As Part of California's Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste? (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0185642266
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/14/0536219/as-part-of-californias-coast-begins-to-crumble-is-the-clock-ticking-on-moving-radioactive-waste
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/coast-begins-crumble-clock-ticks-100000613.html
He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered [3]San Onofre nuclear power plant ."
> "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that," the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant's owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. "At the moment, it is under control, I think it's essential to say that," said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. "But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations...." [In 2103 some of the site's canisters' approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]
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> The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. "San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region," Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. "This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste." Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste...
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> Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand...." Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said...
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> Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. "It's so safe that it's almost a problem," Camargo said. "It's not a priority to a lot of folks to move it."
"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste," the article points out, "and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling..."
"The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build."
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather-news/articles/whole-beach-gone-big-waves-182542462.html
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/coast-begins-crumble-clock-ticks-100000613.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Spread it evenly (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste,"
Given the [1]high standards [nytimes.com] this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/climate/reflecting-pool-contractor-trump.html
Re: (Score:2)
Red states will be spared, of course.
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This isn't even a terrible idea either, it's probably workable but there is a negative percent change this admin could get it done or even get out of the idea phase.
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I will be the first (not even close) to say that just stuffing it in a lead-lined warehouse for 100k years isn't going to work.
Find a use for it... fusion reactor fuel, a new type of nuclear fusion reactor, launch it into the Sun... there has to be a solution.
Hate to tell you... this waste existed under other BICs (Butt In Chair), and they authorized tossing it into the oceans and that crap.
Delay (Score:2)
The government has been avoiding the question of what to do with nuclear waste ever since WW2. Why would you expect them to start acting now?
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They may be different people, but they have the same lack of desire to deal with anything controversial.
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Rather than blaming every government employee since WWII, maybe it makes sense to admit that putting off things like this is just human nature?
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They didn't act before, because nobody knew how to deal with it.
Maybe they could design a reactor that ran purely off of the barrels of waste (either just dump the barrels into it, or maybe the outer barrel itself is used the same way the pellets are used).
Maybe use the centrifugal satellite launcher thing to fling barrels into outer space.
Hell, maybe use the waste as starter fuel for warp drive.
Use your imagination! There has to be a way of dealing with it, somehow... and it's not just the current adminis
Re: (Score:2)
With how US food safety is going, they can just start to mix the stuff in there...
Treasure Island (Score:2)
Many years back (early 2000s) I dated a gal who lived on Treasure Island (which is in the SF Bay Area). I was like "say, this place is nice ..and the location is convenient.. why don't more people live here?". Then I got to explore the island a bit.
Re: (Score:2)
> Treasure Island
Not really a [1]great place to live. [wikipedia.org] It being the final resting place for some of the targets from the Bikini Atoll tests. Also, the recovered remains of [2]K-129 [wikipedia.org] that we claim not to have are buried on one of the S.F. Bay Islands. Maybe this one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island,_San_Francisco#Remediation_and_redevelopment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960)
The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Fission power is being sold to the public as the solution to the baseline power supply problem. The real costs are not being addressed however; the unknown costs include the waste problem, but also the clean up of the sites of closed stations. There's also an explicit insurance policy offered by governments against a Chernobyl type event; the private owners of such a station would not be expected to pay the full cost of such an event.
Sadly once an industry gets its claws into the economy to the extent that nukes have, it generates enormous political power which the rest of us are unable to face down. Compare and contrast the automobile industry...
Re: (Score:1)
I know... those solar panels work great at night, and those wind turbines are awesome on a dead calm day. And, I bet the 24h battery backup for NYC will fit in your garage, too.
And, the wind sails they are really handle tornados super-well (when a tornado can shove a piece of straw through a 4-foot thick oak tree or the tornado picks the entire house up and drops it in the next county). But, go ahead and keep rootin' for solar and wind energy (ignoring, of course where the rare earth minerals come from, t
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> There's also an explicit insurance policy offered by governments against a Chernobyl type event
And many of the same people who complain about this are first to ask for government state-of-emergency assistance in the case of catastrophic weather events.
Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score:3)
The baseline power supply problem is that people think there's a baseline power supply problem. There isn't, the baseline is easy, it's the peaks that are hard.
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Exactly. Nuclear power is singularly unsuitable to do regulation energy for peaks. Incidentally one of the reason why a grid with more than about 70% nuclear will crash regularly. Obviously, this idea is completely outside of what the nuclear cultists can even understand.
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> The real costs are not being addressed
The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.
The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."
Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.
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> Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.
Yes. It is really the "dumbest option possible". But the nuclear morons associate it with might and power. Which, incidentally is not wrong as the only rational reason to do civilian nuclear at all is access to fissile materials and hence the Bomb. Most politicians and nuclear fans like to lie about this. But here is a statement from Macron that tells it like it is: [1]https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/a... [lemonde.fr]
Essentially he said that the Bomb is impossible without a large civilian nuclear base and a large civilian nuc
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2020/12/21/nucleaire-pour-emmanuel-macron-c-est-la-filiere-militaire-qui-prime_6064052_3232.html
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> Chernobyl type event; the private owners of such a station would not be expected to pay the full cost of such an event.
The [1]Price Anderson Act [wikipedia.org] (and its amendments) also excludes rate payers from making claims to recover the replacement cost of their homes. Without this Act the nuclear industry would collapse simply because it cannot sustain itself without the insurance indemnities it provides.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
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Yes. Funny thing is that often repeated lie that nuclear power cannot be insured. It can be and the back-insurers did the calculations back when the question came up. They ended up at something like $5 per kWh, i.e. totally unsustainable economically. The reaction from politics was to put them under strict secrecy. Yes, I have a friend that used to be a risk modeler at a large back-insurer and that knows.
Incidentally, about the same level of self-destructive stupid with gas prices and climate-change not bei
What? (Score:2)
Whose bright idea was it to store nuclear waste right next to an ocean coastline?
Re: What? (Score:2)
It's exactly the same bright idea as putting a nuke plant there to begin with.
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Not just a coastline. A coastline with an active fault less than a mile away. And just to prove how stupid energy companies can be, PGE went ahead and built the Diablo Canyon plant and located it on the coastline, as well, and later discovered it had its own fault about 7 miles away, capable of generated a 7+ earthquake.
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They were clearly hoping that at some time the problem would just vanish. Not forever, but until they are dead and cannot be held accountable anymore. And look, that seems to be happening.
Common Sense vs. California (Score:2)
(California-sponsored Greed) ”The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall.”
California is the third largest state in the nation. 160,000 square miles and local leaders still chose to store nuclear waste within the hazard risk of a tsunami in a border state known for participating in annual El Slammo weather seasons.
A seawall, should have been the last choice of protection. Because that storage solution should have been nowhere near a corrosive environment like that.
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> p>California is the third largest state in the nation. 160,000 square miles and local leaders still chose to store nuclear waste within the hazard risk of a tsunami in a border state known for participating in annual El Slammo weather seasons.
As I recall, it is also stored at 4 to 5 times the density of the waste stored at Fukushima.
Dump it into the ocean (Score:2)
Add the waste to the existing pile off the [1]Farallon Islands [wikipedia.org].
Excellent fishing there, you can catch rockfish and lingcod most of the season almost as fast as you can take them off the hook. I'm hardly radioactive at all, although I got terribly seasick because the water is usually really rough from the Golden Gate out to the Farallons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands#Nuclear_waste_dump
nuclear shills will NOT learn from history (Score:2)
They'll repeat the same things over and over again: Technology today is nothing like it was in the past; A Chernobyl-like event could never happen today, modern regulations make events like this impossible, etc etc.
And despite stories like this one and others like it, they'll cling desperatly to their conviction that technology today has solved all the problems of uranium/plutonium fission reactors and that this form of energy is totally safe nowadays and is the only solution to climate change.
The thing is,
Re: (Score:2)
Just some more lies. You people have lied time and again, and have zero credibility left.
Nuclear titties! (Score:3)
It's a shame they're going to remove the domes since they're basically 2 giant boobs next to the freeway
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> It's a shame they're going to remove the domes since they're basically 2 giant boobs next to the freeway
[1]Everywhere I look there is something to remind me. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5OQMoSCrqw
Without detailed information on storage (Score:2)
The parent is useless. Slashdot was once a tech site instead of this general news for the typical retard.
Anyone have some QUALITY reading material on the subject? We will never see that from the editors who really should be replaced by AI which would do a better job on a bad day than they've done for many years.
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I sure don't but I'm googling around and I see they are [1]bragging [songscommunity.com] about using stainless steel dry cask storage. Unfortunately, these casks are [2]subject to corrosion [innovation...etwork.com] under nuclear storage conditions (that link is PR but they describe the problem well) so it's not really a win either. There isn't one, unless you count vitrification, which is so expensive to do right that no one wants to use it.
[1] https://www.songscommunity.com/used-nuclear-fuel/continued-safe-storage-of-used-nuclear-fuel
[2] https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/corrosion-damage-modelling-dry-storage-containers-spent-nuclear-fuel/23155/
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When hast the nuclear mafia not lied about everything being safe and then instead done the cheapest and worst thing they though they could get away with? These people are essentially habitual criminals.
RECA (Score:2)
I grew up in the [1]Secret City [wikipedia.org] Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.
As kids, we would ride our bikes onto the reservation woods in the area between the West end of Oak Ridge and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. There were gates that proclaimed this was illegal trespassing, but try telling that to 10 year old
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee
Nature says "Chalenge accepted" (Score:2)
> "The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall," said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters.
didn't the guys at Fukushima say something similar?
yes, Fukushima is a thousand times more susceptible to catastrophic tsunamis but you don't need 1,000 catastrophic tsunamis. you only need 1
Nuclear Waste Terrorism (Score:1)
It seems like collecting all nuclear waste into a consolidated location, or even a dozen dozen consolidated locations, concentrates it. Concentrated waste is a prime terrorist attack target. The amount an attacker can obtain access to, or try blow up, is rather large when there are only a few sites. The first several sites can be attacked with a huge amount of waste taken or ejected into the air, before we would know we are being attacked. On the other hand, more distributed waste storage would not have the
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Get a few kilograms of that and you have material for a nice number of dirty bombs. And if you are careful, you may not even kill yourself in the process (which typically only happens much later anyways).
Such a surprise (Score:2)
Trying to do nuclear power on the cheap does not work. Who would have expected that.
Obviously, the assholes behind this are already gone and will not be held accountable.
More antinuclear frearmongering (Score:1)
What a crock of shit. Here are some facts about used fuel(aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant)
It has a total kill count of zero. Yes zero. Meanwhile, 8.7 million people die annually from the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels.
It is a solid metal encased in ceramic. The Simpsons' caricature of green goo is false.
There isn't a lot of it. We could put all of it(yes, all of it) in a building the size of a Walmart. France keeps all of theirs in a room the size of a high school gym--that people walk
Not just there (Score:4, Informative)
We have a cask on the coast from the old Humboldt Bay power station. One tsunami could do it in.
Re:Not just there (Score:4, Informative)
There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.
The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.
Re: Not just there (Score:2)
I just actually read the summary... "The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude" ... EGADS
Re: (Score:2)
> just dump it in the sea.
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
- Yes, but...
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYpUSjSgFg
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Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.
DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.
Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.
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There are [1]multiple sites [wikipedia.org] in the ocean off Southern California including [2]dumped munitions, low level radioactive waste, sulfuric acid, and toxic petrochemicals chemicals. [wikipedia.org]
There is a Superfund site at he former location of the Montrose Chemical Corporation in Torrance where much of the DDT related waste was illegally dumped off Palos Verdes.
The full extent of the problem is [3]still unknown. [wikipedia.org] “The more we look, the more we find, and every new bit of information seems to be scarier than the last... This h
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern_California#Locations
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern_California#List_of_dumped_chemicals_and_waste
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern_California#Future_plans
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Careful, that's how you get Godzillas.
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> That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.
Yeah. Now I'm gonna have to go read Zodiac again.
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We have even more barrels of nuclear waste in the ocean up north, near the Farallon islands, off the coast of San Francisco. The current draws the leaking waste right into the bay...
Re: (Score:2)
There's a rocket launchpad in Cali, right? Zip-tie or duct-tape some of the casks to a section that'll have fuel, detach it, light the engines and burn for a course above the orbits of the other planets aiming for the sun.
Or, maybe a fusion reactor could be made that uses nuclear waste as a fuel (hint: put money into fusion research).
Or, maybe better designs for nuclear reactors so that they don't generate as much waste.
Those casks are a ticking clock, not denying that... a little creative thinking could t