brett crockett: Stop PFS

I agree that the Goshute respository is not a good idea. But I don't think you should combine good arguments with specious ones. In the long run, thinking people will discount your good arguments when they find the problems with the other arguments.

You have correctly identified the risk of aircraft or missile crashes into the storage yard as a risk that is unnecessary and therefore unreasonable. It is a risk that could be eliminated by placing the repository almost anywhere else than next to a bombing range.

The greatest risk of the facility is that it is in a regulatory vacuum. The reservation is not directly subject to regulation by the state's agencies, and the Goshute tribe has neither the expertise nor the motivation to objectively regulate the facility over the long term, because it will be their major source of income. They will err on the side of keeping it going, so their willingness to shut it down if any question is raised will be zero.

The Environmental Impact Statement prepared some ten years ago by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is out of date because we are now at war, and there is an identified enemy, not a hypothetical one, who would be interested in either stealing some of the material to make a dirty bomb, or in causing a release of the material through something as simple as crashing a plane into it and hoping the resulting fire will carry radiation downwind to Tooele and Salt Lake. The war is liable to go on for decades, so the small risk of it happening in one year becomes material over time.

Another problem with the site is that the NRC assumed it would have only a limited license, because Yucca Mountain would eventually take the waste. That is not at all certain. Even if Yucca eventually opens, the waste at Skull Valley will move to the bottom of the list for placement in Yucca Mountain because it is not immediately next to large metropolitan centers, rivers and the ocean. Any waste placed there will be there for 100 years, minimum. It may be possible to maintain the storage casks over a long term, but that depends on active inspection and enforcement, which the Goshutes won't do. And once it's there, there will be no place to move it to if they decide it is not being managed properly.

Now let me comment on arguments that are not reasonable:

The gas mask has nothing to do with used uranium power plant fuel rods. It implies that this stuff is a threat to the air, like a leak from the nerve gas storage at Deseret Chemical Depot, but that is simply false.

The transportation issue is specious. There is all sorts of deadly chemical substances, not to mention gasoline--flammable, explosive, and poisonous to breathe--rolling down our hgighways and rails every day, and we give it little thought. Ammonia, chlorine, and sulfuric and nitric acids are carried in thin walled metal balloons, which can easily break open in any accident, and which can also escape through a simple broken valve. Major accidents with such materials happen every year. Recall within the last year how a tank car containing an illegal mixture of these chemicals melted in South Salt Lake and released a plume that shut down I-15 and I-80 and evacuated a mile radius of homes.

By contrast, spent nuclear fuel is carried in very strong casks that can survive most collisions, and even if they break open, the stuff is a solid material that will just sit there until the guys in the moon suits come pick it up. It's not a liquid that will flow down the street nor a gas that will blow on the wind. The uranium started out in mines in Utah and other western states, in Canada, or in Africa, and then was shipped a couple of times to be refined and then processed into fuel pellets at one of the few facilities that can do that, in Washington State or Kentucky. By the time it gets to a commercial nuclear reactor, it has already traveled thousands of miles back and forth across the US. Not a single accident with any of those shipments has been known to seriously harm anyone from radiation exposure. If it had, you can bet that would be the focus of innumerable stories during this controversy. We kill and injure people every year with chemical and gasoline shipments, but the many shipments of spent nuclear fuel, new nuclear fuel, radioactive materials, and radioactive waste do not kill anyone. The inverse square law applies to radiation, and it does not have to be too far away--a hundred feet or so--before the natural background radiation of life--350 millirem per year--is far higher than from any such waste.

We need to keep radiation exposure in context. Married people get exposed to more radiation than singles because they sleep with a human being who contains radioactive potassium. Trace amounts of uranium are all through our rocks, including the granite of the Salt Lake Mormon Temple, producing radon gas. The higher altitude we live, the more cosmic radiation we get from space. The carbon dioxide emitted by our cars and power plants includes carbon 14, a radioactive isotope, as does the carbon in the food we eat.

So arguing that the shipments are unreasonably dangerous--when we accept much deadlier shipments all the time, and ride around in cars with 20 gallons of gasoline at 80 miles an hour--is not persuasive to an informed person.

The alternative of keeping spent nuclear fuel next to power plants indefinitely is not realistic. Power plants are close to major population centers in order to cut down on transmission losses. They need to be near water for cooling. the New York times has already stated it wants the spent fuel at the nuclear plant up the Hudson River to be moved out of there.

Then notion that the fuel could be reprocessed so it can be recycled into fuel is not a bad idea, but it is NOT something that can be done easily at every single reactor. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is precisely what was done at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington. The process typically involves chemical separation of the fuel material with nitric acid and other highly toxic chemicals, producing a residue that is both highly toxic and highly radioactive. The cost for building a reprocessing facility, and the environmental law requirements (including all the permits and environmental impact statements) mean that you can only build one or two or three of them in the country, and they will take a LONG time and create lots of NEW high level radioactive waste and be the subject of lawsuits and delays. PLUS, the spent nuclear fuel will have to be shipped to the respocessing centers(s) from across the country. We will STILL need to have a place where we can dispose of highly radioactive waste, and now it will have to be able to contain dangerous chemicals mixed with it too! The Hanford site has millions of gallons of that stuff sitting in underground tanks. They are trying to build a plant to turh the liquid into glass logs that will not escape into the air or groundwater, and can be safely placed undergound at Yucca Mountain.

Thus, the ONLY real problem that reprocessing and recycling solves is the limited fuel supply for nuclear reactors. It does NOT solve the waste problem, because NEW waste will be generated, and we will still need someplace to bury where it won't affect the air or groundwater.

It amazes me that there are so many people getting involved in the issue, but hardly any of them--and that includes politicians I otherwise greatly admire-- are investing the minimum of time to understand the problem.

Politicians have gotten caught up into the familiar dynamic of exaggeratig a threat in order to show the public that they can save them from the threat. The politicians in Nevada have gotten people so worked up over the Yucca Mountain respository that we may end up with a far more dangerous situation, with a combination of fuel at Skull Valley and at power plants. Make no mistake, if Yucca Mountain does not open, Skull Valley will be the only alternative to onsite storage, and the nuclear plants cannot operate indefinitely. They will eventually wear out. Where does the fuel go then? The politicians in 30 other states will gang up on Utah and the fuel will come here. Opposing Yucca Mountain is masochistic for any Utah government official.