Where's g? He had that quote in his signature about one man changing the world.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Vacationing.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I'm sorry, but I don't think dumping any waste into the ocean is a good idea. No idea what the ramifications would be in the future. Underground is best, but not on a fault line! [-X

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

Our reprocessing it to ensure a supply for hundreds of years would be even better.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Agreed. Where is a good place to read up on that?

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

The Great Nuclear Power Debate. Your library should have it.

to nuke proponents in the US:

Yucca Mountain, where the US government wants to dump YOUR nuclear waste, is a hundred miles from here in MY backyard.

no thanks. and don't think this fight is over.

so you like nuke plants in, that's fine with me, build all the ones you want, build them on every street corner if you're that much taken by them. that fact that you don't want to accept the true operating costs and hazards due to waste products and want to put anyone else but yourselves at risk is also understandable, but it is also fundamentally dishonest.

Nevada does not want your nuclear wastes. keep it yourselves.

helluva complex way to boil water.

Yucca Mountain is 100 miles from Las Vegas. That is hardly backyard enough for it to be any threat. It's also a bit rich for someone living in a city like Las Vegas to be complaining about a nuclear storage facility when you're in the middle of the Nevada desert, get bombarded daily by extremely concentrated solar radiation as well as inhaling the radioactive isotopes released by all the motor vehicles.

The fight hasn't begun. Fear mongerers have been promoting mass hysteria for half a century. Now we're fighting back.

Politics make the construction costs very high because of all the red tape and politically correct crap that power companies are put through. Once it is built, operating them is far cheaper than any other power plant.

The most radioactive isotopes produced are allowed to decay in the few hours after the fuel is removed from the reactor. The rest is more stable stuff that is stored until some administration realises that there are hundreds of years worth of energy locked up in the stuff and allows the fuel to be reprocessed and reused. If nuclear fission was given the proper freedom is deserves, there wouldn't be a waste problem. The fission products would be reused and we wouldn't have any Yucca Mountain.

I would have no problem with living near a properly run storage facility. Of course, I don't so that statement is admittedly somewhat empty. But I wouldn't mind because I know that I should be far more concerned with radioactive radon gas in my home or radioactive potassium in my blood stream or the exhaust fumes from my car than with anything Yucca Mountain could throw at me.

However, it is the most efficient way of doing it.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

What radioactive isotopes are released in car exhaust? Not sarcasm, serious question. Also, how does Vegas get bombarded by a higher concentrate of solar radiation?

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

After you reprocess radioactive waste, you get usable fuel, but surely there must still be some waste material. What's left and how much would there be?

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I'll admit, I was once caught up in the mass hysteria of the Nuclear Plants of [)(o)(o)/\/\...until I started to realize, by reading here and there, that it wasn't so bad.

Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were highly publicized (I have a game on me Commodore 64 called Chernobyl!), and mass media has a way of hitting the most people with junk information. Hollywood has had its fair share of atrocities when it comes to dealing with nuclear power, also.

At our house in VT, my mother and father and I have been discussing ways to cut power costs for our house, to save money. We've been thinking of a combination of solar and wind to help out.

I think it would be wonderful if we could reprocess the spent fuel rods and use them again. Which brings me to an important question: Is that what North Korea is doing? So they can run their power plants longer? I've been awefully wary of what Mr. Bush has been touting ever since he decided we needed to fight the Iraqis. Not trying to start a political debate, tho.

Is that a possibility for the N. Koreans? Mass media has been making a big deal about them building weapons with the spent rods. Hmmm...

Spent fuel consists of three components. Uranium that was unused in the initial reaction. Plutonium that was formed by neutron absorption. And radioactive fission products. The uranium and plutonium are comparatively stable, at least when compared to the other stuff, and are used again. The fission products consist of some stuff that decays in the initial cooldown period and other more stable nuclides that could be used for other purposes like in RTGs or in various medical technologies.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Thanks!

Hmm... seems to be pretty tidy to me. Reprocessing is a good idea.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

It is. Tell that to Jimmy Carter, though.

The reason that we don't reprocess fuel is entirely political. Only about 1% of the fissionable uranium in a fuel pellet is used during its time in the reactor, and a good amount of fissionable plutonium is there also. Almost all of the nuclear waste has vast amounts of fuel in it to be reprocessed.



As Glom said, 100 miles away is hardly your backyard. There are several nuclear and coal plants withing 100 miles of me but I'm not glowing yet. Mohave and Reid Gardner coal power plants are significantly closer to you and you will receive many times the radiation dosage you would get due to Yucca Mountain from them.

One of the reasons why Yucca Mountain costs three times what a manned Mars mission would is because it is safe. Many billions of dollars and years of effort have gone into selecting and preparing the site. I would not feel at all unsafe living near Yucca Mountain.

I don't really understand your point. We didn't choose Yucca Mountain to endanger people who live in Nevada, we chose it because it was the safest place to deposit nuclear waste. It is a mountain. The waste stored there will not harm you, nor will it leak into the groundwater. There are nuclear waste sites in nearly every state in the US, and we are not afraid of them. There is nothing to fear from a properly built storage site. It's like being afraid of weapons arsenals at nearby military bases - there could be a problem, but most likely there would not be.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that you would receive far more radiation from a luminous watch, television, radon gas, limestone, or even your own bloodstream than from nuclear waste buried in a mountain which is over 100 miles away from you. I'd like to ask what you're really afraid of. Ionizing radiation is made up of three things - alpha radiation, which can be stopped by paper, beta radiation, which is stopped by metal, and gamma radiation, which can be stopped by several meters of lead or concrete. Clearly Yucca Mountain has far more protection than that.

That's OK. But don't put yourself in a position against nuclear power because you are upset that a mountain in your state was chosen to store nuclear waste. Neither one is going to hurt you and nuclear power can help you. You oppose nuclear power not for any reasons actually having to do with it, but entirely because of an irrational fear and NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) syndrome. Politics again, which is the reason why nuclear power is not widespread in the first place.

Plus, nuclear fission is far more efficient at boiling water than any chemical forms of heating, as Glom pointed out. Actually, it's not as frivolous as Wirraway made it seem - power is currently produced by making steam, and to make steam, one must boil water - and one gram of uranium has the heating power of 20 million tons of coal. Just think of the pollution from that much coal. Nuclear power does heat water - very efficiently. And that's not all it does. I have a friend who had a brain tumor, and had it treated with radiation. Without radiation, he may not have survived. When used properly, as it is in the US and UK, nuclear power and even radiation are two incredibly powerful and beneficial tools.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

we get a lot of solar radiation cuz' the sun shines a lot here, its what we're famous for. since this fact concerns at least one poster, my advice is to use sun block (when it rains, you might want to come out of it). apart from that brilliant observation....

like I said, if you're in love with nuke radiation, that's ok by me, build as many as you want, wherever you want, any design you want. its your decision. just accept the full costs with the benefits instead of doing the moral equivalent of polluting the river downstream. there are actually laws preventing that, even in this country.

100 miles or 10 miles, its our backyard. its our state. you're using the worst kind of justification for pollution possible -- "as long as it doesn't bother me and kinda sorta doesn't bother you". right? Nevada was chosen because it has minimal political clout. Surely you're not so naive to think that safety alone was the dominant consideration. is anyone you know of actually begging to become the country's nuke dumping ground? are you?

Nevada and its residents are fully capable of deciding what kind of energy sources and the associated environmental/health costs are acceptable -- coal fired plants OK. Lake Mead and the power plant there -- OK.

for us to bear the costs associated with YOUR nuke use isn't acceptable. this is not "irrational fear", this is a decision of the residents here. UNLESS you're going to lecture us on what's best for us, and what we should or should not be afraid of.

the question you'll never get around to addressing is, why not keep nuke waste yourselves? you're not afraid of something, are you?

tell me why you don't want nuke waste in your backyard.

I'm listening.

I still want to know what radioactive isotopes are coming out of my car.

And I am wondering why the sunlight in Vegas is more harmful than the sunlight in say, L.A.?

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

What does this have to do with Yucca Mountain? I agree with Glom. I wouldn't be afraid at all of a safe nuclear waste storage site such as Yucca Mountain. It's not as if they're actually dumping high-level waste in your backyard. It's being buried deep inside a mountain which is over 100 miles away from you.





Coal OK? Coal OK? If you think coal is OK, then I don't know what the heck you're worried about. Pollution from coal plants is proven to kill over 50 people a day. It is one of the primary causes of acid rain. You receive more radiation from coal plants than from nuclear plants. Coal mining kills thousands of miners either from injury in mines or from lung cancer.

Nuclear power plants are also far easiser to operate than coal plants. Coal plants require thousands of trainloads of coal a year to operate. A nuclear power plant only requires a few truckloads of fresh fuel per year. To get this coal, coal plants also must constantly run mining operations to get coal, in which many miners die. The volume of waste produced is actually more than the orginal fuel. And this waste has to go somewhere, too. Coal plants are so dirty that it makes nuclear waste seem clean by comparison. Would you rather have a coal plant releasing pollutants which are proven to cause cancer and other respiratory dieseases, are proven to cause acid rain, and kill many miners each year, or a nuclear plant whose only waste is nuclear waste which can be safely stored at the bottom of swimming pools?

I don't understand how you are opposed to both radiation and nuclear plants at the same time. If I wanted to stay safe from radiation, I would replace all coal plants with nuclear ones. Nuclear plants provide almost no radiation exposure to people whatsoever.

Wirraway, before you go on, view the file here. It is a breakdown of your radiation exposure sources. As you can see, the amount of radiation you would receive from wearing a luminous wristwatch is seven times what you would get from living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor. You don't live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor, but you do live within 50 miles of two coal plants, each of which provide three times the radiation dosage that a nuclear plant would. Watching TV provides about 100 times the radiation that living near a nuclear plant would, and living in a stone, brick, or concrete buliding is a factor of 7 more. But you have to understand that none of these doses are serious. The .01 mrem you would receive if you lived within 50 miles of a nuclear plant, which you do not, is simply not important.


Get this through your head: Yucca Mountain was not chosen because "everyone else was too scared." There were several sites under consideration and Yucca Mountain was chosen because it provides the safest environment for storing nuclear waste. If Yucca Mountain was in New York, than the waste would be deposited there. It's not as if there's some conspiracy against Nevada.





If you were you would have addressed our points.

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"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

I just wanted to say that I used to live in Oak Ridge, TN, where they did a lot of the work for the first nuclear bombs our country built alongw with building plenty more after that.

I lived not 15 miles from the X-10 and Y-12 plants where not only did they used to build nuclear weapons, but they are currently disassembling existing ones.

Yet, I'm not glowing, and you have to be in a real dark room to notice the water glowing.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.