In reversal, Trump drops
Yucca Mountain as
nuclear waste site

Maybe there is something to the story posted below on Lucianne.com . You Should Know About This Chernobyl Fungus That Eats Radiation Popular Mechanics, by Caroline DelbertOriginal Article Posted by StormCnter — 2020-02-07 09:36:01

Hence, Nevada is a target state for 2020. What about doing a deal with Mexico? They could use the jobs/money for the depository.

Meanwhile, the tanks at the Hanford site (Richland WA) continue to decay and the danger of nuclear waste seeping into the water table increases. I hope the President really is committed to finding an alternate solution.

Mr. President. The USA is awash in very dangerous nuclear waste which is currently stored in unsecured facilities. The situation is ripe for creation of dirty bombs which could poison populated areas for generations to come. It is not enough to just decide against Yucca mountain which while unpopular is - as certain as science can possibly deam - a most secure site and already vetted for such storage. It is critically important that an alternative depository be announced. It took years to vet Yucca Mt. and the methodology to be employed. Changing horses in mid-stream now only dooms us to further decades of delay.

Send it to downtown Portland, Oregon. All that radiation may help stop the spread of communism.

Bring on the fungi! Reference to #2.

Though on most things France is never a model, in this instance, she is. France recycles its nuclear waste very successfully and has for decades. The Heritage Foundation has a great article about this from over a decade ago. Mr. President, pull us into the 21st century, kicking and screaming if necessary. The technology is there. Let's do it!

Jimmy The Peanut Farmer, Not Jimmy the Nuclear Scientist... Is why its illegal to recycle nuclear waste and instead bury the valuable material in a hole in the ground. I get it, Trump wants to be sure to win Nevada. After the landslide in November we need him to get serious about what we are going to do with it. At some point the luxury of stupidity will run out. We have a recycling opportunity with a zero emission energy source, and the "YOU HATE SCIENCE" crowd are busy watching 1950' horror movies and screaming "NO".

Our ability to send payloads into space now means that we can send the material into the Sun, or to the nether regions of space where it will decay into harmless matter. How much will it cost? How much does licensing, transportation, maintenance of facilities, payrolls, and other expenses cost now? Maybe a few launches every now and then will cost less and less, as time goes by.

Don't we own some small island in the Philippians? We at least need to publicly consider that.

Nevada should pay back all the money that was spent on Yucca Mountain. They pushed to have it built because of all the jobs but then changed their mind when it was built.

there is just one logical location - Hawaii - in crazy mazie's back yard.

Tell the world that the nuclear waste will be sent to Utah, where the govt is even now looking for likely sites. Then watch hapless Mitt try to lobby Trump to choose some other site. Oh, the drama!

Great campaign move. He wants NV in a bad way. I suggest put it in Sacramento or Chicago.

There is a lot of stuff in said nuclear wastes, but the critical substance IMO is plutonium. Any, and I stress any reactor which "burns" uranium ends up with plutonium in the spent fuel rods. If some bad actor can get a hold of it, it's a matter of chemical processing, not nuclear, to get fissile material. This operation can be performed under cover in the space of a small to medium sized house. There has only been one person that I can remember who has asked the essential questions, and that is Galen Winsor, a literal hands-on nuclear expert. The questions are: Who owns it? How much is it worth? I would add a third: What is being done to protect this material (as #6 says) since it is of a vital counter proliferation matter. The full video is here: https://atomicinsights.com/galen-winsor-asks-who-owns-the-plutonium-how-much-is-it-worth/ Along with other nuclear wastes, the plutonium must eventually be accounted for and secured. We asked for nothing less from post-USSR Russia and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure its nuclear material. Now it's our turn.

If you pay attention to Trump he often floats ideas to see what happens. When he gets a lot of pushback he goes to plan B- which likely was his plan A to begin with. Except now it will be seen as a compromise.

Forget all these other states just dump it in New Mexico. The Brown Pillsbury Doughboy Richardson let everyone else do it. This has been going on since the bomb testing in 1945 so why stop now? New Mexico is a bluest of blue liberal hell hole so downtown Alberquirky or Santa Fe would be a nice places to dump. I'm surprised from a satellite image that New Mexico doesn't glow in the dark.

They have the WIPP site in New Mexico. It was developed for just such a purpose. When the MIchael Douglas/Jane Fonda/Jack Lemmon movie "China Syndrome" came out, the leafleters outside the theater in Albuquerque pointed out a serious dilemma about the issue, and that was "what to do with the spent fuel rods" that have a half-life of 10,000 years? The ore that produces the pellets for the rods is also 'hot'.... it has to be kept where NO ONE can get access and use it for nefarious purposes, and as the movie pointed out, when you cut corners have faulty equipment, or have bad designs, BAD things can happen.

#18 is correct. Trump's go-to method is to suddenly announce rather dramatic changes to policy, then wrangle the responses into the form he intended all along, or back off completely if the response is too negative. You would think the Opposition would realize this by now, and maybe they do, but the method is not aimed at them, it's aimed at the People. The Democrats are basically powerless to counter this method of Trump's, reducing them to hapless critics.

Having nowhere to store spent fuel assemblies from nuclear power plants is bad news. Current storage is dangerous. The actual problem which caused most of the radioactive contamination at Fukishima was NOT the meltdown of three reactors, as most would assume. Their very ancient, first generation reactor designs with only a torodial catch trough beneath the containment vessel worked exactly as designed and the molten core, as it burned through the bottom of the containment vessel, filled this circular trough. This reshaped the molten reactor fuel into a non-critical mass shape, which ended the nuclear fission reaction so the molten fuel cooled and is stable. The PROBLEM was the "spent" nuclear fuel assemblies (racks of zirconium clad uranium oxide pellets formed into long metal rods, many dozens in an assembly) which had to be "temporarily" stored in open topped 'swimming pools' of ordinary water. The water absorbs neutrons, keeping the fission tamped down, and carries away the heat from the residual atomic decay in these fuel rod assemblies. This is only intended by nuclear engineers for TEMPORARY storage until the fuel assemblies cool off (thermally and radioactively) for a year or two. Unfortunately, Obama cancelled the Yucca Flats nuclear storage facility, which the nuclear power industry had depended on, after it had been essentially fully constructed, supposed to have opened in 2017. So, there is NO PLACE to put these spent fuel assemblies. So they sit in swimming pool "temporary" storage areas adjacent to ALL the nuclear reactors in the USA and other countries, because there is no permanent storage, since YF was closed down by Obama and Dirt-for-Brains Harry Reid. At Fukishima, the horrifically strong 7.4 level earthquake cracked the concrete walls of these storage pools and the water leaked out. As these fuel assemblies were gradually exposed to air, the exposed parts turned red hot, started to melt and then finally the metal started to burn, lifting radioactive smoke particles into the air to drift around the area. The most important thing that they did to mitigate this problem was bring in snorkel type concrete pumps with long boom arms to pump sea water into these pools faster than it could leak out, covering the fuel assemblies with water and ending the danger until the pools could be repaired or the fuel assemblies moved. Keeping spend fuel assemblies permanently in "temporary" storage is just bad policy, and it also prevents us from getting more than 1% of the energy in the nuclear fuel. After one :"burn", the fuel needs to be reprocessed, separated and new fuel rods made, and run through the reactors again. This can be done many times.....but Jimmah the Genius Carter banned nuclear fuel reprocessing in the USA in the 70s, so we throw away 99% of the energy in nuclear fuel, another of the antinuke folks' sly methods of bankrupting the nuclear power industry.

Actually, #6, spent reactor core assemblies would be a horribly poor, almost totally unworkable choice for the source material for a dirty bomb. The fuel assemblies are VERY large and heavy, need cranes to handle, and are heavily radioactive, so they will kill by radiation any amateurs attempting to steal one. And then, they are heavily constructed and the nuclear material is inside of strong metal tubes, you'd have to break them open or grind them up to get the material out, and then it is very hard ceramic pellets, not easily dispersed, or turned into a powder. These things are largely self-protecting. Really they are very poor choices for a dirty bomb materials, but are still dangerous to leave in a temporary storage pool forever. There are some other, far more readily available and easily usable sources of materials for dirty bombs, that are, fortunately, not well known. And I am not going to discuss those things. They are protected by their anonymity.

#11, two points. One, a failed lauch spreads this stuff all over the place....VERY, VERY bad. And Two, the stuff is very valuable, should be reprocessed and used many more times, not thrown away.

#17, close but not quite right. If the fuel assemblies were used in a normal reactor cycle the ratio of Pu isotopes is very poor for weapons, not really very useful. I'm not sure if it would even work, might, might not. For making weapons grade Pu, other methods are used to specifically create the desired isotope ratios which are useful for that purpose. And the "simple chemical processes" (basically a correct point) are extremely radioactive and take large amounts of very strong acids, and other industrial level chemicals. Not a backyard science project by any means, and not easily done without attracting attention. "Why is it that you need two rail cars full of highest grade ********ic acid?" It WILL be asked. And if the isotope ratios are from a normal reactor burn cycle, you would need to separate isotopes. And if you want to then separate the isotopes.....back to the severe problems of isotope separation that apply to uranium, calutrons, gas diffusion or centrifuges. All very expensive, very slow, impractical in "non-governmental" situations. The bottom line is that spent reactor fuel is an extremely poor source for weapons materials unless the reactor is set up specifically to do that, and commercial reactors are not, so spent commercial reactor fuel, while it does technically contain plutonium, isn't where anyone would want to start for weapons.

I like the Utah suggestion, they can call it the Mitt Romney Nuclear Waste Depository.

Just read about a fungus that eats radiation perhaps we don't need to store it at all.

People need to get a grip about the Fungus that eats radiation. The radiation is still there. The source of the radiation hasn't been diminished it is just that some black fungi seem to be able to use the radiation energy to grow, like a normal plant uses the light from the sun to 'power' it's growth. Humans refined and process ore to create concentrated radioactive materials to provide a heat source to generate power. Humans now have the responsibility to convert the dangerous waste from that process into some kind of different energy source or into an inert material and then STORE it, instead of kicking a can down the road.

Agree there are technical challenges to reprocessing spent fuel on a small scale, but I'll stick with DOE assessments which like some aspects of your post I can't get into. Yes, the normal fuel cycle does not produce much usable uranium, hence monitoring efforts try to determine if fuel element replaces are occurring other than a normal reactor cycle. I don't trust the IAEA or the canard of "oh, we'd know about it." Hint: as we found out during OIF, there was a lot we didn't know about and the "IAEA seal and control" didn't mean squat. Russia's Rosatom was a like a dope dealer, selling reactors, which are a gateway drug to much worse capabilities, to rogue countries around the world. We wouldn't have a handle on 100% of the numerous fuel cycles on the planet. All I'm saying is don't count out the possibilities. Lastly, and more to other L-dotters, radioactive materials being self-protective, as in who would want to handle them, doesn't really matter to dedicated jihadists. The head guy could find a couple of minimally competent technical extremists as helper boys and it would please them to no end to die as martyrs if they could take a couple hundred thousand infidels with them. If they can charge an Abrams tank in the open desert with their AKs in onesies and twosies, they would gladly help with handling toxic materials.

Well this reversal sure pleased Harry Reid and the rest of the Dems although they said Trump was just trying to take credit for their work in shutting down Yucca. BTW, not everyone in this state opposed using Yucca Mountain, only the big mouth Dems. Regular folks wanted it used so citizens in NV could get a government check like Alaska gets. To me, it’s been another example of government waste and it should have been used for the original purpose years ago. I figure it’s as safe as anything else these days. I hope Trump steps up and tells the Dems he’s allowing a bigger budget for going forward with storing materials.

1. You posters who think the plutonium from expended power reactor fuel assemblies can be used to make a practical bomb are wrong. There is far too much P240. The plutonium would be so warm from alpha emission that it would melt any explosives intended to compress it, and, should that problem be overcome, it would predetonate upon compression. It would be cheaper to start from scratch than to start with spent reactor fuel. 2. It is possible to build several types of reactors that could use the isotopes in spent fuel rods from light water reactors as fuel. Why bury fuel? There is enough energy sitting in cooling ponds to power the country for several hundred years, including growth in demand. Unmoderated (fast) neutrons don’t care if they hit U235, U238, P239, P240.... They can fission it. Nuclear “waste” is the wrong term for the by-products of fission in a light water reactor. The correct term is “fuel.”