On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 05:05:55 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:


Yucca is a bad location, and a bad design. Realize that most of what
they want to put there is actually very valuable, yet they've provided
no easy or safe way to get it *back out* when (or if) people ever come
to their senses. Dumb.

Agree.

There's really no reason to *bury* the spent fuel at all. Better would
be to simply place the rods, in their shipping casks, in a dry exterior
location. Put a fence around them, maybe post a few guards. That way,
in a few years when people are sitting in the cold and dark, they may
decide nuclear power isn't such an evil thing after all, and those rods
can easily be recovered and reprocessed to make more power.

The French are storing their high level wastes in easily accessable
containers in natural dry caves. That way they can retrieve it at need.
We don't have to bother with caves, since we have enough barren
desert area to spare to simply store the containers in the open.

Yeah, but now you're back to two of the biggest problems with Yucca -
transporting the waste, and inflicting it on others. The real risk is
almost irrelevant, because any policy that includes those two problems
is bound to be bogged down forever in political wrangling.

There are two main reasons people don't want to store waste in the
open next to the plants - they can't wait to get rid of it (and they
really don't care where it goes so long as it's somewhere else), and
cost. How do you even predict the cost of monitoring, potential cask
replacement decades down the road, etc.?

All that said, it's time for folks who are favor of having nuke power,
to take responsibility for their waste. That means on-site storage,
for a very long time.

Wayne