"fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions:
> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.
The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.
this is exactly the idealism thats causing problems -the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.
Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
No, what's creating the problems is the gas and coal lobby that dug into the conserveratives (CDU) and social democrats (SPD) to prevent the Energiewende from completion by creating burocratic and economical hurdles.
For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.
oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…
> the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.
Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.
Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.
> idealism
If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?
The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.
> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?
If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).
If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.
That’s not what decommissioning means and what you’re asking for is childishly ridiculous.
How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?
How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?
How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?
The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.
> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants
We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.
I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.
[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.
I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.
The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress needs to get its shit together, I agree.
We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.
There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years.
This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.
Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment.
Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.
No, the attitude makes sense because of the time value of money.
At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.
The only real argument against this is that the waste ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly increase the cost of guarding. But that's no justification for burying it now.
Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository, at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow time for other disposal methods, such as launching into space, to become competitive. How cheap will the descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?
I think there may have been an argument for rapidly burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also be disrupted by direct strikes.
I sort of mostly agree. Long term deep storage is nice because with a good design, we can pretty much set and forget. Most LLFPs aren't actually very dangerous as they don't emit gamma rays, but Tc-99 and I-129 are pretty nasty stuff. we could probably reprocess those into Ru and throw the rest of it into a deep geologically stable hole. Any society in 10k years that could find the stuff will be advanced enough to avoid or rebury it. As long as we don't store anything highly bioavailable near water, it should be fine. By 10k years from now the amount of radiation actually being released will be miniscule. But, I'm all for a big deep hole.
The US government made nuclear plants pay into a fund for long-term waste storage. Last I saw, that fund had accumulated over $40 billion. But since the Yucca Mountain facility was canceled, the government never provided the waste storage they were charging for. It's not surprising if nuclear operators don't want to pay twice.
> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.
The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.
http://connyankee.com/