LAT: Nuclear Waste Outpaces Solutions (major Times story)

[DeepModem Mom]

Nuclear Waste Outpaces Solutions
Plants use outdoor storage casks while waiting for the government to find a longer-term solution. Some fear it won't.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2005

MORRIS, Ill. — Along the headwaters of the Illinois River, engineers at the Dresden nuclear power station have erected two dozen steel and concrete silos that rise 20 feet above the Midwest plain.

The gray structures are unremarkable except for what is loaded inside: Each contains roughly 13 tons of high-level nuclear waste that has been accumulating at the plant since the Eisenhower administration....Dresden's reactors have produced one of the largest stockpiles — 1,347 tons — of civilian nuclear waste in the nation. With the plant churning out nearly 48 tons more waste each year, engineers are preparing to double the size of the outdoor storage pad this summer.

The plant has the same problem as nearly all of the nation's 103 commercial reactors: They were never designed to store waste long-term and are now forced to deal with large quantities of spent uranium fuel rods that produce high levels of radiation.

The problem reflects decades of miscalculations and missteps by the federal government, which promised at the dawn of the nuclear age to accept ownership of the waste. The plan to build a waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has faced so many political, legal and technical problems that it's impossible to project when — or even if — it will be built.

As a result, the most lethal waste product of industrial society is being handled outside any federal policy and without any roadmap for how it will be managed in the future, according to industry officials, nuclear waste experts, lawyers and academicians....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-waste12jun12,0,268313,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[dArKeR]

1. Incredible!

[emad]

2. Nuclear waste: the 1,000-year fudge

Nuclear waste: the 1,000-year fudge
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
12 June 2005


Secret plans to postpone solving Britain's nuclear waste crisis for up to 1,000 years are being drawn up by the nuclear industry, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

The government-owned British Nuclear Fuels is developing a scheme for indefinitely storing the intensely dangerous material in giant "millennium domes" around Britain, leaving it for generations far into the future to work out what to do with it.

The scheme - to be floated at a closed meeting of nuclear experts and local authority officials in London this week - runs counter to conventional wisdom. Most experts insist that the safest way of dealing with highly radioactive wastes is to bury them at least 900 feet underground. Storing them increases the chances that they will leak out, leading to health risks and making them vulnerable to terrorists.

But the idea is gaining support in Whitehall, following 30 years of failure to find a disposal site in Britain. Ministers insist that plans for dealing with the waste must be agreed before any more nuclear power stations are built.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=646245

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Thanks for adding this link, emad -- we've got a worldwide problem. nt

[central scrutinizer]

4. "Too cheap to meter"

That was one of the early claims about nuclear power - it would produce so much electricity at such a low cost that it would not be worth metering - basically unlimited, almost free power. Guess that was another lie.

Just do the math. Some of these radioactive wastes have half-lifes in the thousands of years. So, if you could find a place to keep this shit, it would have to stay there for many centuries and would render a large surrounding area basically uninhabitable. But instead of coming up with a way to deal with what we have, we hide our heads in the sand and keep producing even more.