As Part of California's Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste? (yahoo.com) 143
"As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times.
He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant." "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that," the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant's owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. "At the moment, it is under control, I think it's essential to say that," said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. "But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations...." [In 2103 some of the site's canisters' approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]
The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. "San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region," Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. "This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste." Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste...
Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand...." Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said...
Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. "It's so safe that it's almost a problem," Camargo said. "It's not a priority to a lot of folks to move it."
"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste," the article points out, "and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling..."
"The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build."
He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant." "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that," the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant's owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. "At the moment, it is under control, I think it's essential to say that," said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. "But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations...." [In 2103 some of the site's canisters' approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]
The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. "San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region," Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. "This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste." Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste...
Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand...." Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said...
Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. "It's so safe that it's almost a problem," Camargo said. "It's not a priority to a lot of folks to move it."
"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste," the article points out, "and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling..."
"The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build."
Not just there (Score:3, Informative)
We have a cask on the coast from the old Humboldt Bay power station. One tsunami could do it in.
Re:Not just there (Score:5, Informative)
There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.
The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.
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just dump it in the sea.
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
- Yes, but...
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.
DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.
Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.
Re:Not just there (Score:5, Informative)
There is a Superfund site at he former location of the Montrose Chemical Corporation in Torrance where much of the DDT related waste was illegally dumped off Palos Verdes.
The full extent of the problem is still unknown. [wikipedia.org] “The more we look, the more we find, and every new bit of information seems to be scarier than the last... This has shown just how egregious and harmful the dumping has been off our nation’s coasts, and that we have no idea how big of an issue and how big of a problem this is nationally."
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Re:Not just there (Score:4, Funny)
Careful, that's how you get Godzillas.
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We could use a Godzilla right now.
Re:Not just there (Score:5, Insightful)
As careless as it sounds, dumping it into the ocean might well be the most enviornmentally sound plan. Dilution would be sufficient to just make it a non issue.
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Seeing as a quick Google search for that exact thing returns no articles, perhaps you could post some of them for us to review?
"elevated" is meaningless without context. If the seafood isn't more radioactive than a banana for example then it's not an issue.
Re: Not just there (Score:2)
Moving the goalposts from detectable to significant. Pick a lane.
Re:Not just there (Score:5)
Water is actually a really radiation shield. It's why it's used as a moderator in nuclear reactors. Contrary to popular belief, water is required for the reaction to continue. It's a moderator, because what happens is the two neutrons emitted during fission of uranium come out too fast to be properly captured by other uranium atoms to spur ongoing fission. Water is used to slow down those neutrons to where they are more readily absorbed by uranium. The problem is, water is also used to cool the reactor, so while the reaction stops or slows down significantly, a tremendous amount of heat is still generated from the remaining reactions. Thus a "meltdown" refers to the fuel rods exceeding the melting point of uranium and it melting and pooling at the bottom of the reactor.
That said, the casks at the bottom of the ocean, as long as they stay there, will actually be fairly safe even if they rupture. Even the wildlife can get fairly close (inches) before it becomes dangerous to them.
So sadly, no three-eyed Simpsons fish is likely to happen.
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We have even more barrels of nuclear waste in the ocean up north, near the Farallon islands, off the coast of San Francisco. The current draws the leaking waste right into the bay...
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The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce...
Quoted directly from the summary - give it a read and see for yourself
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There's a rocket launchpad in Cali, right? Zip-tie or duct-tape some of the casks to a section that'll have fuel, detach it, light the engines and burn for a course above the orbits of the other planets aiming for the sun.
The problems with this plan are... numerous, but if you did want to dispose of nuclear waste in space, it'd be easier to launch it out of the solar system than to launch it into the sun.
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Spread it evenly (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the high standards [nytimes.com] this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.
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Red states will be spared, of course.
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This isn't even a terrible idea either, it's probably workable but there is a negative percent change this admin could get it done or even get out of the idea phase.
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I will be the first (not even close) to say that just stuffing it in a lead-lined warehouse for 100k years isn't going to work.
Find a use for it... fusion reactor fuel, a new type of nuclear fusion reactor, launch it into the Sun... there has to be a solution.
Hate to tell you... this waste existed under other BICs (Butt In Chair), and they authorized tossing it into the oceans and that crap.
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For 30 years the plan for the BICs was Yucca mountain and here we are with no backup option with that being dead now.
Something has to be done, doesn't have to be for 100k years that's a fallacious argument. A lead lined warehouse with consolidation and stability is better for another say 80 years versus the status quo because any of the ones you brought up aren't exactly realistic at the moment.
A smart admin would have both ends of the plan, short term (warehouse) and long term (reprocess).
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For 30 years the plan for the BICs was Yucca mountain and here we are with no backup option with that being dead now.
Yucca Mountain was a good plan. We should have done it over all of our objections. We still could. It is a better option than anything else anyone has come up with.
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I agree, I'm not sure how but I would go back to Nevada and offer them something to accept it or failing that there has to be a way to have them pound sand a bit. Sorry Nevada.
As a compromise I might also find and develop a second site as well so they're not taking *all* of it.
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"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste,"
Given the high standards [nytimes.com] this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.
Yea, those tears in the casks are due to vandalism and Democrats and of course, Joe Biden ...
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Delay (Score:2)
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Because new individual people keep rotating in, with none of them being the same people that had the job in WW2.
My expectation would be incorrect, but that's why I would have it.
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Rather than blaming every government employee since WWII, maybe it makes sense to admit that putting off things like this is just human nature?
Re: Delay (Score:2)
It's not the assorted employees' faults. It's Congress' fault since it's their job to solve it.
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The inherent flaw of democracy.
Dealing with something in advance is the best solution, but that would be expensive and unpopular costing them votes so it doesn't happen. Instead it's left so it becomes the next guy's problem.
Only if something blows up and becomes an immediate emergency will they try to do anything about it.
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They didn't act before, because nobody knew how to deal with it.
Maybe they could design a reactor that ran purely off of the barrels of waste (either just dump the barrels into it, or maybe the outer barrel itself is used the same way the pellets are used).
Maybe use the centrifugal satellite launcher thing to fling barrels into outer space.
Hell, maybe use the waste as starter fuel for warp drive.
Use your imagination! There has to be a way of dealing with it, somehow... and it's not just the current adminis
Re:Delay (Score:5, Interesting)
What they did do at this site was put it into big blocks of concrete, this also works fine. Also, not to point out the obvious, but this storage area is on top of a 60 ft cliff. So the idea that this will suddenly fall into the sea, probably not without a pretty huge earthquake (as in 10x the size as any seen on the west coast). Of course you can just put the concrete containers on a truck and move them inland. That works too. This isn't even a hard problem.
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With how US food safety is going, they can just start to mix the stuff in there...
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- government is there for kicking the can down the road
Treasure Island (Score:2)
Many years back (early 2000s) I dated a gal who lived on Treasure Island (which is in the SF Bay Area). I was like "say, this place is nice ..and the location is convenient.. why don't more people live here?". Then I got to explore the island a bit.
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Treasure Island
Not really a great place to live. [wikipedia.org] It being the final resting place for some of the targets from the Bikini Atoll tests. Also, the recovered remains of K-129 [wikipedia.org] that we claim not to have are buried on one of the S.F. Bay Islands. Maybe this one.
The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Fission power is being sold to the public as the solution to the baseline power supply problem. The real costs are not being addressed however; the unknown costs include the waste problem, but also the clean up of the sites of closed stations. There's also an explicit insurance policy offered by governments against a Chernobyl type event; the private owners of such a station would not be expected to pay the full cost of such an event.
Sadly once an industry gets its claws into the economy to the extent that nukes have, it generates enormous political power which the rest of us are unable to face down. Compare and contrast the automobile industry...
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There's also an explicit insurance policy offered by governments against a Chernobyl type event
And many of the same people who complain about this are first to ask for government state-of-emergency assistance in the case of catastrophic weather events.
Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:3)
The baseline power supply problem is that people think there's a baseline power supply problem. There isn't, the baseline is easy, it's the peaks that are hard.
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Exactly. Nuclear power is singularly unsuitable to do regulation energy for peaks. Incidentally one of the reason why a grid with more than about 70% nuclear will crash regularly. Obviously, this idea is completely outside of what the nuclear cultists can even understand.
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Bla, bla, bla. Can you do anything but pushing FUD?
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renewable actually make the balancing problem worse
False. Wind and solar are highly dispatchable, any time you have overproduction you can simply turn them off, unlike your beloved nuclear plants which are the actual problem because even the very best ones are poor at following load. The fix for nuclear's overproduction is the same as the fix for renewables' deficit, specifically more storage, but if you have more storage then you don't need nuclear at all and in fact only idiots and scum boost it because in the real world resources are finite and we'd get
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You're right: civilian nuclear programmes are not cost effective compared with renewables. But, there's also the military aspect to this too. Military nuclear benefits by hiding/sharing some of the costs, industrial infrastructure, training, expertise, supply chains, etc with a civilian programme. If there was no civilian nuclear programme, the defence budget would be much bigger to fund things like the nuclear navy.
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The UK is at 46% renewables, and that number is increasing rapidly. Why hasn't it collapsed yet?
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
Spain is at 56%:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
Iceland is at 100% renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
You fail.
Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:4, Interesting)
The real costs are not being addressed
The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.
The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."
Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.
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Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.
Yes. It is really the "dumbest option possible". But the nuclear morons associate it with might and power. Which, incidentally is not wrong as the only rational reason to do civilian nuclear at all is access to fissile materials and hence the Bomb. Most politicians and nuclear fans like to lie about this. But here is a statement from Macron that tells it like it is: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/a... [lemonde.fr]
Essentially he said that the Bomb is impossible without a large civilian nuclear base and a large civilian nuc
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Which, incidentally is not wrong as the only rational reason to do civilian nuclear at all is access to fissile materials and hence the Bomb.
If that's true, why does the US military make the Pu-239 that the US uses for its bombs in special reactors that don't make power? Why does Russia have special reactors for making H-3 for the Tritium boosting of their Hydrogen bombs? Oh wait, its not true and you have no idea what you are talking about. What is true is if you make a really cheap type of NPP that uses natural uranium (yellow cake) then it naturally makes a lot of Pu-239 and you can process that out rather easily. However, this plant wi
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It is true. There is more than just reactors to a nuclear industry. Stop lying.
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Saying nah-ah isn't being clever, it's just cementing your ignorance. Fissile material for bombs isn't made from commercial reactors. There's a difference between "reactor-grade" plutonium and "weapons-grade" plutonium. The plutonium that is generated in a commercial reactor is heavily contaminated and incredibly difficult to separate from spent fuel rods. It's simply not done for military purposes anywhere other than one waste reprocessing plant in France, and there were talks about shutting that one down
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And you believe they put exactly the fuel rods in there that they tell you? How quaint.
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And besides we already solved the baseline problem. A bit of demand shaping, some short term storage, some interconnects.
The old model of the grid is going away rapidly.
Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:4, Informative)
Chernobyl type event; the private owners of such a station would not be expected to pay the full cost of such an event.
The Price Anderson Act [wikipedia.org] (and its amendments) also excludes rate payers from making claims to recover the replacement cost of their homes. Without this Act the nuclear industry would collapse simply because it cannot sustain itself without the insurance indemnities it provides.
Nuclear vs coal (Score:3)
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Thank you for the name of the Act protecting nukes (Score:2)
I knew it was out there, but didn't know it's name.
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True capitalism would have nicely solved these problems.
No. Capitalism truly means only that capital controls the means of production. It means literally nothing else. Anything else is regulation on top of capitalism and any regulation of capitalism is in fact a watering down of capitalism with some other strategy for management of resources. Further, systems don't solve problems, people do... or perhaps they cause them intentionally. Capitalism was designed for this.
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Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:2)
You can wipe your ass with it, which I presume is where your posts come from, but you can't build a house with it. Try letting people who know what words mean talk next time.
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Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:2)
Oh, you peaked in high school? You can stick your high school level understanding of economics up your ass next to your junior high school understanding of reproductive biology and your utter lack of ethics.
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Renewable aren't actually cheap.
And fission plants definitely aren't cheap.
Especially if you include the unsolved issues such as waste barrels stranded on the beach.
"But but no true Scotsman would put barrels..."
Just shut up.
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What? (Score:2)
Whose bright idea was it to store nuclear waste right next to an ocean coastline?
Re: What? (Score:2)
It's exactly the same bright idea as putting a nuke plant there to begin with.
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Not just a coastline. A coastline with an active fault less than a mile away. And just to prove how stupid energy companies can be, PGE went ahead and built the Diablo Canyon plant and located it on the coastline, as well, and later discovered it had its own fault about 7 miles away, capable of generated a 7+ earthquake.
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They were clearly hoping that at some time the problem would just vanish. Not forever, but until they are dead and cannot be held accountable anymore. And look, that seems to be happening.
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Every time you bring of the safety of the waste the supporters scream how safe nuclear is. We haven’t come close to dealing with the previous decades waste, so lets just make a bunch more and play the longest game of hot potato and hope we never have to deal with the time running out.
Common Sense vs. California (Score:2)
(California-sponsored Greed) ”The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall.”
California is the third largest state in the nation. 160,000 square miles and local leaders still chose to store nuclear waste within the hazard risk of a tsunami in a border state known for participating in annual El Slammo weather seasons.
A seawall, should have been the last choice of protection. Because that storage solution should have been nowhere near a corrosive environment like that.
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p>California is the third largest state in the nation. 160,000 square miles and local leaders still chose to store nuclear waste within the hazard risk of a tsunami in a border state known for participating in annual El Slammo weather seasons.
As I recall, it is also stored at 4 to 5 times the density of the waste stored at Fukushima.
Dump it into the ocean (Score:2)
Add the waste to the existing pile off the Farallon Islands [wikipedia.org].
Excellent fishing there, you can catch rockfish and lingcod most of the season almost as fast as you can take them off the hook. I'm hardly radioactive at all, although I got terribly seasick because the water is usually really rough from the Golden Gate out to the Farallons.
nuclear shills will NOT learn from history (Score:2)
They'll repeat the same things over and over again: Technology today is nothing like it was in the past; A Chernobyl-like event could never happen today, modern regulations make events like this impossible, etc etc.
And despite stories like this one and others like it, they'll cling desperatly to their conviction that technology today has solved all the problems of uranium/plutonium fission reactors and that this form of energy is totally safe nowadays and is the only solution to climate change.
The thing is,
Nuclear titties! (Score:4, Funny)
It's a shame they're going to remove the domes since they're basically 2 giant boobs next to the freeway
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It's a shame they're going to remove the domes since they're basically 2 giant boobs next to the freeway
Everywhere I look there is something to remind me. [youtube.com]
Without detailed information on storage (Score:2)
The parent is useless. Slashdot was once a tech site instead of this general news for the typical retard.
Anyone have some QUALITY reading material on the subject? We will never see that from the editors who really should be replaced by AI which would do a better job on a bad day than they've done for many years.
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I sure don't but I'm googling around and I see they are bragging [songscommunity.com] about using stainless steel dry cask storage. Unfortunately, these casks are subject to corrosion [innovation...etwork.com] under nuclear storage conditions (that link is PR but they describe the problem well) so it's not really a win either. There isn't one, unless you count vitrification, which is so expensive to do right that no one wants to use it.
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When hast the nuclear mafia not lied about everything being safe and then instead done the cheapest and worst thing they though they could get away with? These people are essentially habitual criminals.
RECA (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in the Secret City [wikipedia.org] Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.
As kids, we would ride our bikes onto the reservation woods in the area between the West end of Oak Ridge and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. There were gates that proclaimed this was illegal trespassing, but try telling that to 10 year old kids. Years later, I learned that there had been a couple of major releases of uranium hexaflouride over this area. There were also releases of strontium-90 into the local rivers. The plant had told their workers not to drink the water, but had waited 24 hours before alerting the downstream community water supplies. The Y-12 plant also released 2.4 million tons of mercury [energy.gov] into the creek that runs through the center of Oak Ridge. The mercury was used to purify the lithium that was used in the hydrogen bombs [wikipedia.org] (*).
A few years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was dealt with and I seem to be cancer free today. I recently learned that because I lived in Oak Ridge and had cancer, I am now eligible for compensation under the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act [justice.gov] changes that were passed as part of Trump's One Big F'Ugly Bill Act. This is the American Way (TM). Rather than preventing or fixing the problem before hand (cough, cough AI), we'll just pay off the victims after the inevitable disaster.
(*) To be fair to the scientists who worked on the Bomb, though, many of whom were the parents of my friends, the environmental movement really didn't get moving until the early 60s and the imperatives of a world war and the later Cold War took precedence over the local environment.
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You think that's bad? That's nothing compared to Zone rouge in northern France and Belgium. It's been uninhabitable since about 1919, and is expected to stay that way for at least 300 years, possibly as much as 700 and not because of radioactivity. No, it's because of heavy metal contamination, unexploded ordinance and poison g
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Processing nuclear fuel: not quite as bad as the result of WW1.
Faint praise, I'd say.
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I grew up in the Secret City [wikipedia.org] Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. [...]
I'm glad Skjellifetti's post has been modded up as Interesting.
I suppose it is understandable that the earlier forays into nuclear energy had less of the guardrails that are demanded these days. And yes, those safety regulations are generally prompted by the environmental movement which itself comes into existence because of the problems that come out of those early forays.
I knew someone who worked at Windscale (now called Sellafield) in the UK. There was a fire [wikipedia.org] at this nuclear plant in 1957, and the horror
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Nature says "Chalenge accepted" (Score:2)
"The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters.
didn't the guys at Fukushima say something similar?
yes, Fukushima is a thousand times more susceptible to catastrophic tsunamis but you don't need 1,000 catastrophic tsunamis. you only need 1
Such a surprise (Score:2)
Trying to do nuclear power on the cheap does not work. Who would have expected that.
Obviously, the assholes behind this are already gone and will not be held accountable.
More antinuclear frearmongering (Score:5, Informative)
What a crock of shit. Here are some facts about used fuel(aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant)
It has a total kill count of zero. Yes zero. Meanwhile, 8.7 million people die annually from the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels.
It is a solid metal encased in ceramic. The Simpsons' caricature of green goo is false.
There isn't a lot of it. We could put all of it(yes, all of it) in a building the size of a Walmart. France keeps all of theirs in a room the size of a high school gym--that people walk on.
Cask storage has been perfect. It has a 100% perfect record. Put it in my backyard.
Cask storage is cheap. It's just cement and steel.
All those claims that it's dangerous for thousands of years are untrue. The amount of radiation released from used fuel follows an exponentially decaying curve. All the highly radioactive isotopes decay completely within 5 years (which is why they keep it in water for 10). After the medium-radioactive isotopes, cesium and strontium, completely decay within 270 years, you can handle used fuel with your bare hands.
Weapons waste and medical waste are not used fuel. Used fuel is the material produced by a nuclear power plant. They are different. It's like saying we should ban oranges because apple seeds are bad for you.
Weapons != energy
Climate change could have been averted if we properly pursued nuclear energy.
To date, zero countries have deep decarbonized their grids with solar and/or wind.
France: 29 g CO2 per kWh with its nuclear baseload.
Sweden: 21 g CO2 per kWh, using nuclear and hydro.
Germany: 334 g CO2 per kWh after spending 15 years and hundreds of billions of euros on its energy transition.
Nuclear will be a necessary part of the solution. The only countries to have deep decarbonized their grid did it with hydro and/or nuclear. And since hydro is location-dependent and environmentally destructive, it won't scale. Atoms before Dams!
STOP THE FEARMONGERING LATIMES
Remember, all antinuclear activists are fossil fuel simps.
Re: More antinuclear frearmongering (Score:2)
Casks leak. There is a whole industry around dealing with it. Deal with it.
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Trickle-Down at Work (Score:2)
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One look at the aerial photo (Score:2)
Looks like one tsunami would go over the entire facility. And then... salt water sitting inside.
And nuclear power is so much cheaper than wind or solar...
NOT.
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And why the hell the link to Yahoo, rather than the actual LA Times article https://www.latimes.com/enviro... [latimes.com]
Learn to swim.. (Score:2)
..see you down in Arizona Bay!
Merciful intervention of common sense (Score:2)
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Get a few kilograms of that and you have material for a nice number of dirty bombs. And if you are careful, you may not even kill yourself in the process (which typically only happens much later anyways).
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What a surprise they're exactly the kinds of people who are into terrorism
We fund terrorism and terror attacks, sometimes deliberately, as in the case of Israel.