While I'm at it, note that nuclear waste should be a complete non-issue. Yucca mountain is a wasteful boondoggle. The French have developed a dandy technology for handling radioactive waste. The layman's description is this:
- Grind up the waste into very fine particles.
- Mix those particles into a large volume of leaded glass.
- Cast that glass into a large billet -- about 1/2 the volume of a boxcar.
- Embed that lead-glass (plus radioactive waste) billet inside another billet of leaded glass, winding up with a hunk of glass about the size of a large boxcar.
The resulting huge hunk of glass is stable as can be. Safe enough to bury in your back yard, or use as a foundation block for the local grade-school, or whatever. It's not a security risk -- stealing a hunk of glass the size of a box-car is a truly major undertaking. People would notice. It's nice and safe in terms of leaching of radioactives -- the cube-square law works nicely in your favor. The glass billets are stable for more than enough time to allow the radioactives to decay. The French nuclear agency sponsored a bunch of archaeological research to find the oldest glass samples in the world and studied their properties very carefully. They really nailed down the
very long term properties of glass (extrapolating from a base-line of nearly 4K years with real samples)! And the lead in the glass blocks the radiation quite adequately in the mean time.
In addition to all those benefits, it also allows for recovery of the radioactive material (by reprocessing the glass billets) should it become sensible to do so. But that recovery would be
extremely obvious, so it poses no significant security issue.
I have no clue why we're too dumb to use this solution here in the US. Perhaps there's too much political capital tied up in the current non-solution?
Xenophon