Yucca Facts today posts a letter from Ty Cobb, a former Reagan official, to key Nevada decision makers re: Yucca Mountain, as well as a letter Cobb penned to Bruce Breslow, the new executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
I have long hoped that Nevadans could/would be fully and fairly informed about Yucca Mountain and that the NANP and Harry Reid and others would stop doing their utmost to kill every proposal for Yucca before a detailed debate has been had. Nevada citizens deserve unbiased information on Yucca so we can weigh the real pros and cons of hosting the waste facility - and possibly a reprocessing center. We need to understand the safety issues and consider all the costs and benefits so we can make an informed decision.
I have done some reading and research and I believe safe transportation and storage are possible; that a viable reprocessing center would solve many of the present concerns about volume; that a world-class university R&D center at the plant would be a boon to our higher education system and the state; and that the $100 billion injection into our economy plus an estimated 8,000 jobs during construction would be very good for Nevada.
I sure hope Bruce Breslow will give things a fair shake.
Everything I proposed above is already being done in France and dozens of other nations around the world. The United States is way behind most of the developed world when it comes to nuclear power plants, storage, and reprocessing – because of the fear-mongering and misinformation dissemination that has been allowed to go on for so long.
Dan
2009 January 17
The key here, E!!, is the reprocessing. The US is the only developed nation in the world blinded enough to reduce itself to a debate over storage. We’re debating over technology from the 1950s, essentially. While the US generates less than 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, France and Japan are both around 90 percent. Neither has this debate because both simply put the fuel back into the centrifuge and use it over and over.
The Carter administration banned reprocessing just as the technology was being developed. That ban still exists. Because no storage facility has ever been built in the US, nuclear waste has remained within the confines of the respective reactor walls for up to 50 years in some cases. The available on-site storage has been filled at many plants.
Failure to take meaningful action on this issue has prevented any nuclear reactor from being built in the US since the 1970s. This has occurred in spite of the fact that modern reactors (such as the pebble bed reactor design) are much safer and more efficient. In effect, our fear of modernizing has trapped us into reliance on older, more volatile reactors when better alternatives are available.
There are essentially three characteristics one should look for in an electricity-generating resource: they should be (1) affordable, (2) reliable, and (3) clean. Nuclear power is the only resource that meets all three of these qualifications. Coal meets the first two and, while it has become cleaner over time, no other resource is as clean as nuclear power – which has zero emissions. Even expensive and unreliable resources like solar and wind power have emissions associated with them. Because their unreliable nature requires that they be backed up at all times by coal or natural gas, they effectively create emissions. This pairing cannot be overlooked because solar and wind power cannot operate on the grid without coal or natural gas.
For more on costs, see: http://npri.org/publications/putting-utilities-on-the-dole