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NRC listens to outcry on Diablo Canyon waste storage

November 21, 2013

diabAbout 200 members of the public addressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Wednesday night in San Luis Obispo about the storage of nuclear waste at Diablo Canyon Power Plant, most of whom objected to the practice.

The NRC is in the process of drafting new rules for the storage of spent fuel for the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors. Pacific Gas and Electric, which operates Diablo Canyon, stores spent fuel in both pools and dry casks at the power plant.

“Nobody wants a nuclear waste repository on their coastline,” San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Adam Hill said Wednesday. “I think all of us have agreed that the lack of a permanent disposal policy is a terrible burden on our county.”

Hill, whose district includes Diablo Canyon, said he has already sent a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein asking her to prod legislators to create a storage facility for the nuclear waste. Hill also said the Board of Supervisors would draft a collective letter stating its concerns about the amount of fuel stored in the pools at Diablo Canyon and the safety of transferring the rest to dry casks.

The federal government previously planned to move waste from nuclear power plants to a storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the Obama Administration defunded the project.

The NRC is taking public comment on its proposed rules for nuclear waste storage until December 20. It has issued an environmental impact statement saying that storage of nuclear waste at reactor sites for 100 years is a safe practice.

 


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I’m not a member of the Green Party, although I object to you using the accusation in a pejorative manner, reminiscent of the tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy. But to set the record straight, “I am not, nor have I ever been a member of the Green Party.”


Lame, you, like the majority of people in SLO County have more money and resources and luxuries than 95 percent of the other 7 billion people in this world. Do you honestly believe that you alone earned that by working harder and smarter than every one of those BILLIONS of people who do NOT have nearly the luxuries you enjoy day in and day out?


Lame, you absolutely would not have all the prosperity you brag about if it were not for the suffering of others and the continued devastation of our environment. How much more do you want? How many more needless wars do we have to have to feed your style of consumer culture “prosperity”? How many more billions of people starve while you eat your turkey and blame the evils of the world on the Green Party?


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Wiser said: Lame, there’s a good chance you “prospered” at the expense of others and our environment, leaving the payback and clean-up to others. Where did those “prosperous” years leave the world? Answer: with more poverty, more people dead or mutilated because of unnecessary wars and more environmental devastation.”


I’d like to respond to Wiser’s obviously Green Party attack on my honest profession, and do so respectfully without profanity or other violation, however, the Moderator has taken to removing a couple of my recent posts which I believed were on topic and useful to the discussion. Guess I need to re-read comment guidelines, or just go away.


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BeenThere says people complain Yucca Mountain wasn’t suitable. WHAT people, BTDT? The rocket scientists from Mothers for Peace?


Yucca Mountain was been geologically stable since before the dinosaurs went away 65 million years ago. It is perfectly suitable in fact, just not suitable for the nannies running between soccer meets and protest marches. Obama defunded it as the uneducated weenie he is.


The destruction of the Yucca Mountain solution is just a sample of our lack of wisdom.


The nuts are running the asylum. The Dems just erased decades of precedent of using the filibuster to limit runaway power by a simple majority.


I am so @#$$@# glad I prospered under Reagan, Clinton, Bush, while this county had some sense of brain and liberty in it’s electorate and elected. I only wish I could leave not just a potful to the next generation but a free and prosperous and well-grounded country and system to them.


Well, hopefully they will be more resilient than I think, and will overcome a wrecked health care system, a wrecked dollar, a wrecked economy, and a wrecked and departed country formerly steeped in liberties and a sense of it’s own exceptional nature……


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you are horribly uneducated – there were many reasons that Yucca Mtn was deemed unsuitable – the salts and water in the tunnels which would have corroded any packaging around the spent fuel was a one of the biggest. get your facts straight!!


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Lame………I don’t have a problem with Yucca. As for the people I am talking about a lot of the people in Nevada. I thought it was clear enough without having to go into details. Sorry.


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Lame, there’s a good chance you “prospered” at the expense of others and our environment, leaving the payback and clean-up to others. Where did those “prosperous” years leave the world? Answer: with more poverty, more people dead or mutilated because of unnecessary wars and more environmental devastation.


We should be glad that people are now trying to avoid those kind of horrible mistakes that profited a few at the terrible expense of the many.


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Interesting to read up on the history of Yucca Mountain, especially in the determination of Yucca Mountain as the only site worth pursuing as a depository of nuclear waste. There were originally ten different sites that were identified as possibilities, and after three years of studies, the focus on Yucca Mountain was laser focused; seems that most of the other sites had far took many local residents fearing for their area and Yucca was the least populated, and had the least concern raised about, so the previous Administration threw everything behind creating the depository with no regard to local’s concerns.

I don’t think we can create a truly “safe” repository for our nuclear waste generated by power plants like Diablo Canyon, and even if we could, the transporting of the waste to the new site would be dangerous, expensive as hell and would see all sorts of financial and political roadblocks thrown up at any moving of the waste. But then again, leaving the waste where it sits isn’t the best case solution either; while the testing for the dry cask containers is impressive and they certainly seem to be impenetrable, do we really “know” what could happen to them in an extremely violent earthquake and possible accompanying tsunami ? We have been playing with fire concerning nuclear waste for far too long; we know how dangerous the stuff is, we know how long it is going to remain dangerous, and we have allowed private enterprise to profit off of the use of nuclear fuel without having to actually cover the real costs associated with that generation. If it wasn’t for the federal government stepping in to relieve companies like PG&E of their financial responsibility if anything goes terribly wrong, there would be no chance of any sort of profit to be made due to how expensive it would be to provide any sort of meaningful insurance coverage.

The best “solution” for the waste from Diablo is to stop creating it as soon as possible first, then we will have a finite amount to deal with and can actually arrive at a solution; to continue to operate the plant and generate the waste without having a disposal plan is irresponsible, to say the least.


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so the previous Administration threw everything behind creating the depository with no regard to local’s concerns.


REALLY BOB?? Spin again as usual? This all started in 1987 and has went through NUMEROUS administrations. Second the President doesn’t decide this, Congress does.


Please show me the facts to support your erroneous statement or as usual are you just bashing the prior administration, to bash as you usually do.


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Hill asked for a storage facility? Mr. Hill we had one built. Called Yucca Mountain. We spent over 12 billion for a hole in the ground that sits empty. Yea people complain it isn’t suitable. O.k. fair enough. So is it more suitable sitting at the nuclear sites?


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Yucca Mtn was never built – the only thing that was done was the drilling of tunnels into the mountain for testing. The site is unacceptable as they found corrosive salts and water in the tunnels which would have compromised the spent fuel. Also, there is a good possibility that Yucca Mtn could become volcanically active once again. Can you imagine a volcanic eruption spewing 70,0000 tons of high-level radioactive waste into the atmosphere? Bottom line, there is not now nor will there EVER be a safe place to store this stuff. It is scientifically impossible to predict the geology of any given location 500, 1,000, 2,500 years from now. Even the NRC admits that this “spent fuel” MUST be isolated completely from the environment for at least 200,000 years! There may not even be humans on the planet by then.


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Thank you!!! You proved my point with your last part about there won’t be a safe place. EXACTLY! No matter if they move it from Yucca to Tim buck two, someone will find something wrong with the geology or something.


Oh and as far as never built, yea but my point is we still poured 12 BILLION dollars into NOTHING!!


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