Nevada Gov. Tells US to Bury Nuke Waste Elsewhere

[kristopher]

Nevada Gov. Tells US to Bury Nuke Waste Elsewhere
LAS VEGAS June 22, 2013 (AP)

Nevada's governor is telling the federal government the state doesn't want highly radioactive waste of the type that could be used to build a "dirty bomb" buried in a shallow pit at the former national nuclear proving ground north of Las Vegas.

The federal Energy Department is reviewing Gov. Brian Sandoval's letter opposing plans to ship about 400 canisters of waste from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to the Nevada National Security Site, agency spokeswoman Aoife McCarthy said Friday.

Sandoval, a Republican former federal judge and state attorney general, accused the Energy Department of trying to set a dangerous precedent by exploiting a regulatory loophole to classify the waste as a low-level hazard so that it can be buried at the former test site about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The governor said the material should be handled as high-level radioactive waste.

"This dangerous waste should be managed in the same manner as remote-handled transuranic waste," Sandoval said, noting that the Energy Department provides hands-free handling and permanent deep-geologic storage of similar material at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

The governor also accused the Energy Department of ...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nevada-gov-tells-us-bury-nuke-waste-19460363

[thelordofhell]

1. yup

[pscot]

2. If we eliminate all 50 states

from consideration as possible sites for a permanent waste storage facility, what are we left with?



HANFORD

[PamW]

3. The dumb Governor has ZERO say-so

The waste in question is NOT high-level waste.

The statements by Sandoval show how STUPID and IGNORANT he is of high-school level science.

Nevada's IDIOT Governor evidently doesn't understand that the radioactivity of a substance is INVERSELY proportional to the half life. Courtesy of Georgia State University Physics Dept:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/halfli2.html

The "radioactivity" is the rate at which radioactive atoms decay and is given in the above link as

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/halfli2.html#c2

"If there are N radioactive nuclei at some time t, then the number ?N which would decay in any given time interval ?t would be proportional to N:

delta N = ? N ?t

where ? is a constant of proportionality (decay constant).

So the rate per unit time is the product of ? and N and is the "radioactivity".

Later they show the relationship between the decay constant ? and the half life:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/halfli2.html#c4

Since the half-life equal the natural logarithm of 2 divided by the decay constant; the decay constant and the half-life are INVERSELY proportional to each other.

That means a large value of the half-life means a SMALL value of the decay constant, and hence LOW radioactivity or low-level radioactivity.

As the article states, the waste is Uranium-235 and Uranium-233. The half-life of Uranium-235 is 704 million years. The half-life of Uranium-233 is 159,200 years which one can confirm courtesy of Brookhaven National Lab's online "Chart of the Nuclides":

http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/

Because U-235 and U-233 have such long-lived half-lives; their radioactivity is LOW and therefore they are TOTALLY UNSUITABLE for making a "dirty bomb".

If you want to make a "dirty bomb"; you need to use something with a SHORT half-life which means a high decay constant and consequently high radioactivity.

The long-lived Uranium isotopes are not suitable for making "dirty bombs". Uranium is one of the most uniformly distributed elements in the Earth's crust. If you dig in your backyard; you will find small amounts of Uranium, the stuff is practically everywhere, and it will have the long-lived, low-radioactivity isotopes.

So the dumb Governor of Nevada is just throwing around the words "dirty bomb" to scare people, and the Majority Leader of the Senate also got fooled and knows no better either.

When will people elect politicians that have even the most basic level of science knowledge, instead of IDIOTS that don't know what is highly radioactive, and what is about as radioactive as the stuff you find in your backyard.

In any case; the Governor can't do anything about it. The Nevada Test Site is a federal reservation and the federal government can do what it wants on it. After all, they blew up nuclear weapons there for decades and the Nevada politicians couldn't do anything about it.

PamW