Bush OKs Nevada nuclear dump.

[Balt]

<< Surely you must be joking. There is no "massive aquifer" beneath the site; this is an area of closed basins with about 4" of rain per year. The Amaragosa Valley is the only area with even a remote chance of receiving water from the site, and they mainly support the project.

The extreme element talks as if liquified radioactive materials will instantly leak into a vast underground river. In reality, dry materials, placed in incredible durable, multiple barriers including 5-inch-thick stainless steel and corrosion-resistant nickel-moly alloys, will be placed in one of the most remote, dry sites in the country.

And what alternative in southern New Mexico would that be? The WIPP site is in salt; it is designed for wastes with little thermal output. The stuff destined for Nevada has approximately 1000 times the thermal output, and as numerous tests in the past have shown, mixing salt repositories and high heat levels is a bad idea.

Please folks, don't base your opinions on the wild-eyed advocacy groups, or what you read in newspapers. Newspapers are constrained to tell the truth by the fear of being sued; here, there is no such fear, so they say whatever they damn well please. >>



Ah, looks like we have another member of the vast right-wing conspiracy!

(I am kidding, of course)

 

[Linux23]

hey, let's just dump it in NJ with all the other toxic sh!t?

 

[hwstock]

<<
In a statement, Guinn pledged to ``exhaust every option and press our legal case to the limit.'' Nevada has raised a warchest of $5.4 million to fight the decision.
>>



Gee, that's slightly more than the 4 million that the tobacco companies dumped into Nevada in 1998, to fight (successfully) attempts to limit smoking in casinos. But then, most of our Congressional reps used to like tobacco money; Reid, Bryan, and Ensign (65K for Ensign) all took their share. The state has turned a blind eye to every attempt by casino workers to obtain compensation for cancer and asthma worsened by Las Vegas' abominable 2nd-hand smoke, and the particulate pollution caused by the poorly-regulated construction industry.

Why do I bring this up? For me the quintessential picture of Nevada hypocrisy was a recent clip on Las Vegas TV: Oscar Goodman, mayor and former mob lawyer, trying to convince a group of smokers about the dangers of radioactive waste. Las Vegas has the highest lung cancer rate in the country; each year, Clark County (seat of Las Vegas) gets ~1200 new lung cancers. Compare that with the grand total of about 450 excess radiation-induced cancers in all of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since 1945.

Nevada gets 8% of its power from nuclear sources, and the local power company is owned by the same organization that is desparate to get rid of the waste from the Trojan Nuclear Plant. While Nevada whines about the safety of transporting waste by road... the people of Oregon watched as the Trojan waste was shipped to Hanford via the Columbia River.

And then there are the two phantom plants that power most of Las Vegas -- The Reid Gartner and Mohave coal-fired plants. Placed near the Arizona border, these plants are unknown to most Nevadans; but Arizona residents get to sample their filth, which kills an estimated 16 people per year. If you get a chance to go to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, note the polluted, hazy skies; a trip out to Bright Angel Point let's you see the source on a map: Nevada's coal-fired plants. Are you bothered by the planes and helicopters buzzing your head? They too come courtesy of Nevada, from Harry Reid's push to prop up the tourist industry.

Nevada's claim to be the put-upon "little guy" is getting a little tiresome. The Department of Energy has pumped 60 billion into southern Nevada, and that money was greedily sought by Nevada in the past. Even now, the Nevada reps seem interested in restarting underground nuclear weapons explosions -- a bizarre and stunning irony, since the only significant injection of nuclear waste into the water table, in this state, has come from those explosions -- and our own state environmental agency has deemed that the existing underground contamination is a far graver danger than Yucca Mountain.

 

[IGBT]

The price we pay for unlimited population and immigration growth. ALL infrastructure is limited. All those babies grow up to be consumers...ya know that don't ya?? :Q

 

[911paramedic]

The problem is that it is not in the middle of the desert, it is close to Las Vegas (I live in LV). The other huge problem is that we have very limited access to that location which means that much of it will be trucked right through town on its way there. We have over 1.5 million people living here not counting the hundreds of thousands of tourists that pass through.

I may be wrong here but I am sure there are other locations that are easier to access and not near such a huge city.

My two cents.

 

[charrison]

911paramedic,

70 miles is not too close to vegas.

Hazerdous materials of any kind have to take special routes which usually try to avoid high traffic areas.

This waste is shipped if virtually indestructable and heavily sheilded containers. The shipping is the easy part.

 

[hwstock]

<< The problem is that it is not in the middle of the desert, it is close to Las Vegas (I live in LV). The other huge problem is that we have very limited access to that location which means that much of it will be trucked right through town on its way there. We have over 1.5 million people living here not counting the hundreds of thousands of tourists that pass through. >>



4 inches of rain a year, with no measureable recharge to the water table, seems to qualify as a desert in most books. The "70 miles" must mean by air to the outskirts of town -- looks more like 90 miles to me. I've done the drive from Vegas through the Mohave, and the site sure seems like it's out in the middle of nowhere. If you can find an alternative place, on federal land, with no significant aquifer underneath, and no population centers within 70 miles, please recommend it.

In my personal opinion, the most sensible thing would be to build bunkered storage at the current sites, let the stuff decay 500 years, then reuse it. When I express this opinion to anyone in about 39 other states, they aren't too happy, and they come up with lots of pretty good reasons why they don't like the idea. In some cases, laws make the situation silly, and make it almost impossible to process waste into a safe form, until it has a place to go. Las Vegas should take a trip to Fernald, Ohio, where 4000 Ci of Radium, dating back to 1944, sits in leaking, concrete silos flanked by two streams, upstream from the town and in the middle of farm country. (Don't worry Las Vegans -- you successfully blocked that waste from going into the Nevada desert -- it's going into shallow, less safe storage in Utah, instead.)

Transportation is the only real issue, and it is mainly an issue of perception. Even if, in Shelley Berkeley's nuttiest scenario, a terrorist gets a direct hit with a missile and puts a grapefruit sized hole in the _outer_ shipping canister... so what? People act as if it will be Pandora's Box, with instant death for miles. In reality, even after a missile hit, the chance of a significant leak is zip, since the fuel rods are solid and still contained in other protective layers. Those canisters are incredibly tough, for good reasons.

But look at some of the other things that transport through Vegas every day -- like tanker trucks full of gasoline and propane. Suppose one of those blew up, just off The Strip? Do you recall that event at the Mediteranean resort some years back, whwre hundreds died after a tanker explosion? There have been two spectacular tanker accidents, one in Reno and one in Vegas, in recent years. With the one in Vegas, it is a miracle that more didn't incinerate.



<< I may be wrong here but I am sure there are other locations that are easier to access and not near such a huge city. My two cents. >>

 

[Ornery]

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act mandated that a repository be ready to receive waste in 1998.

Why is this still being addressed? All of the details should have been studied and the opportunity to disprove the recommendation should already be behind us! Did somebody else fail to meet the deadline on their watch, or what?

 

[Ocuflox]

i live in las vegas too. fyi u can actually take a scheduled visit to see yucca and the storage facility. who wouldnt want to visit a nuke waste site?

 

[hwstock]

<< i live in las vegas too. fyi u can actually take a scheduled visit to see yucca and the storage facility. who wouldnt want to visit a nuke waste site? >>



Someone with an open mind?

 

[hwstock]

<< The waste can be made into a non liquid material before it is stored. >>



NONE of the waste destined for Yucca mountain will be liquid -- the regulations all call for absolutely minimal water content. The stuff consists of dry fuel rods encased in zircaloy, and glass poured into half-inch-thick stainless steel canisters (which are then welded shut).

 

[hwstock]

<< Ah, looks like we have another member of the vast right-wing conspiracy!

(I am kidding, of course) >>



For an interesting window on fearmongering in general, visit
DHMO web page -- how to scare the crap out of people

The DHMO survey was originally given to college students in a biology class, to show the class how easy it is to manipulate people via surveys and selective presentation of fact. The prof who designed the survey expected that most of his students would see through it. Surprise, surprise -- over half were taken in. The truly interesting part of the survey is that is says absolutely nothing that is not factual.

I believe that 80 to 90% of the people who take the survey are in favor of a complete ban on DHMO.