Dianne Feinstein's response on Yucca Mountain

[CAcyclist]

Dear Ms. Weber:

Thank you for contacting me about the
development of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca
Mountain. Your interest and involvement are important
to me, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your
concerns.

Currently, 77,000 tons of high level nuclear waste,
generated by power reactors and nuclear weapons
production, are stored in temporary surface storage
facilities located at 131 sites in 39 States. This year,
President Bush approved the Secretary of Energy's
recommendation of Yucca Mountain as the nation's first
long term underground repository for high level
radioactive waste.

I oppose the development of the site because it
would involve transporting high-level nuclear waste
through populated areas of California and I am concerned
about the safety of this process. I am also concerned that
the site lies adjacent to Death Valley National Park and
any leakage from the Yucca Mountain site could
contaminate Death Valley=s groundwater. As I
understand it, the site=s capacity is inadequate and there
could be enough nuclear waste in the U.S. to fill the
entire site by 2010.

We must find a viable, environmentally sound,
long term solution to our nation=s nuclear waste problem.
I believe it would be a mistake to bring all of our nation=s
nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Instead of a single
repository, it would be better to develop regional nuclear
waste permanent storage facilities which would increase
overall storage capacity and reduce transportation risks.

Unfortunately, the Senate approved the Yucca
Mountain site by a vote of 60 to 39. I hope the
department of energy will take into consideration the
numerous concerns that I have expressed about Yucca
Mountain site and I will certainly monitor the
development of the site very closely.

Again, thank you for writing. I hope you will
continue to keep me informed of issues of importance to
you. If you have any further questions or comments,
please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C.
office at [phone].

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

http://feinstein.senate.gov

Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the
Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov. You can also
receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at
http://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html.

[Massacure]

1. The U.S. should reprocess it.

That will cut down on the mass and the longetivity of the nuclear waste if I recall. Perhaps NNadir has something to say about reprocessing.

[NNadir]

2. Ms. Feinstein opposes Yucca mountain for the wrong reasons.

First of all, I have no doubt that if built, Yucca Mountain would have extraordinary geological stability. Examination of the natural reactors at Oklo Gabon which operated for thousands of years 1.8 billion years ago in Africa shows that most nuclides do not migrate much, even in extremely wet climates. (Gabon is rain forest, or was rain forest.) I also don't doubt that nuclear materials can be safely transported. Thousands of metric tons of nuclear materials are transported routinely. They are known as "nuclear weapons."

Thus Ms. Feinstein's opposition on these grounds are probably specious.

The real reason to oppose Yucca Mountain is that it is wasteful. Let us assume that we had 77,000 metric tons of spent fuel. 97% of it is Uranium. This translates into an energy value of 6 exajoules of energy. This is enough energy to fuel every single industrial and domestic energy operation on the planet for 5 days.

The forms into which nuclear "waste" is being made for Yucca mountain will make this material enormously difficult and expensive to recover.

It is dumb, dumb, dumb. Almost as dumb as the American electorate.

[Buzz Clik]

3. What's the cost balance on recovering U from spent fuel?

Of that 97%, how much would be usable as fuel? How much waste would be generated on the other end? Just curious.

I am truly weary of the opposition to Yucca Mountain that Feinstein gives. It's nothing but uninformed hysteria. However, I'm interested in your thought that the waste can be significantly reduced.

[NNadir]

4. The chief impediment to doing this is the extremely low price of Uranium.

The price has been as low as $10/kg in recent times for virgin Uranium, because nuclear energy is an underdeveloped source of energy.

If we take 30,000 kJ/kg as the mean energy value for coal, and recognize that of the 200 MeV in a typical fission, 190 MeV are recoverable (with 10 MeV lost to unrecoverable neutrinos) we see that the energy equivalent of one kilogram of completely fissioned Uranium is equal to about 2500 metric tons of coal. If we take the price of coal to be $25/metric ton, we see that the price of the energy as coal is $62,500. Thus seen only as a fuel, and not including the infrastructure for the transformation of the potential energy to electricity, nuclear fuel is "too cheap to meter."

Uranium removed from nuclear reactors after use is radioactive (being mixed with fission products and higher actinides) and right now it is very cheap to throw it away. But for the long term it is not sensible.

Once-through Uranium is still enriched with respect to natural Uranium. The nuclear reaction shuts down before all of the fissile nuclei are consumed because some fission products, in particular isotopes of Samarium, are potent neutron absorbers.

It is possible to use the Uranium from spent fuel without further isotopic modification directly in CANDU type reactors and get better than fuel economy from the Uranium than one would get from the natural Uranium used ordinarily in CANDUs. This type of use would extract further energy from the Uranium and would also convert some more of the Uranium to Plutonium which could be used directly in PWR type reactors, possibly in the Radowsky configuration (which consumes Plutonium very efficiently).

There are physics considerations to doing this however; these involve the fact that once-through Uranium contains the unnatural isotope U-236. The presence of U-236 results in certain non-proliferation advantages in the use of this type of fuel, inasmuch as it renders any Plutonium generated in commercial operations even more unacceptable for weapons work than ordinary fuel grade plutonium. However, it dose involve some expense in dealing with these physics changes, and thus in our short ranged "bottom line" thinking, no one wishes to be bothered.

Cheap ores of Uranium will not last forever. Eventually the ceiling price of Uranium of $100 to $200/kg will be realized, at which price, it becomes as economical to recover Uranium from seawater as it is to mine it. Before that time, people will be digging the Uranium out of places like Yucca Mountain.

[Buzz Clik]

5. Thanks.

That was very enlightening. Exactly the info I was seeking.

[NNadir]

6. You're welcome but I neglected one of your questions.

How much of the energy is recoverable?

The answer is all of it, but only if some reactors operate in the fast neutron spectrum, and all actinides (not just Plutonium) are recycled. In addition, one would need to transmute the (very small) quantities of the three long lived fission products Cs-135, I-129, and Tc-99 in such a way that their decay energy was recovered. The energy involved in the decay of these three isotopes is almost trivial. If they were not transmuted, the loss would be much less than 1%.

I have also assumed that the decay energy of intermediate life time fission product isotopes like Cs-137 and Sr-90 would be recovered, as surely they will in more energetically desperate times. In general the decay heat of fission products accounts for about 3 to 4% of the energy produced in nuclear reactors. The vast majorities of many of the isotopes decay well before they are removed from the reactor. Ba-140, which is produced in about 6% of the fissions in Uranium-235 under thermal conditions for instance, has a half life of 12.7 days. As the fuel remains in the reactor for years, almost all of the Ba-140 produced decays in situ to non-radioactive Cerium-140 (via Lanthanum-140, half life 1.7 days), and the heat generated by this decay is recovered by the turbines in the reactor.

[struggle4progress]

7. Earthquakes In The Vicinity Of Yucca Mountain

Nevada ranks third in the nation for current seismic activity ...

<A> magnitude 5.6 earthquake near Little Skull Mountain, about 8 miles southeast of the Yucca Mountain site, .. occurred on June 29, 1992. This earthquake caused damage to a nearby Department of Energy field office building. This earthquake, and many after-shocks, occurred on a fault that had not previously been identified. The Little Skull Mountain earthquake and numerous others at about the same time in the western U.S. are considered to have been triggered by the magnitude 7.4 Landers earthquake, in California.

.. <I>n 1948, there was a magnitude 3.6 event on the southeast boundary of the Yucca Mountain site, in an area known to have a number of faults. Recently, there have been other events recorded beneath Yucca Mountain with magnitudes less than 2.5.

Earthquake activity is a safety concern both during operation, above and below ground, and after closure of a repository at Yucca Mountain ...

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/seismo01.htm


Yucca Valley earthquake surprised experts
July 17, 1992
By Diane LaMacchia

Soundly asleep in their beds, the residents of Yucca Valley and Big Bear Lake were not the only ones jolted by last month's early morning earthquakes. Scientists met with surprises, too.

"When I drove down there, I fully expected to find that a major east-west fault line called the Pinto Mountain fault had ruptured," says LBL geologist Pat Williams, who has been studying ancient fracture patterns along the Hayward fault (see Currents, June 29, 1990). Instead, the largest earthquake to occur in the contiguous 48 states in the last 40 years broke through four separate, lesser-known north-south fault lines in the Mojave Desert. "It let me know again that the Earth will always surprise you," Williams says.

The magnitude 7.4 Yucca Valley quake, named the Landers earthquake for the nearest, hardest-hit town, ruptured at 5 a.m. on June 28. A second one, 6.5 on the Richter scale, hit about three hours later, 30 kilometers west at Big Bear Lake, a ski resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. News reports that day said the two quakes were "unrelated," but reports the next day said they were related. Williams explains that although technically speaking, the second may have been too far away to be called an aftershock, the two earthquakes were clearly related in that the Landers earthquake lowered the compressional stress on the Big Bear fault and allowed it to rupture. <snip>

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/yucca-valley-earthquake.html


July 9, 2004

Victory in Yucca Mountain Lawsuit; Court Overrules Government’s Lax Radiation Standards for Nuclear Waste

Statement of Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook

Today’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) illegally set its radiation release standards for groundwater for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, marks a major victory for citizens of Nevada, for the environment and for science over politics.

The EPA set 10,000 years as the period during which radiation in the groundwater cannot exceed drinking water standards at the site’s boundary, but this time frame would not protect the health of future generations. As the court ruled, the Energy Policy Act requires that the EPA determine public health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain “based upon and consistent with” the National Academy of Sciences’ recommendations. The Academy’s recommendation is that the compliance period should extend through the time of the peak risk for radiation doses from the repository, which studies show are likely to occur in 300,000 years or more. To compensate for Yucca’s geologic unsuitability, the EPA ignored the findings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy’s recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the agency’s policy concerns. But that is not what EPA did,” the Court wrote in its ruling. “Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS’s findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the Academy had expressly rejected.” <snip>

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1745

[NNadir]

8. Ooooh boy.

First, let me state that I oppose Yucca Mountain, not on these specious grounds, but on the grounds it is wasteful for the clear reasons given above.

I don't believe in permanent nuclear repositories, except temporary ones, on the grounds that all nuclear materials are valuable resources.

So I am rather happy that there are people around opposing the construction of this site, even if they do so on grounds that are rather idiotic. Yucca mountain should not be built

But anyway. I happened to have been in the area of the Landers quake when it occurred. I lived in San Diego at the time, and I remember the quake quite well, since it woke my wife and I up. She suggested that I pull the covers up over my head and later, after the quake ended, I asked her to speculate on how the covers would have protected me from a collapsing roof. We had a good chuckle over that one, and like all San Diegans we made lots of jokes about the earth moving when we were in bed with our wives and husbands. We didn't really mind the crack in our wall, since we were renters.

San Diego, as it happens was much closer to the Landers epicenter in the Yucca Valley in California than it was to Yucca
Mountain in Nevada. I do see the importance of relating this event to the Yucca mountain since both geological features have the word "Yucca" in them, and therefore clearly any feature or product named "Yucca" is related to nuclear issues. For instance, "Yucca hot sauce" except for the mild and medium versions, can burn your tongue and sometimes you have to wash it down with water. Therefore nuclear power is too dangerous to use. I note in passim that nuclear materials are sometimes said to be "hot" and the hot sauce is also said to be "hot," so there is yet another relationship.

Getting back to the quake, if I had a nuclear waste canister under my bed, which I didn't, I am quite certain it would have rolled around a bit, but I very much doubt that it would have leaked, being made of re-enforced steel, much as the canisters at San Onofre, even closer to the center of the quake than I was, didn't do much. (I do note however that everyone who experienced the Landers Quake will eventually die though, and it is worth noting that all of these people who will eventually die were shaken, not stirred, by the same quake that shook, but didn't stir, the "nuclear waste" at San Onofre.

Now let's turn to the article from "Public Citizen" the organization founded by the internationally known moron and technophobic Luddite millionaire Bechtel investor, Ralph Nader. "Studies show" it says...

The "risk factor" associated with radioactive materials is determined by a determination of the likely number of cancers that could be caused distributing a gram of a particular nuclide to enough people so that, upon swallowing them, each of them would get cancer. A table of these values can be found in "Nuclear Reactor Physics" by William Stacy, Wiley and Sons, copyright 2001, page 229. (I am looking at this table right now.) The table is reproduced from Physics of Plutonium Recycling, Vol 1-5 NEA, Paris 1995. Thus the number of cancers one could induce by getting people to swallow one gram of Americium-241 is 433. (Note that this is much lower than the number of people that one could kill with cancer by getting them to swallow one gram of the naturally occurring Uranium decay product Radium-226, 1600 people, or one gram of naturally occurring Thorium-230, 75,000 people.)

The Stacy reference also has, on pages 230 and 231, a nice graph showing the risk factors for the various nuclides in spent fuel, for both the once through cycle and the nuclear recycling cycle in which the energy of Plutonium, Uranium and the Neptunium are recovered. (Note that Curium is NOT included in this recycle, although certainly Curium could and should be recovered.) In this graph, the units on the ordinate are logarithmic comparisons to the relative radiotoxicity of Uranium ore, from which the spent fuel was originally prepared. Thus the value 1 would be the risk from radionuclides if no nuclear power plant had ever been built on earth, ie, the risk resulting from the radioactivity resulting from the very dangerous supernova that resulted in all of the elements now found on earth with the exception of the hydrogen and deuterium in our water and, of course, our Lithium, Beryllium, and Boron.

The graph in Stacy, looks rather like the one in this reference that can be clicked on by people who only get their information on the Internet:

http://nuclear.inel.gov/papers-presentations/nuclear_fuel_cycle_3-5-03.pdf

The graph in the INTERNET reference shows that the total radiotoxicity in the (stupid) once through cycle is equivalent to Uranium ores after 300,000 years, the number magically pulled out of a hat by Ralph Nader's friends and fellow scientific illiterates at Public Citizen.

The Stacy graph though, is much, much more detailed.

Since I am looking at it in (gasp) a book, I will describe what the Stacy graph shows. For the first 500 years the radiotoxicity is dominated by fission products. At this point the radiotoxicity is about 1000 times greater than it is for Uranium ores. After 500 years the radiotoxicity risk is dominated by the radiotoxicity of three actinide isotopes Am-241, (the stuff in your smoke detectors at home), Plutonium-240, and Neptunium-237 (which the Am-241) to which the stuff in your smoke detector decays. The total risk of Am-241 falls below that of Uranium ores in about 20,000 years, and the total risk of Plutonium-240 falls below the risk of Uranium ores just short of 100,000 years. Thereafter, the radiotoxicity is determined by the activity of Neptunium-237. At this point the radiotoxicity is about 5 times what it would have been if no nuclear power plant had ever been built on earth. It does not fall to a value equivalent to the risk of Uranium ores until ten million years have passed.

(In passing I will note that Neptunium is the most problematic of all actinides since the Neptunyl ion associated with the common V oxidation state has soluble salts.)

Stacy shows in the second graph what happens if one recycles the Plutonium, Americium, and Neptunium as one should if one has an iota of sense. Under these circumstances, the radiotoxicity of fission products and all actinides falls below the radiotoxicity value for Uranium ores in about 1000 years, as is also shown in the "INTERNET reference" I linked above.

This suggests an excellent technological way of reducing the radioactivity risks associated with that terrible supernova from which the earth was created, a supernova that occurred well before Public Citizen could have filed a lawsuit stopping it. Here's how it works: We build as many nuclear power plants as we can and we recycle all the waste. In this way we can protect people like the citizens of Sparta, New Jersey (where my sister and brother in law live with their children) who have naturally occurring Uranium in their drinking water. I am told that if my sister in law drinks two glasses of water a day for seventy years from her tap, her risk of contracting cancer will be 1 in 10,000 greater than mine. I have an ion exchanger on my water system, as well as a carbon filter. This seems to remove my local Uranium, though I still have some of that awful Radon in my crawlspace. Please build a nuclear plant in my town so I can get rid of that Radon!

[NNadir]

9. A correction of a transcription error.

I really have to stop writing posts here when suffering from "Ohmygod...fear more years of Bush" insomnia. I sometimes make silly errors in my posts.

In the post above I made this statement:

"Thus the number of cancers one could induce by getting people to swallow one gram of Americium-241 is 433. (Note that this is much lower than the number of people that one could kill with cancer by getting them to swallow one gram of the naturally occurring Uranium decay product Radium-226, 1600 people, or one gram of naturally occurring Thorium-230, 75,000 people.)"

Laying in bed this morning, I realized I'd transcribed in some cases, the half-lives of some of the actinides and not their cancer doses/gram.

Here are the correct figures from the table: Thorium-230, 0.3 CD/g;
Americium-241, 936 CD/g; Radium-226 35 CD/g.

The most dangerous common isotope in the natural U-238 decay chain is lead-210 which has a CD/g of 34,800. The most dangerous isotope in the natural U-235 decay chain is Ra-223, with a CD/g 799,000 per gram, exceeding the radiotoxicity of it's radiodecay parent, Ac-227 at 85,000 CD/gram.

The most dangerous actinide that might be produced by nuclear reactors, albeit in small quantities, since it is fissionable, has a relatively low cross-section for formation and requires the addition of 4 neutrons to U-238, is Am-242m. It has a CD/g of 28,000.

The radiotoxicity of Np-237, which would dominate the radiotoxicity of Yucca Mountain if it is (stupidly) built for a once through cycle, is 0.139 CD/gram. This means you would have to drink theoretically enough Neptunium contaminated water to ingest more than 7 grams of Neptunium in order to assure yourself of suicide by Neptunium induced cancer. I have no idea how Neptunium tastes, but I'll bet you'd have to drink lots of water to get this much by accident.

[phantom power]

10. How do they arrive at these "cancer-dose" figures?

I assume that there isn't enough human exposure to these elements to get reliable figures. Do they do experiments on rats, or something?

[NNadir]

11. You would be surprised on how much data there is on human exposure.

Some of the human exposure data on Plutonium was accidental, and was the result of laboratory workers and scientists accidentally ingesting it. At one point a worker on the Manhattan Project accidentally swallowed a significant portion of the world supply (then milligram amounts) and there was an effort to recover as much as possible from his biological fluids because the Plutonium was needed for research.

Later, in some of the most reprehensible incidents of the cold war, Americans were deliberately contaminated with Plutonium without their knowledge.

These matters are covered in an excellent work by Eileen Welsome "The Plutonium Files : America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War."

There is also much data on Radium contamination resulting from the effects on Radium watch dial painters in the early part of the twentieth century. In some cases some of these women were encouraged to sharpen the points of their brushes using their mouths. Also the discoverer of Radium, Madame Curie was rather contaminated with Radium and in fact died from it, much as the discoverer or Fluorine died from Fluorine. Dr. Curie's notebooks were not available to scholars until recently when her great granddaughter decontaminated them, because they were so radioactive. Her lab is also still contaminated.

Some of this data can be extrapolated to other nuclides with similar characteristics. Plutonium for instance, to the extent it can be solubilized in physiological substances, concentrates in bone.

Other data certainly comes from the results of weapons testing, particularly thermonuclear devices.

But I would expect that the best data is that that comes from animal testing.

It is worth noting that because nuclear materials are so energetic, they are very easy to track in physiological systems. One can see even a few atoms of these materials.

The world's finest mind on this subject, and the author referenced in Stacy's "Reactor Physics," is Bernard L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, who is a world expert in calculating risk, particularly radiological risk. He is also expert on comparing risks of things much more dangerous than using nuclear power, things like driving cars or smoking cigarettes. Cohen's work has been central to my own thinking on the subject of risk/benefit analysis.

Cohen is most famous in the popular press for having once challenged Ralph Nader - author of the urban myth that "Plutonium is the most toxic substance known" - to eat as much cyanide as he himself would eat Plutonium. Unfortunately for the history of the world, Ralph declined. Cohen now admits that this was probably a dubious challenge made in the heat of an argument during Ralph was doing one of his earlier "Chalk is the same as Cheese" arguments.

Although I've read many works by Cohen, I am not exactly certain of how he calculated CD/gram. If I track it down, I'll post it however. I know that the original paper was in the "Journal of Health Physics."

[NNadir]

14. The reference to Cohen's methods is given in Health Phys. 42 (2)

133-143 (1982). I don't have immediate access to this journal, but will pick it up next time I do.

[struggle4progress]

12. If you do not believe that "The Little Skull Mountain earthquake and ...

... numerous others at about the same time in the western U.S. ... <were> ... triggered by the magnitude 7.4 Landers earthquake, in California," more is required to debunk the idea than suggesting that it originated in name confusion.


Here is a little snippet from some seismologists discussing the impact of an Alaska quake on Yellowstone:

"Scientists once believed that an earthquake at one location could not trigger earthquakes at distant sites. But that belief was shattered in 1992 when the magnitude-7.3 Landers earthquake in California's Mojave Desert triggered a swarm of quakes more than 800 miles away at Yellowstone, as well as other jolts near Mammoth Lakes, Calif., and Yucca Mountain, Nev."
http://www.seis.utah.edu/RecentNews/YNP-11042002.shtml

[NNadir]

13. And another reason to abandon nuclear power in favor of coal

is that a meteorite from deep space might fall right in middle New Zealand, tunnel right through the earth, emerge right under Yucca Mountain and spatter radiation all over the terminally stupid people who wonder about such things.

You're 50% aptly named. You're struggling, but I doubt that the struggle will result in much progress.
:eyes: