unkiciktepi

The NRC granted a license to an impoverished indigenous tribe in Utah to make their money by storing 44,000 tones of nuclear waste on their land. They will call this a temporary repository until the final approval and completion of the national repository in Nevada makes that site available. What does this mean for all of us???

Well for starters, let us consider the term "temporary?" If you move and store spent fuel rods and other medium level radioactive waste in a spot, you tend to create a place that become radioactive. Hence all of the various places around the US that are horribly toxic from it in the first place. By storing the waste temporarily, we increase the amount we need to store later, in that the storage facility becomes waste as well. So we move more and more nuclear contaminants around the country on trains, particularly along farming and ranching corridors, thus increasing the risk of contamination of food supplies and whatnot. In other words, we begin to exponentially increase the problem without effecting any sort of remediation.

The other alternative is to turn temporary into permanent. Sounds okay right? In that you go to all the trouble to build a temp site to secure the materials, and then you can conveniently forget about a few hundreds years from now(Pu halflife is 24,000 years) and continue to use the site for a few generations. In this particular case however, the site is a lovely 25 miles upwind of Salt Lake City. Upwind!!! There can be no oops factor as SLC suffers from a terrible inversion layer problem, expecially in the winter. Should there be a leak or "dustup" of the site's material, especially in the winter, all of those aerosols would be concentrated in the inversion and held down in the SLC region for a considerable period of time before they are washed into the rivers and water systems. Not so good.

But none of this matters, right? Because well we have to store it and deal with it and anyway it is only Utah.