Court Hears Arguments Over Nuclear Waste Dump

[Buzz Clik]

The paranoia marches on to the steady beat of fear and ignorance. In the mean time, tons of high-level rad waste sits waiting for a home.


Quoting:

Court Hears Arguments Over Nuclear Waste Dump

Nevada, Others Oppose Yucca Mountain Project

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18112-2004Jan14.html

Attorneys for the state of Nevada and environmental groups told a U.S. appellate court yesterday that federal agencies ignored science and law in deciding to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in a mountain outside Las Vegas.

Taking up the Yucca Mountain dispute, which has raged for two decades, the panel of three judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard federal government lawyers argue that the decision to create the dump for waste from the nation's nuclear reactors was based on sound reasoning.

Nevada officials consider the federal court one of their last hopes of stopping the $58 billion project, located in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The panel is expected to issue its decision in late spring or summer, and attorneys on both sides said they would appeal to the full appellate court if they lose.

click the link for the entire story

[tom_paine]

1. The Three-Judge Panel...a weakness in the system that the Busheviks have

exploited brilliantly by replacing judges with Bushevik Loyalists less interested in the law (though the last three years have indeed shown that the rest of the judiciary is perhap the most functional aspect of the dying Old American Republic and for now is the last bulwark against Bushevik Tyranny, if you can believe it) than loyalty to their Emperor.

I imagine the Three-Judge Panel worked well for many years until the rise of the unscrupulous cabal of Nixonviks that later became the Busheviks targeted them as a weakness. This ultimately allowed the Attempted Coup of 1998 to proceed no matter what occurred, since THAT Three-Judge Panel was stacked with Bushevik Loyalists who didn;t give 2 shits for the law, but did want to serve the Imperial Famiyl in it's quest to drag the Clinton's throughthe mud.

Sickening and stunning to see our once-free (and still technically free as the Imperials are reducing resistance at the top before they get around to us "little people") nation reduced to Imperial Footstool.

[NNadir]

2. 58 billion dollars?

For a dump?

You know what's sad, for that much money they could have probably developed and built enough transmutation systems to have reduced the entire problem to an absurdity, recovering a hell of a lot of energy along the way. (It is of course, still only a fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq and the health and environmental damage done by fossil fuels.)

Not to worry, that's what the Japanese and the French (and probably the Indians as well) will end up building transmutation systems. The nuclear waste may be one of the last things we'll have left to sell, assuming we can stop suing one another long enough to do so.

[treepig]

3. looks like the $2.5 billion per life saved wrt nuclear waste storage

cost is going to be going up just a tad . . .

We are spending the equivalent of innumerable billions of dollars per life saved in our radioactive waste management programs. As another example from the nuclear industry, consider reactor safety. Since the mid-1970's, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been tightening regulations to reduce the risks of reactor accidents. This program of "regulatory ratcheting" has increased the cost of a nuclear power plant by a factor of 4-5 over and above inflation, an increased cost per plant of well over $2 billion. How many lives does
NRC hope to save at this cost? According to its own studies (5), plants built prior to this regulatory ratcheting could be expected to cause an average of 0.8 deaths over their operating life. Thus, according to their own calculations, NRC is knowingly spending ($2 billion/0.8=) $2.5 billion per life saved. An ironic aspect of these NRC reactor safety-upgrading activities is that the cost increases they have caused have forced utilities to build coal burning power plants instead of nuclear plants. A typical estimate (5) is that the air pollution from 1 GWe of coal burning plants kills 25 people per year, or about 1000 people over its operating lifetime. Considering the fact that the nuclear plant is expected to kill 0.8 according to NRC (5) (or 100 according to the anti-nuclear activist organization, Union of Concerned Scientists (7)), that means that every time a coal burning plant is built instead of a nuclear plant, something like 1000 extra people are condemned to an early death. As a result of this NRC program of regulatory ratcheting, about 100 GWe of coal burning plants will eventually be built instead of nuclear plants, causing about 100,000 needless deaths. The 60+ nuclear plants in the USA that will eventually be completed have cost an average of at least $1.6 billion extra each, for a total cost of 100 billion in an effort to save these (60x0.8=) 50 lives. If this money were spent, instead, on cancer searching and highway safety measures, it could have saved something approaching a million lives.

http://www.cab.cnea.gov.ar/difusion/Cohen.html

[NNadir]

4. Ah, but you're ignoring the important part:

Every death by nuclear energy is worth 2584 deaths by coal, oil or gas because it's nuclear.

Seriously, your's is a very serious and correct analysis. It looks like you've been reading Bernard Cohen. Oh wait, I see from the link that indeed you have. Thanx for posting it.

[Buzz Clik]

5. true enough, but...

...public perception is critical in getting nuclear going again in this country. We absolutely must have reasonable disposal/waste reduction -- having spent rods sitting around in ponds of water just doesn't cut it.

[NNadir]

6. Why though, do we demand a 'reasonable' disposal for nuclear 'waste'

and no 'reasonable' disposal for any other form of energy's waste?

I can't say this enough times. No one in the United States has died from the storage of nuclear waste, and millions have died from other forms of energy waste, most notably from air pollution.

The same analysis holds true for deaths by nuclear accidents vs fossil fuel accidents. Ask yourself, if the same number of persons had been killed by a nuclear accident had been killed as died this week from natural gas explosions in China, at what point in the next century would the media stop reporting it and remembering it?

To paraphrase Salvadore Dali, "It is not that nuclear waste is so good, it is that the waste of other forms of energy are so bad."

Public perception is purely based on ignorance of the facts.