Should President Trump Reopen Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository?

originally posted by: D8Tee
a reply to: NightFlight

This of course is futuristic and I hope it is soon achieved.

Reinvestigating Yucca mountain is an option that should be explored. The people of Nevada don't want it, which presents political challenges. Launching nuclear waste into space is just not an option. Any politician that proposes funding for that research would never be reelected by an intelligent electorate.

From what I read, the people of Nevada were for it, I mean with all the nuclear bomb sites all over the state, having a repository that doesn't exude radiation into the atmosphere for years would be a good thing. Harry Reid was the one that didn't want the repository because it brought down the value of the land he was stealing. Political opinions in Nevada may have changed since the closure, I don't know. And, Harry Reid is history!

OK why put nuclear material where there's earthquakes at all Nevada is number 4 in the us

If we haven't learned yet keep nuclear anything away from oceans and earthquakes it's really simple

And yes Nevada can have strong earthquakes

m.reviewjournal.com...

So yes store waste there we don't have the other 45 states with nerly 0 earthquakes

a reply to: markovian
Groundwater levels in Nevada are probably the deepest in America. With current technology, we can build underground storage facilities that would withstand 9.7 Richter or more. I know that nothing is fool proof, but we need somewhere to safely store our nuclear waste.

originally posted by: NightFlight
I have not seen any videos or news reports on this topic. The nation is in dire need of somewhere to put our spent nuclear fuel, obsolete nuclear warheads and various other radioactive materials that need a ten thousand year repository. Ideally, we need a transport system to the sun that could take nuclear waste and inject it into the sun. Until then, we will have to store it somewhere, safely.

Yucca Mountain - Wikipedia

The project was approved in 2002 by the United States Congress, but Federal funding for the site ended in 2011 under the Obama Administration via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011.[2] The project has had many difficulties and was highly contested by the general public, the Western Shoshone peoples, and many politicians.[3] The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[2]

[Wikipedia]

I believe the closure was for political reasons by Obama. I also believe that we have the technology to create underground facilities to withstand earthquakes up to 9.7 (Richter).

My opinion is that we need to reopen and complete the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository. I am hoping that President Trump will reopen the facility, finish it with the technical upgrades needed, and start storing our waste there.

How do you feel about reopening the facility? I would certainly like to hear the pros and cons...

There are too many questions about the geology of Yucca Mountain. We are talking about very long-term storage, which means into the tens of thousands of years (the initial planned ten thousand years and then observation afterwards. Yucca Mountain itself is part of an extinct volcano and the last eruption in the area as about 80,000 years ago.
Then there's the fact that the Bow Ridge fault line runs right below the damn facility.
So: hell no.

So to anybody saying launch it to space. I did some calculations.
Just to get things into orbit it cost about $1000 per pound I don't know what the cost would be to get something out of orbit and too the sun.
There is an estimated 138,000,000 pounds of nuclear waste in the united states.

So per pound the total cost just to get the waste into orbit would be around $138,000,000,000 I'm sure it would be astronomically higher to launch it at the sun.

Also the greatest cost would be the cost of life if any of these rockets would fail and spread radiation every where.

Given the current level of technology this is just not feasible and endangers life on planet earth.