Russian Nuke Plant Officials Accused of Dumping

[seriousstan]

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors accused officials at the country's oldest nuclear processing plant of dumping radioactive waste in a criminal case ecologists hope leads to its eventual closure, media reported Tuesday.

The Mayak plant in the Urals has been the site of various accidents since it was opened in 1949, including a radioactive waste tank explosion in the 1950s.

Tens of thousands of Russians living near the facility have been treated for the effects of radiation exposure for years.

Yuri Zolotov, deputy prosecutor general in the Urals region, told NTV television that an investigation showed that liquid radioactive waste had continuously been dumped from Mayak into the Techa river, which eventually flows into Siberia's major Ob river and on to the Arctic Ocean.

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20050412/2005-04-12T083520Z_01_L12316722_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-NUCLEAR-RUSSIA-DUMPING-DC.html

[acmavm]

1. There's nuclear waste that needs disposal in every country. No one

has the faintest clue what to do with it.

This is one of the biggest issues facing human beings today. I just don't understand why you never hear more about it.

At least the lies about how safe the Yucca Mountain project are coming out fast and furious. But now what do we do with the stuff?

[megatherium]

2. tough question.

The rub is even if we decide to shut the nuclear energy industry down, we still have to deal with this problem. I have been haunting this board for some months, pushing the notion that nuclear energy might be a good thing. But I'm having doubts, and this is a primary reason why.

I think the solution will be a non-solution: converting the waste to a solid form (vitrification or putting it into ceramic balls), and putting it underground somewhere and forgetting about it. The original plan was to do this in Kansas or some place like that, which has a stable geology. But this was politically difficult, so they settled in Yucca Mountain, a location near nuclear testing sites in Nevada. However, Nevadans are also good at NIMBY politics, and now there's real questions about the geology of that site. Evidence that scientists resorted to fraud isn't helping anyone's confidence either. My guess is that it will end up in Yucca anyway, after a few more years of incredibly expensive legal battles.

The real enthusiasts for nuclear energy (nuclear engineers and physicists) have long argued that the waste should be reprocessed: you separate the hottest isotopes and simply store them (the hottest isotopes have the shortest half lives, so you only need to track them for a century or two), and the non-hot isotopes can be cooked in nuclear reactors to change them to more fuel. But the industry and the government decided this was more expensive than burial, and they decided that there was plenty of uranium fuel anyway. (Not necessarily true anymore.)

I think the case for wind and solar is getting stronger. If we could trust the government and industry to do nuclear properly, I would still support it. But that's a big if.