Argggghhhh!

The government has been collecting substantial fees from nuclear utilities to support the Yucca Mountain research, with the promise to relieve them of their spent fuel (and other assorted irradiated odds & ends). All for what? Spent fuel pools overflow, and some dry-cask storage dots some of the utilities' landscape.

If I were the utilities, I'd start to think about suing to recover the monies.

Solution: force-feed the high level waste to Harry Reid.

After 10,000 years the highly radioactive stuff will almost all have decayed to moderately radioactive stuff - it is, after all, highly radioactive, which by defination means it's rapidly transmuting into something more stable.

And nuclear is our only practical option for reducing oil use - if the greens actually wanted what they claim to want, they ought to be screaming for this.

I have to tell you, these judges are absolutely clueless. In roughly 10,000 years, man has gone from not knowing what the heck metal was good for to using it for everything. In about 120 years we have gone from metal being the best substance to build things for which strength is needed to non-metallic, composite materials which can be made stronger and lighter. In sixty years we have gone from generally avoiding radioactive material like the plague to using it for a unbelievable number of fantastic uses.

Anyone who thinks that this material will stay in the Yucca mountain respository for more than even 1,000 years without a safe, beneficial and profitable use being found for it should never again be paid for thinking.

The stuff is heavy, and would sink like a greased safe.

Why not dump into an oceanic subduction zone?

10,000 years from now, it would be recycled.

How could the Greens not get behind that?

10,000 years in the Future? Civilization is not 10,000 years old. One Dollar held at 3% interest for 10,000 years would accumulate about $10^125 in interest. That is ten followed by 125 zeros.

How much is that? A googol--not Google the search engine--is 1 followed by 100 zeroes = 10^100. but we still have 25 zeros to play with. A trillion (the US GDP is about $10 Trillion) is 10^12 or one followed by 12 zeros. Ten trillion trillions or ten times a trillion squared or the sum of the US GDP for the next Trillion years, without interest and ignoring that all of the stars will have gone out long before that, will yield us 10^25 (these are gobsmacking huge numbers). And 10^125 is ten times a trillion squared times a googol, which is such a huge number that it is idiotic.

It is absolutly moronic to worry about what will happen 10,000 years from now. I will put up the dollar that will solve the problem. They will be able to hire the entire population of China to sit there with tweezers and pick up radioacive atoms one at a time should any be left.

Why do we pay federal judges almost $200K/yr? We could get this kind of brain power out of the nearest homless shelter at $3/pint.

mike earl: "After 10,000 years the highly radioactive stuff will almost all have decayed to moderately radioactive stuff ..."

After one thousand years the highly radioactive stuff will have decayed. See NUCLEAR ELECTRICITY, Chap. 5, especially Figure 15 and Figure 16B.

The longer the half life, the less radiation is being produced. This stuff is decaying very slowly, so it is a lot less dangerous than the stuff with a shorter half-life. I'm with Jeff, dump it in a deep ocean trench or a subduction zone.

No, John is right. 100 years from now our descendants would be asking "why the *$%^! did they dump it in a subduction zone instead of storing it where we can get at it?"

I want my Dollar back!