In a message dated 10/20/02 7:03:11 PM Mountain Daylight Time, gunterg@nbnet.nb.ca writes:
Yes, and we're doing it to ourselves again by insisting that high level waste be placed in deep burial facilities when managed storage above ground at plant sites is a perfectly acceptable solution
No, it isn't perfectly acceptable, and there is quite a bit of scientific investigation behind that statement. I refer readers to USGS Circular 779 Mined Geologic Storage of Radioactive Waste and to the 1980 PEIS on the management of commercially generated spent nuclear fuel. Most nuclear plants are not located where very radioactive material can be stored and monitored indefinitely, and certainly monitoring one site for at least several hundred years is preferable to monitoring 103 sites. Spent fuel IS very radioactive and you don't want it dispersed in the surroundings. Moreover, we know a lot more about the risks of transprotation and how to mitigate them, which we do, than the risks of 10,000-year storage. If and when we reprocess, and I believe we should, there will certainly not be 103 reprocessing facilities, so that process will be centralized in some sense, which suggests a central storage and disposal facility for waste.!
Reprocessing produces some actinide waste and very radioactive fission product waste. The latter may only need sequestering for a few thousand years, not 10,000, but a thousand years is still a thousand years.
Ruth
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com
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