McCain to Nevada, yeah, I lied

John McCain spent some time in Nevada and assured the people there that Yucca Mountain wouldn't need to be opened (a softer report here).

You see, John McCain is also advocating more nuclear power. More nuclear plants means not only more problems with finding Uranium, more mining Uranium, more processing, more spent fuel and by products, it means something else. See those photos of the fuel rods suspended in liquid from the DoE link (first one above). What do you think happens to that liquid? Yeah, it's a real problem.

When I was a young graphic designer I worked on the environmental reports (DoE and EPA mandated) for the Fernald Nuclear Site for the years 1989 and 1990 (published 1990 and 1991). They say it's cleaned up now. Um, yeah. Don't believe it. I tried to find the reports but my google-fu has failed me. See, Fernald, Ohio is also big dairy land. In 1989 and 1990 there were whole months (read that as plural each year) that milk both downwind and upwind could not be sold because it was too radioactive. Fernald hadn't had a working reactor for over 15 years at that time. My guess is that the dairy farmers in the area still have to dump milk every year.

You don't want to know the stories I heard from the engineers there. Not all of the fuel could be accounted for, let's just leave it at that. There's a creek that flows into the Ohio River (from the Miami if memory serves) that flows right past the plant. You do not want to fish there. Trace materials that can be tacked back to Fernald have found their way to the Ohio.

The biggest problem at Fernald, and at all nuclear plants, is the storage of the reactor coolant. See, not only is it highly toxic, it is "mildly" radioactive as well. And there are holding tanks, large holding tanks, full of it all over the US. It will also be stored at Yucca, because most of the tanks were not constructed to for long term storage. In fact, they're way beyond their expected useful life. So, yes, waste for nuclear power plants is certainly less that from coal fire plants. But it's much more directly deadly.

You can make the reactor core safer than what we use now (like a pebble-bed design), but you can't get away from the hot water waste (from the cooling towers), nor the actual radioactive waste (both high and low-level). And you need to store that waste, somewhere. Shipping it internationally isn't going to work (heck, there are actually laws against it). Yucca Mountain here we come. And there's going to be a whole lot more coming your way if John McCain can be believed.

And don't get me started on "Clean" Coal (which is a game of "hide the carbon-dioxide, sulfur, and mercury").