Presidential Commission Seeks Volunteers to Store U.S. Nuclear Waste

[n2doc]

In deciding what to do with nuclear waste and where to put it, a blue ribbon commission recommends a consent-based approach rather than congressional fiat
By David Biello | July 29, 2011 | 5

Nestled more than half a kilometer deep in a salt mine, the plutonium slowly decays, taking some 250,000 years to become uranium. As the U.S. debates what to do with the nuclear waste produced by its fleet of 104 reactors, the radioactive legacy of decades of nuclear bomb-making sits entombed in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.

Now the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, a diverse group of former politicians, industry representatives and academics, has delivered its draft report on what to do with the rest of the nation's nuclear waste. In it, the commission calls for "prompt efforts to develop one or more geologic disposal facilities," such as the one built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada that has been mired in controversy, as well as "prompt efforts to develop one or more consolidated interim storage facilities."

Since 2009, when President Barack Obama halted work on Yucca Mountain and added it to the list of failed potential nuclear waste sites, such as the one at Lyons, Kans., the U.S. has lacked a long-term solution to its growing stockpile of nuclear waste. So the roughly 65,000 metric tons of waste sits where it has been for decades—in glowing blue pools of cool water (for fresh spent fuel) or in giant concrete and steel casks (for older spent material). For both types, storage means either resting on the grounds of an operating nuclear power plant or on the site of a former nuclear power plant that has been torn down. The meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan this past spring highlighted the risks of such a storage plan when at least one of its spent-fuel pools lost water, causing the stored rods to melt.

The key is making sure the spent fuel stays cool—and finding a local community that accepts the risk of having it around. Such a "consent based" approach has worked well in Finland and Sweden, and highlights the flaws in the process that led to Yucca Mountain, which was essentially selected by congressional fiat in the 1980s.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=presidential-commission-seeks-volunteers-to-store-nuclear-waste

I volunteer Palm Beach Florida, Specifically Rush Limbaugh's House.

[Fridays Child]

1. Might as well be Rush's house. It already houses the world's largest...

...pile of steaming shit.