The nasty little secret is that there never has been a civilian nuclear power program. Back about the time I was born in the 1960's there were two reactor types designed and tested that produced significantly less nuclear waste than the reactor types in use today. These were thorium reactors (not uranium) and molten-salt reactors. (use wiki to read about them)

Two reactor types were designed and tested. One does not produce the plutonium isotope used for nuclear weapons and one that could safely burn that plutonium along with other nuclear wastes reducing significantly their radio-active half lifes. Without a source of plutonium you can't make thousands of nuclear weapons. Neither reactor types are operating in the US.

Finally everything you use to handle nuclear waste becomes nuclear waste itself. It's a tarbaby you can't put down once picked up.

Reach your own conclusions.

Put the Carbon Back

"Finally everything you use to handle nuclear waste becomes nuclear waste itself. It's a tarbaby you can't put down once picked up"

This is not true.  Nuclear waste is not a virus and will not spread.   The number of radioactive atoms do not increase as they are handled.    

From a practical point of view, Hanford might be a good choice for a reprocessing site -- the added focus on technology development at Hanford (rather than at some other facility) will keep the pressure on the waste treatment program there.

Given the major cost and schedule overruns in the current Hanford waste treatment plant, I fear that the DOE might just "cut & run" at some point -- this is less likely to happen if they have an interest at Hanford outside of cleaning up the existing mess.

One other comment: if you consider nuclear power at all worthwhile, reprocessing is a good idea. It's unfortunate (tragic, maybe) that nuclear waste has been so poorly handled, and that it doesn't receive more attention. I think that ocusing on reprocessing will improve our treatment of the existing waste.

"only one square [of toilet paper] per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required."

A little water works much better than all that paper.  

The only similar media event ever to occur was the Seattle Times weeklong full front page expose in the late 80's of the dozens of catastrophies and scandals at Hanford. That event helped to launch a nationwide battle that came close to closing DOE, but only resulted in the feds agreeing to spend over $100 billion to cleanup dozens of contaminated DOE sites across the country, that under Bush have now all but been greenwashed by Bush's DOE administration.  Or at least until yesterday's ruling by a judge ordering the DOE to get the cleanup right in one of the local ongoing cleanups in So Cal...

Imagine, I can still leaf through my copy of the original sunday pullout and see many of the very same issues that still confront the industry today, like the Hanford HLW liquid waste farm, which is part of Natalie's presentation, and will still be confronting us 10,000 years from now!

The modern era of bottom line journalism is a far cry from the occasional blockbuster pieces that would show up once or twice a year in the mainstream press 25 years ago. Let's just say that the corporate media today has made Homer Simpson more than just a household name.

But don't give up yet! Once in awhile we find some serious journalistic event like the recent series in Denver documenting the tragic reversal of how Bush has closed off health benefits for nearly 3 out of 4 DOE workers (that's over 75,000 workers that have applied for help) suffering from health impacts linked to their work. The Rocky Mt news has done a whole series of stories on the recent attempts by workers to get benefits...

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,129 ...

A year ago residents near Rocky Flats won a $350 million settlement from impacts of the plutonium pit facility.

But here's the latest and most bizare turn of the military industrial complex's screw...

At the end of the  year, it came out that the DOE had very likely, purposely irradiated workers health records at the Mound Ohio site and then had over a hundred boxes of these records buried at a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico. When this came out publicly, there was no national coverage of this event, but it did get a bit of local coverage  with a call for DOE to spend millions of dollars to dig up the documents. Just think for a moment, what kind of slime would nuke and bury the health records of workers in an attempt to keep them from getting health benefits? What else would somebody like this do?

here's the source title if you wanna check it...

Dayton Daily News: Former Mound employees, advocates question destruction of records

dated 1-7-7

Maybe contaminate people as well? Nooo... Well, actually yes we did and the scandals that former Senator John Glenn uncovered of how doctors working for the DOE purposefully exposed citizens without their knowledge or consent to radiation  has now been topped by the disclosure at UK's reprocessing facility in Sellafield where there is now a major scandal about missing body parts of workers at that highly controversial and HIGHLY contaminated facility, that Scotland has been trying to shut down.

Here's a recent link to that scandal  

http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=493 ...

Or a really hot whopper in Japan where the press just caught the nuclear utilities lying, that's covering up covering up accidents.  The headlines blared 10,000 problems covered up by the nation's utilities...

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070406TDY02006.htm ...

And if such coverups weren't supposed to happen in the U.S. you can see a short expose online of a book called Licensed to Kill, documenting how our friendly electric companies have done the same here...

http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/licensedtokill/licensed2 ...

My favorite is what these guys did at Diablo Canyon with one of the last major populations of Abalone. After the DOJ was ready to file for a $14 million settlement with PG&E, our buddy Bill Clinton had the fine dropped.

So the moral of part I is, can you trust big governments or big companies to do the right thing, other than force you to pay more for less?

But back to the n-waste problem.

Only Russia has worse standards in the industrial world for waste standards.  Our laws were all written over 25 years ago by the nuclear industry with no real changes in standards since. Literally every dump this country has ever put nuclear waste into has leaked.

For an example, when there was an attempt to build a low level waste dump in California, U.S. Ecology got the okay to dig an unlined hole in the ground, with a clay cap and just start throwing anything hot in, from Class A through C wastes. Class C llw can include very hot stuff like plutonium or even small amounts of transuranics, just as long as its not a spent fuel rod, its LOW LEVEL WASTE!!!!

Across Europe and Canada, waste standards are far more strict. In Canada, the waste goes into a monitored retrievable above ground facility.

Back in 1982, the U.S. mandated the construction of 13 regional llw facilities, so that commercial waste producers could get rid of their liabilities at a DIRT cheap price.  Today, not one of those dumps were ever opened due to public opposition. (Nimbyism according to nuke mongers)... Even W. was forced to block a dump in Texas under public pressure.  Why do we have a law on the books that allows nuclear waste producers to dump wastes on the states, transfering any of their liabilities to the public?

The waste laws were written back when ALARA ruled. Today, ALARA (AS Low As Reasonably Achievable) is a joke. In 1988 the commission who was in charge of monitoring global dose standards based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb survivors came out with technical results showing that radiation impacts were between 4 and 16 worse than previously thought. The UK immediately increased its safety standards 4 fold, but our good buddies in the Reagan administration decided to ignore the findings, still leaving us with ALARA, or should I be more specific, what ever you wanna budget is okay.  

There is a real reason why nuclear waste is the achilles heal of the nuclear industry. If republicans in Nevada are Nimby's then these creeps are all out to dump it on minority communities (Yucca Mt. is being pushed on lands disputed by the Shoeshone tribe), like what they tried to do with the Skull Valley indian tribe in Utah. They've found one man willing to take millions of dollars so that utilities can use his tribal land outside of Salt Lake Utah to store spent high level waste. That war is currently over, but vampires never die do they. The battle has made republican run Utah right next to Nevada, the one of the two biggest opponents of nuclear dumpers in the country.  And you wouldn't know it unless you have a subscription to the Salt Lake City Tribune or the Las Vegas Sun.  

Elsewhere on Grist
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/5/3/102117/6965

we get the baited line, why are activists only concerned about radiation from nuclear power?

What about coal radiation?

You have Imhoffe and Limbaugh telling million's in the league of Homerdom that environmentalists are opposed to all forms of energy. We're NIMBY's if we don't accept the waste, and hysterical if we get passionate with them. And they tried to get away with the lie that Patarick Moore is an environmentalist or a founder of Greenpeace who supports nuclear power.  

Let's face it, once its built, its gonna run. Only two times (Rancho Seco and Trojan) has the public succeeded in shutting down an operating nuke or for that matter almost any other electric generation facility. The battles were vicious affairs and took years.

Should we be demanding the closure of coal plants? That's why the Sierra Club originally endorsed nuclear in the 1960's. They've learned their lesson, that rhetoric by an industry who does whatever it wants and usually gets away with it, is capable of anything if you let it!

Imagine there probably isn't a utility company in the country that hasn't had an employee killed on the job. But it was all just accidental right!  Anybody see a movie about what happened in a small town in California with Julia Roberts as the star?

Do you think anyone other than a corporation can get away with murder and just pay a fine? These corporate killers have a clean slate every time a news story is written about them. Imagine, if the local media started a column with a list of all the accidents, health impacts to their workers, bad rates, Ken Lay maneuvers, etc. that happened to the utility prior to introducing the latest rate increase?

yep close them coal plants down and replace em with new cleaner coal plants. Us dangerous types that want stuff like that aren't gonna be the ones that get on NPR, 59.5 minutes or GE's pronuclear NBC. That was tried, we can't even get a program to cover the mountain cropping going on today across the Appalachians, let alone any kind of serious help for coal miners. Give me a break, Please, remember, only rhetoric by industry paid flacks must be taken seriously.

High level wastes, mill tailings, mixed wastes, transuranics, u-238 gasses, HEU, liquid slurpies from hell, you name it, they did it, and don't have any answers other than dumping it on Nevada, or at the WIPP facility. We used to call this kind of slam "Out of site, out of mind". dooh!

Lastly, there's gonna be some gigantic fireworks just around the corner. SC just passed a law that refuses to allow wastes from outside their compact area, meaning wastes from the rest of the country will soon have no home... There's gonna be a huge fight and right now, there isn't a single place in the country that wants to become a bonafied national sacrifice area for everybody else.

Oh, yeah, Ronnie Reagan used to claim back in his pre-Limbaugh radio days, that he could store all the nuclear waste produced in the country in his Garage.  We never did find out if tried to do it after he moved into the whitehouse a couple of years later. I've heard its got a big garage for nukes somewhere underneath.

by GtoeOne at 9:07 AM on 04 May 2007 Pangolin

Yeah? Then whats all this stuff:source

Some Examples of Low-Level Radioactive Waste

Low-level radioactive waste is generated at commercial facilities such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, and research institutions. It includes radioactive materials used in various processes as well as supplies and equipment that have been contaminated with radioactive materials. Low-level waste can include:

    * ion exchange resins and filter materials used to clean water at a nuclear power plant,
    * contaminated hand tools, components, piping, and other equipment from nuclear power plants and other industries,
    * research equipment from laboratories where radioactive materials are used,
    * shoe covers, lab coats, cleaning cloths, paper towels, etc., used in an area where radioactive material is present,
    * containers, cloth, paper, fluids, and equipment which came in contact with radioactive materials used in hospitals to diagnose or treat disease,
    * filters from sampling devices used to test for airborne radioactive contamination,
    * scintillation fluids in which filters from some sampling devices must be dissolved in order to determine the amount of radioactive material present, and
* carcasses of animals treated with radioactive materials used in medical or pharmaceutical research.

And then there's all this stuff

WHAT IS "LOW-LEVEL" RADIOACTIVE WASTE?

"Low-Level" Radioactive Waste includes:

Irradiated Components and Piping: reactor hardware and pipes that are in continual contact with highly radioactive water for the 20 to 30 years the reactor operates. The metal becomes "activated" or radioactive itself from bombardment by neutrons that are released when energy is produced. Also called Irradiated Primary System Components.

Control Rods: from the core of nuclear power plants--rods that regulate and stop the nuclear reactions in the reactor core.

Poison Curtains: which absorb neutrons from the water in the reactor core and irradiated fuel (high level waste) pool.

Resins, Sludges, Filters and Evaporator Bottoms: from cleansing the water that circulates around the irradiated fuel in the reactor vessel and in the fuel pool, which holds the irradiated fuel when it is removed from the core.

Entire Nuclear Power Plants if and when they are dismantled. This includes, for example, from a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor building floor: over 13,000 tons of contaminated concrete and over 1,400 tons of contaminated reinforcing steel bar.

The highly radioactive and long-lived reactor wastes are included in the "low-level" waste category along with the much less concentrated and generally much shorter-lived wastes from medical treatment and diagnosis and some types of scientific research.

My reading of that is that that stuff is used to handle the nuclear materials. A lot of the stuff used to handle it becomes waste. Then the protective gear you used to handle the waste becomes waste, and so on.....

I will personally grind a solar panel up and use it as a pillow it if you agree to do the same with an equal amount of "low level" nuclear waste that I get to select. Just a thought experiment but one I can always win.

p.s.-google before you spout off.
p.p.s.-how freaking big was Ron Reaguns garage anyway?

Put the Carbon Back

When it does nothing of the sort.

It creates just as much high level waste as before, but it allows you to use existing waste as fuel, rather than mining for more.

_

In this way, it's much the same as corn ethanol.
Huge cost, almost nonexistant benefit.

But it sounds good at first blush.

_

But who cares about reducing the ammount of uranium mining?

What people care about is reducing the threat from the waste.

_

What I think a lot of people don't know is that nuclear landfills don't fill up by volume.  They fill up by temperature.

And the temperature difference between the whole pile, versus the 97% of the volume of U238 removed, is neglible in temperature.

But using an analogy like "Recycling" where landfills fill up by volume is a intentionally misrepresenting the facts.

-David Ahlport

Your statement should have said anything in a neutron flux becomes radioactive.  My point is that items used to clean up radioactivity do not become radioactive.  You are correct that items used to clean up radioactivity can become contaminated.  In some cases the contamination can be cleaned in other cases, it is not so easy.