Just introduce a bill to keep motorists out of Yucca Mountain. Bush will sign almost anything. And this makes more sense than most of your efforts.

Until passage the Nevada highway patrol can block the roads.

Harry, did you know Richard Nixon was a crook and George Schultz worked for Bechtel? Please, please, get that in the Congressional Record.

Reprocessing doesn’t make economic sense until uranium prices increase by an order of magnitude from today’s levels, if then. Do you like wasting money? I observe that extraction of uranium from seawater (which contains about 4 billion tons of the element) by the Japanese amidoxime process is likely to be cheaper than this, so reprocessing is not likely to be needed in the foreseeable future.

Bruce: is Yucca Mountain going forward just out of sheer momentum?

I’d say so, and also that the requirement to bury the waste in the near term was political from the start. Burial may also have made more sense if reprocessing was going to be done, since once the fission products are out of the spent fuel elements they’re arguably more likely to become mobile in the environment. But reprocessing (and the fast reactors that would burn the recycled higher actinides) look like technological dead ends at this time.

A contractor is always supposed to build according to specifications. The purchaser has its own engineers who should have approved the specifications and supervised the quality throughout the life of the project, and of course it is they who control when and how much Bechtel gets paid over the life of the project. If they accepted crap and didn’t make Bechtel fix it, or made Bechtel take concrete or other supplies from favored vendors, or let Bechtel take draws to which they were not entitled, they screwed up.

And don’t tell me you can’t find crooked pols in Boston or the rest of Mass.

IOW don’t let the local politicians off the hook. It’s their town, it’s their infrastructure, it’s their job to see that it’s built right.

Incidentally, I’m an engineer who spent a decade building, starting up and operating nuclear power plants at several sites.

Besides if there were no Yucca Mountain the eco wackos would be yelling and screaming that there is no way to dispose of residual wastes.

Thanks for the cogent observation. Not having much of a background in nuclear energy, I wasn’t aware of the alternative — but I’m almost always in favor of “cheaper, simpler, and all around easier” or, as my good friend Bruce Henderson (aka “Evil Bruce”) puts it, “Start out stupid and work up from there.” Given the available alternative, is Yucca Mountain going forward just out of sheer momentum? ..bruce..

It turns out to be cheaper, simpler, and all around easier to just stick the spent fuel rods (after a few years of decay in a cooling pool) into massive shielded armored casks filled with inert gas. These so-called ‘dry casks’ are rugged and very resistant to attack, and should last for centuries. The spent fuel produced by a nuclear reactor over its lifetime, stored in casks, will occupy less land area than the reactor itself.

Eventually, something else will have to be done with the spent fuel (if only because the fission products will decay so much the plutonium is not protected against clandestine diversion), but by putting that time centuries into the future the present cost can be made negligible. Why spend gigabucks on a geological repository today when we can safely delay that expenditure for generations?

D: Bechtel must be good at keeping a low profile, since I lived in the DC area for nearly 8 years (6 of those right in the District itself) and wasn’t aware of their involvement with the Metro. On the other hand, the DC government itself is so disfunctional that they can make almost anyone else look good by comparison.

Shannon: Actually, most of the complaints I’ve heard in the wake of the Big Dig tunnel collapse is that Bechtel had too little oversight, not too much. On the other hand, there have been other charges of the MTA dispensing patronage jobs to friends and family of the Mass state legislature (hence, the difficulty Romney had in firing Amorello prior to the tunnel collapse), so it may have been a bad combination all the way around. ..bruce..