Interesting story about the tanker though, Greg, and it’s revealing that even though there was nothing more to it than a traffic accident, people attach some mysterious extra significance to it. As told here, it does have a kind of urban myth feel to it, as I’m sure you’ll recognize.

“The water in the basement of the No. 4 reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is now five meters deep following frequent water-spraying with outside equipment to cool its spent fuel pool, the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Agency said Monday.”

(from:http://www.globalnews.ca/Robots+report+high+radiation+Japan+nuclear+plant/4633926/story.html)

“Readings Monday from robots that entered two crippled buildings at Japan’s tsunami-flooded nuclear plant for the first time in more than a month revealed a harsh environment still too radioactive for workers to enter…

readings from a water tank in Unit 2 showed a severe spike in radiation that indicates likely damage to the fuel rods inside the spent fuel pool there, TEPCO officials said. That was the first indication of damage to those rods.

The radiation was far higher than that measured in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, suggesting the damage to the fuel in Unit 2 is greater…

Traveling on miniature tank-like treads, the devices opened closed doors and explored the insides of the reactor buildings, coming back with radioactivity readings of up to 49 millisieverts per hour inside Unit 1 and up to 57 millisieverts per hour inside Unit 3.

The legal limit for nuclear workers was more than doubled since the crisis began to 250 millisieverts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends an evacuation after an incident releases 10 millisieverts of radiation, and workers in the U.S. nuclear industry are allowed an upper limit of 50 millisieverts per year. Doctors say radiation sickness sets in at 1,000 millisieverts and includes nausea and vomiting.”

#2: I’m not sure how much of an effect they really had, but probably some.

One night the mayor of a small town near where I grew up had a fender bender. A big truck did not stop fully at a stop sign and did not have the right of way.

The truck was an unmarked tanker. The cops showed up. THe mayor wanted to know what was in the truck. There was a big flap about it.

It turned out the truck contained nuclear material being secretly transported. There was a rule that this sort of material transported through this area on a regular basis (having something do with the nuclear defnse system, not power, as I recall) would not be transported through the center of any of the towns. THe driver was taking a shortcut.

That event, IIRC, swayed the local opinion about transport.

There is no trust.

#1 It was politicians who made the Yucca Flats decisions based on political considerations, not engineers based on scientific and/or technical considerations.

#2 That is what I have been saying, that anti-nuke activists are playing chicken with the health of people who live near nuclear plants.

1) Picking Yucca Flats as a storage site torpedoed the credibility of those trying to do this.

2) It is a strategy of the anti-Nuke lobby to force the fuel to stay on site in order to bring the individuals power plants to their knees.

Who thinks it is not a settled issue and is still holding it up?

If they think it is a settled issue and yet are still holding it up, what is their motivation to do so?

“Readings Monday from robots that entered two crippled buildings at Japan’s tsunami-flooded nuclear plant for the first time in more than a month revealed a harsh environment still too radioactive for workers to enter…

Meanwhile, readings from a water tank in Unit 2 showed a severe spike in radiation that indicates likely damage to the fuel rods inside the spent fuel pool there, TEPCO officials said. That was the first indication of damage to those rods.

The radiation was far higher than that measured in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, suggesting the damage to the fuel in Unit 2 is greater…

Traveling on miniature tank-like treads, the devices opened closed doors and explored the insides of the reactor buildings, coming back with radioactivity readings of up to 49 millisieverts per hour inside Unit 1 and up to 57 millisieverts per hour inside Unit 3.

The legal limit for nuclear workers was more than doubled since the crisis began to 250 millisieverts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends an evacuation after an incident releases 10 millisieverts of radiation, and workers in the U.S. nuclear industry are allowed an upper limit of 50 millisieverts per year. Doctors say radiation sickness sets in at 1,000 millisieverts and includes nausea and vomiting.”

If the waste remains recoverable, then if there is some decision in the future that such a storage site is insufficiently safe, then the waste can be removed, reprocessed and put into a safer form in a safer place.”

This is an argument you seem to be having with yourself. For the fifth time, geologic disposal is the way to go, because no other option presently exists.

Only you have suggested that anybody (me included, or Greg, or any other comment I’ve read) suggests waiting for a ‘perfect’ answer. That’s entirely from some recess in your mind, and you keep repeating it like a mantra.

Where there is disagreement may be in our respective views of the degree of forseeable paths to containment failure, even in granite and basalt. But geologic disposal was never the dispute here (except as a convenient distraction for you, I suppose).

Three weeks in, Daedalus, since I posed the question to you: how is anyone supposed to get at the rods at Daiichi?

The ones exposed to the environment. The ones spreading radiactive materials in an ever increasing radius?(except in Joffan’s impermeable globe of paranoia)

Helpful alternatives from daedalus? Still precisely zero.

Number of times daedalus has suggested anyone questioning how severe the crisis is a ‘fearmonger’? Lost count.

People who think geological storage of nuclear waste is not safe enough don’t have any criteria by which they can be convinced that it can be made safe enough, just like the YEC don’t have any criteria by which there would be enough evidence for evolution.

Nuclear waste has to be somewhere. Either it is left where is is now, or it is moved to a place that is safer. I think that there is no one who could demonstrate that putting nuclear waste in a stable form and putting it a km down in a dry formation of granite or basalt would not be safer than leaving where it is. Is such a place perfectly safe? No, but it is many orders of magnitude safer than where the spent fuel is now.

If the waste remains recoverable, then if there is some decision in the future that such a storage site is insufficiently safe, then the waste can be removed, reprocessed and put into a safer form in a safer place.

Leaving it in a recoverable state is not risk free either. Once it has decayed enough to handle (several centuries), then terrorists might steal it and turn it into dirty bombs or something. Future CAM quacks might decide that nuclear waste is good for people and take it out and start selling it.