Reid bill: N-waste shouldn't be moved

WASHINGTON - Congressional delegations from Utah and Nevada united Wednesday to introduce legislation aimed at preventing shipments of high-level nuclear waste to either state and instead seeking to store the material at the reactors where it was produced.
The prospect of on-site storage could significantly reduce the attractiveness of a proposed temporary storage site on Utah's Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation.
The bill's sponsor, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says it would relieve energy companies of the burden of managing the waste, reduce the risk associated with shipping nuclear material across the country, and would buy time to develop workable alternatives to a proposed permanent waste facility beneath Yucca Mountain, Nev., which is badly behind schedule.

more...

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3310491

All new reactors built in the United States need to reprocess their spent fuel until 99% of original usable fuel is gone.

I like Harry Reid. But he is pandering to Nevada ignorance on this issue. I understand that he must do this for political reasons - but it is the politics of all the same the politics of ignorance.

The risk that a nuclear accident will occur from the transportation of nuclear fuel is vanishingly small when compared to the risk of the fossil fuels that Nevadans burn every damn day in complete indifference to the damage it causes humanity. Many thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel have been transported around the world for many decades. Not one human being has been injured in this process, ever, any where on earth. Not one. This compares very favorably to the situation with fossil fuels, with the exception that when fossil fuels are transported and people are killed in the act, no one gives a rat's ass.

It is immoral stupidity.

I took a lot of geology classes in college and we studied Yucca mountain. It's about as dry a place as you'll find anywhere in the US. It's dangerous and stupid to keep all the waste in those on-site "swimming pools". Not only are they vulnerable to an attack, but they're vulnerable if something malfunctions and the water runs out. Say an earthquake at San Onofre. Sorry Harry. Your state already played host to dozens of nuclear explosions - get over it.

At Oklo, which was in a rain forest, most of the radioactive materials from the naturally occurring reactors migrated less than 100 meters over billions of years.

But that is not the point either.

The fact is that in toto, the risks associated with nuclear materials are vastly smaller than people suppose. No one has ever died from a nuclear related terrorist incident, or any other type of accident of any type resulting from the storage of spent nuclear fuel. Zero people. Yet people seem obsessed with nuclear materials.

They are not obsessed with air pollution which kills people wholesale on a grand scale every damn day. Neither are they obsessed with global warming.

After a few years of decay, it is not necessary to keep spent nuclear fuel in pools at all. Dry casks are used. They work fine. None have ever leaked. None have ever injured anyone.

My personal "solution" for the non-problem of spent nuclear fuel is to store it in a few centralized secure locations until it is needed for reprocessing, something I predict will happen in about a century. Yucca mountain theoretically could be such a place, but there should be nothing "permanent" about it. Nuclear materials should not be buried but should remain readily available and easily retrievable. Nothing else need be done for the short term. This may involve some trucking, but given that the entire inventory of spent nuclear fuel thus far produced could fit in an average sized warehouse, not all that much dramatic risk is involved.