Fredtalk: Yucca Mt. Is Not The Answer for Nuclear Wasre Dec.

Dear Editor,
Safe and secure burial of high level nuclear waste at
Yucca Mountain, Nevada is a scientific impossibility and
the Dept. of Energy knows it. See below. Yucca would be
a man made dirty bomb and a planetary scale.

November 26, 2003

DOE predicts nuke reactions in casks

Nevadans worry about danger at Yucca
By Suzanne Struglinski

LAS VEGAS SUN

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department predicts up to 60 uncontrolled nuclear reactions would take place inside nuclear waste casks stored at power plant sites should the casks corrode, according to a department study obtained by Nevada officials.

After a review of the documents, state officials say they believe the same thing would happen at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The state wants the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent board set up by Congress to review the potential dump, to look into the matter.

"We were amazed to learn, after finally obtaining some of the pertinent documents from the Department of Energy through the Freedom of Information Act, that DOE's own studies anticipate that, if the repository operates as is now planned, up to 60 nuclear criticalities may plausibly occur inside the mountain, and that (the) conditional probability of occurrence may be greater than one in 1,000 per year," Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects wrote to board Chairman Michael Corradini.

Criticalities are uncontrolled nuclear reactions that could occur if water -- or other liquids -- got inside the casks. It could start a mininuclear reaction inside the casks and cause a steam explosion, said Washington attorney Joe Egan, who represents the state on Yucca matters.

The issue of water seepage at Yucca Mountain has been a critical point of debate over the planned nuclear waste repository. Scientists are still studying how water moves through the mountain. With or without water, the casks are eventually expected to corrode over a period of thousands of years.

State officials expressed surprise that the report wasn't disclosed as part of the Yucca Mountain debate.

They say Energy officials have said that the issue won't affect Yucca Mountain and state officials say this study shows that it does.

But Allen Benson, a Yucca Mountain project spokesman in Nevada, said the documents the state received do not relate to Yucca Mountain but are from a 4-year-old report looking at on-site waste storage facilities at nuclear power plants.

Benson said the department was glad Loux sent the letter to the board since it can now choose to review the matter, but that on-site storage and storage inside Yucca "are two different things."

Benson said that since the report shows that criticalities can take place inside above-ground storage containers at the 103 nuclear power plants throughout the country, especially if water gets in them, it makes even more sense to store the waste in Yucca, which is in the desert.

But state officials say the fact that the Energy Department acknowledges in this report that criticality is an issue is a huge threat.

Egan and Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval filed petitions with the U.S. Court Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking the court to include the FOIA documents in the court record. The state's major court arguments on the site will take place there on Jan. 14.

Loux said the department only predicated an "extremely low probability of occurrence" of such reactions in the Final Environmental Impact Statement issued last year. He quotes the document's specific text to that effect in his letter to Corradini.

State officials had Michael Thorne, a criticality expert, review the report and found that an expected 60 chain reaction events would occur throughout the lifetime of the repository since the department anticipates the waste packages will degrade over time.

"A criticality occurring in the repository could severely compromise the entire facility, vastly increasing radionuclide releases and making waste packages irretrievable," Loux wrote.

The department documents do not have a timeline for the events to occur, according to the letter.

"These are not nuclear explosions," Egan said. "We are not trying to scare anyone ... we are not saying this is going to happen, but DOE's own analysis notes it was a nonspeculative scenario."

But if the casks were to burst, the radioactive material would go with it. "It's literally a dirty bomb, a conventional explosion with radioactive materials," Egan said.

"Their maximum accident scenario in transport is $18 billion in clean-up (costs) and 44 early fatalities, and that's with a small puff of radiation not an explosion -- they call it a 'violent event' which is a euphemism for explosion," Egan said.

Russian Nuclear Waste Dump Explosion 1957

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Lighthouse-Hertsgaard.htm

"I am become Death,
the shatterer of worlds."

The line of Hindu scripture that flashed through Oppenheimer's mind at the moment "gadget," the first test bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.

Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 11
The Vision of the Universal Form
Lord Krishna is beseeched by Arjuna to reveal His universal form showing all of existence.

Lord Krishna said: I am terrible time the destroyer of al beings in all worlds, engaged to destroy all beings in this world; of those heroic soldiers presently situated in the opposing army, even without you none will be spared. Bhagavad-Gita 11:32

(exerpt)
As such, Mayak was the site of perhaps the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. There had been three nuclear disasters at Mayak whose damages were comparable to, and probably worse than, the reactor meltdown in 1986 that made Chernobyl a household name around the world. The difference with the Mayak disasters was that they never became media events. On the contrary, they were kept secret-not only from the outside world but from the Russian people, including hundreds of thousands of local residents who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation. In a striking case of Cold War duplicity and doublethink, the news from Mayak was suppressed by both the KGB and the CIA, each of which apparently feared an informed populace as much as it feared the enemy arsenal. (The CIA learned about the accidents in the course of normal intelligence gathering but declined to publicize them. Thus, when I reached Chelyabinsk in 1991, the three Mayak nuclear disasters still remained largely unknown to all but a handful of international nuclear policy experts.

Astonishingly enough, the first Mayak disaster was not an accident at all but the result of deliberate policy. From 1949, when the Mayak complex produced the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon, until 1956, Mayak officials poured their nuclear waste directly into the nearby Techa River. Tens of thousands of people living downstream received average doses of radiation four times greater than those subsequently received at Chernobyl. For the twenty-eight thousand people most acutely exposed, average individual doses were fifty-seven times greater than at Chernobyl. Nevertheless, only seventy-five hundred people were ever evacuated from their homes, and people were not forbidden to use the river water until 1953, four years after the contamination began.

The second, and most terrible, Mayak disaster took place on September 29, 1957, when a nuclear waste dump exploded, spewing seventy to eighty metric tons of waste into the sky. The waste facility had been constructed in 1953 as an alternative to more river dumping. When its cooling system malfunctioned, the waste began to dry out and heat up, eventually reaching the unearthly temperature of 350 degrees Celsius. The resulting explosion was equivalent to seventy to one hundred tons of TNT-enough to blast a thick concrete lid off the tanks and hurl it twenty-five meters away. The total amount of ejected radioactivity measured twenty million curies -- ten times more than had already been dumped in the Techa River. Ninety percent of the radioactivity fell immediately back to earth, but the remaining two million curies formed a plume half a mile high that spread across the Chelyabinsk region, severely contaminating air, water, and soil. All the pine trees in a twenty-square-kilometer area died over the next eighteen months. Approximately 272,000 people were exposed to average doses of 0.7 rems of radiation, the same amount that 750,000 Chernobyl victims would experience in 1986.

The third Mayak disaster occurred in 1967, and again nuclear waste was the culprit. In 1951, after Mayak officials realized they could no longer dump waste in the Techa River but before they built the storage facility that would explode in 1957, they began pouring waste into Lake Karachay, a natural lake within the Mayak complex; since Karachay had no outlets, this measure, it was assumed, would keep the waste from contaminating the regional water system. However, in 1967, a cyclone swept across the drought-exposed shores of Lake Karachay and whirled its deadly silt high into the air and across the surrounding landscape. Five million curies of radioactivity ,were dispersed over fifteen thousand square miles; nearly half a million people were affected.

Atomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf

Posted for educational and research purposes only,
~ in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 ~

disillusionedX2,
Here is the most cost effective method to denature and
ELIMINATE nuclear waste, plutonium and "dirty bomb"
elements for good....and generate electric power as a
by-product. But the nuke industry make billions BY NOT
solving the waste disp[osal problem endangering public
health for thousands of future generations. It is
ubiquitous for government funding 'programs' NOT to solve
problems or make peace. There is far more profit in mischief
and failure, our own culture of death.
--------------------
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC
Sunday, November 4, 1979
Process may kill radiation threat

By CLARENCE W. BAILEY
Copyright, 1979. The Arizona Republic

TEMPE -- An internationally recognized Arizona State University physicist disclosed Saturday that he has discovered a method for treating nuclear reacÂtor and other highly dangerous radioactive wastes so they will be harmless.

The procedure was conceived by Dr. Radha R. Roy professor of nuclear physics who is the designer and former director of nuclear-physics research faÂcilities at the University of Brussels In Belgium. and at Pennsylvania State UniÂversity.

Roy said the process â€œvery roughly can be described in part as a reversal of phenomena that occur during a nuclear fission chain reactions.

The scientist said the process is the culmination of many years research

â€œTheoretical analysis and mathematical calculations confirm the process is highly effective and that any level of radio activity, from weak to strong. Can be reduced to harmless state in a short period of time,â€ Roy said.

The thing that is so encouraging is that the method can cancel radioactivity rapidly enough for it to be of r real practical value in disposing of dangerous wastes in storage and as they are being produced, Roy said.

One treatment-plant design which Roy has devised could reduce the radioacÂtivity of even the most dangerous wastes with half-lives or 15,000 to 40,000 years to a level where they would be essentially harmless in about 20 days.

A half-life is the time required for a quantity of radioactive material to lose one half of its radioactive strength.

Roy, who left his native Calcutta, India. to do advanced nuclear- physics reÂsearch at the University of London during World War II, said all the necessary theoretical and quantum electrodynamical work on the process has been completed.

â€œThere remains perhaps as much as a years work in calculating parameters and preparing data that will he needed for the engineering design of a pilot radioÂactive waste-treatment plantâ€™ he said.

Roy is known internationally among scientists for his many advanced research contributions in the field of nuclear fission fragments and as the author of deÂfinitive graduate and post-doctoral textbooks used in universities all over the world. â€œDuring the 37 years since the first fission chain reaction there has been no progress whatever toward the development of a method of deactivating radioactive waste or even for storing it safely,â€ he said.

â€œThe collections of dangerous nuclear wastes in this country alone have now reached a total of at least 75 million gallons, and it is growing daily.â€

He estimated an operational nuclear waste-treatment plant could cost $40 milÂlion or more. By contrast, he noted, Congress last summer appropriated $80 million just to build more concrete storage bunkers to hold only a part of the growing accumulation of nuclear wastes.

â€œSince it is so very dangerous to ship strongly radioactive materials it would certainly be sensible to build a treatment plant for each reactor so radioactivity could be killed out before the waste is transported anywhere" the scientist said.

Roy said that the national danger from nuclear waste is "extremely serious" and urged the federal government to build treatment plants near established nuclear waste storage areas. Other treatment plants should be constructed to kill out the radioactivity in the wastes from the nation's weapons programs and from its educational, industrial, medical and experimental research facilities he said.

Roy warned that waste containing plutonium 239 is "critically dangerous" because of its extremely high radioactivity and also because it is the essential ingredient in an atomic bomb.

The treatment process not only will render plutonium 239 harmless in a remarkably short time, he said, but also will keep deactivated plutonium from ever being reprocessed to make an illegal atomic weapon.

Roy further warned that the United States not only is exporting nuclear energy when it sells reactor technology to foreign nations, but also is sending overseas the potential for making illegal bombs out of plutonium from reprocessed nuclear wastes.

The treatment method will guarantee to foreign countries that use nuclear fission energy that they can maintain an environment free from radioactivity, and it also could guarantee to the world that there will be no reuse of plutonium in an unauthorized weapon, he said. Careful theoretical and mathematical analysis have assured him that the nuclear waste- treatment process will function reliably and with rapidity and high efficiency, he said.

"But the existence of this promising nuclear waste-treatment procedure should not be construed in any sense to mean that nuclear fission power reactors are safe" Roy said. The contractor who built Three Mile Island's reactor-like those who built the other 71 reactors now operational in the United States -- expected that plant to function normally for 30 years in total safety without event .But the fact is that it went out of control and nearly created a meltdown which could have destroyed a large part of the human habitat of east-central Pennsylvania,'' Roy said.

----------------------------------------

Neutralize & Eliminate Nuclear Waste For Good
The Roy Process Brief Description
from the web site: http://members.cox.net/theroyprocess

Is there a safe process to get rid of nuclear waste? One possible solution is a process invented by Dr. Radha R. Roy, former professor of Physics at Arizona State University, and designer and former director of the nuclear physics research facilities at the University of Brussels in Belgium and at Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Roy is an internationally known nuclear physicist, consultant, and the author of over 60 articles and several books. He is also a contributing author of many invited articles in a prestigious encyclopedia. He is cited in American Men and Women of Science, Who`s Who in America, Who`s Who in the World and the International Biographical Centre, England. He has spent 52 years in European and American universities researching and writing recognized books on nuclear physics. He has supervised many doctoral students.

Roy invented a process for transmuting radioactive nuclear isotopes to harmless, stable isotopes. This process is viable not only for nuclear waste from reactors but also for low-level radioactive waste products.

In 1979, Roy announced his transmutation process and received international attention. The Roy process does not require storage of radioactive materials. No new equipment is required. In fact, all of the equipment and the chemical separation processes needed are well known.

What`s the basis for the Roy Process? If you examine radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, you will see that they all have too many neutrons. To put it very simply, the Roy process transmutes these unstable isotopes to stable ones by knocking out the extra neutrons. When a neutron is removed, the resulting isotope has a considerably shorter half-life which then decays to a stable form in a reasonable amount of time.

How do we knock out neutrons? By bombarding them with photons (produced as x-rays) in a high- powered electron linear accelerator. Before this process, the isotopes must be separated by a well-known chemical process.

It is feasible that portable units could be built and transported to hazardous sites for on-site transmutation of nuclear wastes and radioactive wastes.

To give an example, cesium 137 with a half-life of 30.17 years is transformed into cesium 136 with a half-life of 13 days. Plutonium 239 with a half-life of 24,300 years is transformed into plutonium 237 with a half-life of 45.6 days. Subsequent radioactive elements which will be produced from the decay of plutonium 237 can be treated in the same way as above until the stable element is formed.

From the Patent application claim: http://members.cox.net/theroyprocess/additional-uses-royprocess.html

Dr. Roy released his Roy Process to the press in 1979.
Scientists of a large company saw the Patent application under non-
disclosure agreements and said the Roy Process was "entirely feasible".
Dr. Roy was offered millions of dollars for the patent rights.
NOT to develop it...but to shelve it. Dr. Roy refused. Then Ronald Reagan signed
the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act which made "geologic isolation" (burial)
of nuclear waste, federal policy, putting viable alternatives in scientific limbo.
Now after wasting hundreds of billions of tax payers money on junk science,
nuclear waste has leaked into our precious ground water.

Dr. Roy was right. There IS only one way to totally eliminate high level
nuclear waste and that is to transmute and denature it for good.

Dennis F. Nester
Atomic Age Timeline Animation:

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf