West Valley needs more - Phased cleanup of nuclear site prolongs region's period of risk (NY)

[jpak]

http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/04/22/1028177/west-valley-needs-more.html

A final decision by the federal government to clean up the former nuclear reprocessing plant near West Valley in phases, instead of all at once, is a decision to keep this region and Lake Erie at risk. That's disappointing, and should be a call to action for both the Western New York congressional delegation and state legislators.

It cannot be repeated enough — Lake Erie, with tributary streams near West Valley feeding into it and people heavily dependent upon water from the lake and Niagara River, needs to be protected. Without a full cleanup, the large collection of highly toxic nuclear wastes buried in or leaking from the plant site south of Buffalo could pose a real danger.

Federal officials should have done the right thing by removing West Valley wastes years ago. Now, the decision for a phased-in approach merely kicks the radioactive can 10 years down the road. And there's no guarantee federal officials or the state, which has ownership for the plant since it was transferred when a Nuclear Fuel Services lease expired in 1980, will do the right thing or follow each other's lead.

<snip>

Sending nuclear waste to the geologically fractured zone at West Valley was a mistake to begin with and one made consistently from 1966 to 1972, when it was the home of a nuclear reprocessing operation that took in roughly 640 tons of materials from nuclear power plant operations. All of that ended when upgrades and federal standards made it too expensive for the private-sector plant operators to continue, and the federal government found itself inheriting the waste that was later solidified by stirring it into melted glass.

<more>

Commercial spent fuel reprocessing was a commercial failure - and it will cost taxpayers $10 billion to clean this up.

nuclear sucks - yup!

:thumbsdown:

[madokie]

1. Yes it really sucks

almost as bad as those who blindly advocate for it's use to begin with. Nuclear energy is neither a safe nor a sane way to produce our electrical energy.
We should have stayed on course with Carters recommendations and required the coal plants they were building to use a gasifier rather than direct burn. If we'd done those two things we'd neither be where we are, CO2 wise nor would we have needed any more nuke plants plus we could have been closing them down as we went along. But no the love of money got in the fucking way.

Rec

[NNadir]

2. Thank you for verifying that every stinking anti-nuke on the planet is a coal greenwasher.

There are NO exceptions.

I'd love to hear one stupid pro-coal anti-nuke here even try to grasp the external cost of coal gasification.

I note with due contempt that an anti-nuke criticizing "blindness" is hilarious, because it is obvious that there is NOT ONE anti-nuke who as ever opened a science book in his or her life.

Typically zero anti-nukes give a fuck about coal waste or climate change, which is why in their open illiteracy they speak for coal.

Having never opened a science book in their lives, they cannot understand the difference between stupid paranoid rhetoric and risk.

Coal kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. Kills. Kills. Kills.

By contrast there is NOT ONE dumb anti-science anti-nuke here who can demonstrate ONE death from the facility subject to this stupid paranoia.

If any energy industry were required to meet nuclear standards for safety and public risk, they would all collapse.

Nuclear energy doesn't need to be perfect to be vastly superior to all the anti-nuke dangerous fossil fuel dumping that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.

It only needs to be better than everything else, which it is.

Have a nice coal apologist waste dumping day.

[Name removed]

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