biffvernon wrote:clv101 is right to be concerned about getting the stuff locked away now, while our economy can still cope, but I don't see that a change from Cumbria to Dumfries & Galloway should cause much delay.
If the answer had been yes in Cumbria - I expect bulldozers could have started work this year. No other site is within years of a planning application even being submitted as far as I'm aware.
biffvernon wrote:Some of us told them to do it this way many years ago and it's high time the government took geology more seriously than the convenience of local employment politics.
Local politics is critical! Local politics represents years maybe decades of delay. In my opinion, it should be deep underground ASAP - that makes it a political problem, who will accept it the soonest? The government was betting on Cumbria. They lost the bet and a big problem just became a whole lot bigger - for all of us. That's why I see nothing to be please about in this decision.
Filter Feeder wrote:One thing to be pleased about is that it basically scuppers plans to build more (German or French) nuclear reactors.
This is what I was thinking too. It kind-of keeps the issue of waste up there in front of people's faces. Of course, if you're a fast crash wallah then I can see it'd be very worrying. I personally think we're more in for a slow deliquescence than a fast crash, such that the obscene amounts of money needed will still be able to be found, or printed, ten years hence.
Filter Feeder wrote:In a fast crash scenario, it's the reactors you need to worry about...
I'm not so sure - there's a lot more potential radiation in the decades worth of waste in cooling pools than in the reactors. The material in the reactors, whilst not passively safe, is still in fairly robust steel and concrete containment vessels. For the all the failings at Fukushima, the reactor containment vessel was just about up to the job despite at least partial core meltdowns. The spent fuel sitting in the pools could have released a lot of radiation had ad hoc cooling been restored rapidly. That material was just under water - not strong steel/concrete containers like the reactor cores.
You're right that the automatic systems are pretty robust during Scram. But reactors are not designed to just sit like that for years, without power, and without further intensive intervention.
Totally_Baffled wrote:
Getting the Scots to take nuclear waste will be nigh on impossible.
Torness, Hunterston?
Lol i missed out the word 'extra', - given that the Scots/SNP want to be nuke free. Also a storage facility of a permenant nature (which is what we are talking about here) is a different matter to the temporary storage in existing nuclear sites?
I am coming to the rapid conclusion that making coherant posts from a blackberry is very difficult!
