underground lab tackles japan nuclear waste issue

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_JAPAN_NUCLEAR_TUNNEL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-07-14-05-35-46


In this photo taken Thursday, June 19, 2014, a reindeer pasture sits beside the Horonobe Underground Research Center in Horonobe, Japan. Reindeer farms and grazing Holstein cows dot a vast stretch of rolling green pasture here on Japan’s northern tip. Underground it’s a different story. Workers and scientists have carved a sprawling laboratory deep below this sleep dairy town that, despite government reassurances, some of Horonobe’s 2,500 residents fear could turn their home into a nuclear waste storage site. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

HORONOBE, Japan (AP) -- Reindeer farms and grazing Holstein cows dot a vast stretch of rolling green pasture here on Japan's northern tip. Underground it's a different story.

Workers and scientists have carved a sprawling laboratory deep below this sleep dairy town that, despite government reassurances, some of Horonobe's 2,500 residents fear could turn their neighborhood into a nuclear waste storage site.

"I'm worried," said 54-year-old reindeer handler Atsushi Arase. "If the government already has its eye on us as a potential site, it may eventually come here even if we refuse."

Japanese utilities have more than 17,000 tons of "spent" fuel rods that have finished their useful life but will remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. What to do with them is a vexing problem that nuclear-powered nations around the world face, and that has come to the fore as Japan debates whether to keep using nuclear energy after the 2011 disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant.

[madokie]

1. When you're in a hole

the first thing you want to do is stop digging, likewise when you find you have a lot of waste and no place to safely put it. First thing you want to do is stopping making it.
Especially true if that waste is radioactive nuclear waste.
Making and using Depleted Uranium munitions out of some of it is not the answer either as the usa seems to think. Talk to the people in Fallujah if you don't believe me

[FBaggins]

2. Sigh... it's like a broken record around here sometimes

But I'll remind you yet again that DU does not come from spent nuclear fuel.

DU is less radioactive than the natural uranium that is all around you.

[littlemissmartypants]

3. The lesser of two evils is still evil. eom

Love, Peace and Shelter. Lmsp