Yucca Moutain Gone, NEI Wants To DUmp Rad Waste At Sea

Keith Johnson from the Wall Street Journal has made it official...the Nuclear Industry, not ready to admit defeat (they cannot SAFELY DISPOSE OF RADIATIVE WASTES) is floating around some new old ideas to deal with the ever growing pile of RADIATIVE WASTES that are unlawfully and illegally stacking up at sites such as Indian Point on the banks of the Hudson River.

Quick Question...we have been paying a surcharge for some time now to have the DOE REMOVE THOSE WASTES IN A TIMELY FASHION...is there a class action attorney out there willing to file a suit on this for the citizens? I already have enough citizen stakeholders for such a Class Action Case...email me at strikeforcenews if you are interested in this as a Pro Bono Case. (Several Utility Companies have already successfully SUED, and gotten MILLIONS, and it is not even THEIR MONEY in the fund.)

Back to the story...seems that the NRC, DOE and NEI are trying to force people to reconsider Yucca Mountain as the storage solution by floating the Disney "Under The Sea" option that has been around for a few decades now. Rather than rehash what is already included in a well linked story, lets share with you what Keith Johnson and the Wall Street Journal have to say on this explosive issue.

Quake Zone: A Really, Really Deep Storage Solution for Nuclear Waste

By Keith Johnson

Now that Yucca Mountain, the proposed storage site for nuclear waste, is off the table, a host of alternative storage options are surfacing—or resurfacing.

Governments around the world have been struggling to find the best way to store spent nuclear fuel. For two decades, the U.S. was committed to burying it in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. France reprocesses its spent fuel. Other countries, such as Spain, have considered storing the stuff above-ground in sealed concrete containers. If nuclear power is to play a bigger part in the nation’s energy mix, the U.S. needs to find a solution to the long-term storage question.

One old idea making the rounds again is deep, deep geological storage. As in sticking nuclear waste inside the earth’s mantle. The idea is to put spent fuel on tectonic plates, and then send it on a one-way ride on the geological conveyor belt into the earth’s crust, where the waste will be sequestered by massive heat and pressure. Greentech Media takes a look at some of the idea’s latest proponents.

Using the earth’s subduction zones for nuclear storage isn’t a new idea—it’s been floating around for decades. The U.S. Department of Energy briefly had a research office dedicated to sub-sea storage solutions. The problems, though, are both technical and political.

Technically, no one has yet found a reliable way to stick the waste so far down. Fears that colliding continental plates could actually push up waste—rather than push it down—have also long dogged the idea. Additionally, international conventions against dumping any radioactive waste in the ocean is a big roadblock for subsea storage ideas.

Those are the main reasons the British government discarded the idea in 2006, along with other far-out ideas such as sticking nuclear waste in ice or in outer space. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management found that there’s “no proof of concept” for subduction-zone storage, and there’s “no foreseable change” in international treaties limiting its application.

Still, only so much spent fuel can be stored on site at the country’s nuclear reactors. Sooner or later, the government needs to find a solution to the storage question, or nuclear power’s expansion will be physically constrained. Will the Jules Verne-style solution be the answer?