Two Minutes

“Two minutes” says Teal Krech as he replies to a question posed to him bye an interested intern from within his cubicle at the “Village Voice” headquarters. The question he was answering was “How long can a human being survive unshielded radiation exposure from a broken fuel rod?” Teal achieved this research from the DoE (Department of Energy) who to this point “has no set plan for the transportation of the spent nuclear fuel rods through our major cities and states on their way to ultimate storage in the bowels of Yucca Mountain”(Krech 2002). Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles Northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the site that President George Bush has endorsed for serious consideration as the location in which to store the nations nuclear waste. This nuclear waste, currently stored at 131 reactor sites around the nation, originates from nuclear fuel rods used for nuclear power generation, and national defense and weapons programs.

Since 1978 the Department of Energy has been studying Yucca Mountain. They have been trying to determine whether it would be suitable for the long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive wastes. In that time period and billions of American dollars spent of scientific research on everything from the potential seepage into groundwater to microbial growth within the Alcoves already trenched into the mountain’s core. Yucca Mountain has been determined the safest place in North America for such a site. The Department of transportation has sank nearly three decades of research and money into the site and have just this year began developing a concise transportation plan for the movement of this nuclear waste throughout our country to the Yucca Mountain site, says Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis.

“With the licensing procedures expected to take 3 years” (Abraham 2002) and that license only granted through the construction period of the site, at which point and time the Department of Energy will have to reapply for licensing before they can begin to receive wastes, the project is at least 8 years away from completion. I personally think that eight years allows plenty of time for further development of transportation methods and protocols that will guarantee the safe movement and containment of this waste through our major cities. The Department of Energy will probably come up with special containers that will be specifically designed to withstand even the most violent of turnovers and impacts, just like they have done for the transportation of gaseous cyanide and chlorine which are transported bye truck and rail every day. Both of which would cause catastrophic levels of deaths if the containers integrity were to be compromised and its contents allowed to escape.

Nuclear power generation is responsible for almost 20% of our nation’s power usage. (Abraham 2002), and since the Regan administration we have been steadily increasing the number of nuclear power generating reactors across the country. We as a nation are dependent

on electrical power for everyday life, so we shouldn’t expect to see the number of nuclear power plants decrease in any scope of the near future. We need methods of disposal for the wasted (spent) fuel rods that we currently have on hand in the amount of 40,000 metric tons. (Abraham 2002)

In 1978 before the Nuclear Waste Policy Act went into effect the nation looked into many different proposed methods of nuclear waste disposal, some of these methods include; rocketing the waste into outer space aiming for it to exit the solar system or to impact the sun. This method seemingly has potential for rocket failure resulting in the release of radioactive material throughout our atmosphere or potentially across our nation’s skies killing millions in its wake.

The second method explored was forcefully injecting the waste onto the edge of the earth’s tectonic plates as to allow the waste to enter the earth’s mantle. Several other methods involved Antarctica, such as allowing the nuclear waste to sink all the way to the Antarctic’s bedrock (approximately 2 miles) melting its way down using the spent materials own heat to do the melting and leaving it there, another method included the storage of the waste on the surface of the arctic and covering it with ice.

There have been proposals for reactors that consume nuclear waste and transmute it to other, less-harmful nuclear waste. In particular, the Integral Fast Reactor was a proposed nuclear reactor with a nuclear fuel cycle that produced no transuranic waste; in fact, it could consume transuranic waste. It proceeded as far as large-scale tests but was then cancelled by the US Government. (Wickipedia 2004)

All in all the general consensus bye the American congress and senate was that the underground storage at