Should the U.S. store its Nuclear Waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain?

[airbuzz]

Ehi men, do you know how much it costs to put something in orbit?

Actually it is about 10000 to 50000 Eur for each Kg you want to take up.

And you leave it in a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) or in the best case ine a GTO (an elliptic orbit with perigeum LEO orbit and apogeum GEOstationary orbit).
And then it is not that easy to "escape" from the earth. You should contruct a spacecraft that will be lost.

Believe me, at this moment this solution is absolutely not feasable, there are thousand of engineers trying to study how to travel at lower costs in the space (me too) and how to take off from the earth...

 

[Morbius]

• The team hopes to use a power wall, which is an array of monitors pieced together into one giant monitor, to project the true wealth of detail generated by the code.

I have been reading about these power walls recently. There is a biology team that calls their's the http://ncmir.ucsd.edu/Research/Highlights/2004_BioWall.htm .

hittsquad,

Here's an article that shows one of our Powerwalls at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory:

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Quinn.html

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist

 

[Morbius]

Morbius's 3,000 tons per year, which could be significantly lower if the "environmentalists" didn't stand in the way, is absolutely trivial compared to the billions of tons of pollution from fossil fuels that gets into the environment every year. And remember, none of that 3,000 tons of nuclear waste gets into the environment.

Russ,

Exactly!

The anti-nukes are so afraid of radioactivity and radiation - but the fools
don't understand that fossil fuels put more radioactivity into the
environment than does nuclear!

From scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Fossil fuels like coal contain trace amounts of radioactive uranium and
thorium. Because we burn BILLIONS of tonnes of coal each and every
year - THOUSANDS of tonnes of radioactive uranium and thorium go up
the stack into the environment!

Quoting from the Oak Ridge article:

"Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher
radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet
government regulations"

and

"The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times
that from nuclear plants"

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist

 

[Political Prodigy]

I think they should until an easier, cheaper, way of disposing it is found. If it wasn't so expensive I would rather use the jettison it into space idea.

 

[hitssquad]

use the jettison it into space idea.

What purpose might that serve?

 

[Political Prodigy]

So long as it was out of Earth's gravitational field it would no longer cause problems here on earth. We already messed up our planet a great deal, why not litter the whole galaxy?
If it was sent straight into the sun or another star that would be a whole lot better but much more of a pain to calculate would it not?

 

[brewnog]

It's not the calculations which are a pain Prodigy. It's a tremendous amount of completely unnecessary cost, and as has been repeatedly pointed out, incredibly dangerous too.

 

[Morbius]

So long as it was out of Earth's gravitational field it would no longer cause problems here on earth. We already messed up our planet a great deal, why not litter the whole galaxy?
If it was sent straight into the sun or another star that would be a whole lot better but much more of a pain to calculate would it not?

Political Prodigy,

The calculations are fairly trivial.

But you have NO IDEA how much energy one has to expend to de-orbit the
waste into the Sun. [ The waste is already in orbit around the Sun,
because it is on Earth which is in orbit around the Sun. ]

It is extremely expensive to put the waste into the Sun - as well as the
risk of a launch failure.

And to what purpose?

Geologic disposal in Yucca Mountain is safe - it has been endorsed by
the National Academy of Scientists, plus the scientists in the national
laboratories that have studied this.

As far as messing up the galaxy with our nuclear waste - that is one of
the most ridiculous contentions I've heard. The average supernova
spews a TREMENDOUS amount of nuclear waste into the galaxy - an
amount more than tens of millions of Earths worth!

The total amount of nuclear waste that the USA has generated from
the Manhattan Project plus nearly 50 years of nuclear power generation
would fit in a high school gymnasium!

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist
Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory