with the nuclear waste problem to solve.
Earth Magazine July 2014
# posted by Rockdoc @ 8:17 AM 
