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jstan
climber
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Feb 11, 2009 - 04:29pm PT
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Rox:
And what happens if a container ruptures or corrodes?
Any tests that have been done are highly accelerated.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:23pm PT
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JEleazarian, we have tech companies supplying a variety of secure smartcard-based national identity cards to any number of nations - just not here.
Precise receives order for national id card system
Bluering - people typically come as families - controlling benefits and costs associated with those families is only possible if you control their identities and employment.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2009 - 05:28pm PT
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Bluering - people typically come as families - controlling benefits and costs associated with those families is only possible if you control their identities and employment.
Then you lose me...that's just a massive migration of low-income people, probably a heavy burden on social services too.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:33pm PT
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Nowhere did I imply unlimited access to employment or benefits. Once you have the situation under control from a documentation perspective then you are in a position to control employment, say similar to the way we do with H-1B workers, by quota or some other resource allocation scheme.
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:41pm PT
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Send it all to Idaho.
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jstan
climber
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:46pm PT
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Rox:
You imply no high level waste is slated to go to Yucca Mesa?
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:52pm PT
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High-level waste from the Hanford Site is slated to go to Yucca Mtn. However, all of this waste will be vitrifed (turned to glass).
jstan, if we dont get power from nuclear, can we build wind farms, coal powered plants and dams in your neighborhood?
I already have all of those including nuclear in mine. I live in a fairly unpopulated area where population centers are making us deal with their sh%%. Its kind of like the NIMBY syndrome. NIMBY but send me all your power....
Sorry, dont want to contribute to hijacking a nice thread about illegals.
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Feb 11, 2009 - 05:54pm PT
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Continuing off-topic, I think it's mostly high-level waste that's going to Yucca. Low-level waste goes other places (the Energy Solutions dump in the West Utah desert, for one).
That said, I don't have a huge concern about storage at Yucca, it's the transport that I'm more concerned with.
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 06:03pm PT
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stevep,
the transport will be pretty darned safe, at least for the vitrified high level waste.
Check out these TRU containers
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/fctshts/TRUwastecontainers.pdf
They are being used successfully for transport of TRU waste to WIPP.
Having worked at a plant that transported munitions filled with nerve gas like the plant you guys have in Toole, UT, I am far less concerned about the High Level Waste transport than moving the nerve gas.
Or for that matter, any other number of widely used chemicals that are transported daily (chlorine, sulfuric acid, ammonia, etc. etc.)
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 11, 2009 - 06:21pm PT
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Back closer to on-topic, why do you think, healyje, that we have not adopted these sorts of secure ID methods here? I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. I sense that many people want just this sort of ID, but if it is so readily available, there must be some sort of organized opposition.
Thanks.
John
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 06:32pm PT
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One thing I remember. If it is federally mandated then a bunch of new offices need to open up to support it and it costs. If the feds tell the states to do it via Drivers Licenses, then again, the feds need to foot the bill which they dont like.
Plus there are those folks who want to live more under the radar with less govnment involvement. Many of these are the same ones telling illegals they need better documentation then they dont want it for themselves.
I think my neighbor is illegal. He has three kids and is the most family oriented gyu and nice that you will ever meet. Runs a landscaping business and sometimes his wife makes tamales (best I ever had) and the kids sell some to me...
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:04pm PT
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JEleazarian, yes, there is all sorts of opposition from the Right and Left to a secure national identity card. Cards of this sort could easily be used to hold medical, tax, judicial records as well as identity. It's easy to imagine futures where you'd need to use it to start your car for instance, which would only work if you have no outstanding warrants, your insurance is valid, you have no DUI's, etc., etc.
Lots of Constitutional and Bill of Rights implications to the deployment of one. But, you want the only solution to the 'immigration problem' that will work you have to head down that road - everything else is a joke and all the supply-side solutions in particular create massive government bureaucracies to implement.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:22pm PT
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Makes sense, healyje. I was unaware that this technology was sufficiently perfected.
There certainly seem to be privacy issues which, as you point out, crosses more typical ideolgical boundaries. Without some truly secure national identity system, I agree that attempts to enforce border security and immigrant employment laws without this technology won't (or should I say don't) work.
By the way, the reason I got on you about already trying this with employers is that virtually every employer now insists on seeing and copying a worker's social security card. Even then, that does not insulate an employer from potential prosecution for hiring undocumented workers, hence my concern about potential racial and ethnic discrimination. Now, if that social security card were something more secure, the enforcement at the employer level would be little different from what it is now, but might actually work.
Thanks for having the patience to straighten me out.
John
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:28pm PT
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John,
healyje is right about the card in that the technology is there. I work for the gov. and have such an ID card. The card stores all kinds of data on it and is also tied to my index fingerprint for certain secure ID access. It also contains info about my security clearance and probably stuff I dont know about. Thats the part that gives people the creeps...
Yeah, funny thinking an ID boy doesnt know about rad waste. I work at Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Sorry Rox, we have the distinction of having a much bigger problem than yours. But we are working on a solution...
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dirtbag
climber
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:42pm PT
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Hooked another one!
Now, let's talk about the effects of wolves on the U.S. economy, particularly in Idaho.
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:43pm PT
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Just dont eat them after shooting them, they are full of rad waste. that glow in the dark feature helps with night hunting though...
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jstan
climber
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Feb 11, 2009 - 07:55pm PT
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Golsen:
The last I remember from a few years ago is that the effort to dig under the tanks at Hanford and surround them with concrete had been stopped. I don't remember whether it was associated with engineering risk, of which there would have to be plenty, or whether it was due to absorbed dose limits for the personnel.
If I remember correctly the groundwater plume had been detected and was being tracked.
Can you give us any idea as to the present activity?
Oh, I checked Wikipedia on Yucca Mtn. Its depth is not several miles and it is not below the aquifer. It is substantially higher than 1000', the present top of the water table. The present top is also lower than the highest point the aquifer has reached in history. It is reported surface water reaches the waste, the waste being located in tufa, through fractures and is expected to reach the waste in a fifty year time period. (I believe tufa is a finely grained silicatious materiall, not salt, formed out of gases emitted by the super volcano located near the site.) Fractures being as chaotic as they are you would have to read the analysis to give you confidence.
The last court review forced the monitoring of water contamination to be done for 1,000,000 years and not the 10,000 years proposed by DOE. Also Yucca Mtn. was proposed as the primary repository for reactor waste and the proposed design volume was recently doubled.
All of this if you can believe Wikipedia.
Oh I apparently was in error. I don't whether Excelon actually has to pay for storage but presently the Gov't is giving them money for their failure to have the facility up on schedule. According to Wiki the taxpayer will have to fund only 27% of the cost of storage. I don't know whether the nine billion dollar cost of construction will be charged off this way or if will fall on the taxpayer. Small accounting details tend to get lost.
The debate on casks has been going on a long time. Hotter than hell I understand. The articles I have read over the last decades seemed to focus on temperature effects and radiation embrittlement. Over 100,000 years - who knows?
Seems to me we should hook thermocouples up to them and generate power thermoelectrically.
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Feb 11, 2009 - 08:41pm PT
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jstan,
at Hanford there is approximately 53 Million gallons in 177 tanks of a nice mixture of various phases and nearly every element on the periodic table. The current plan is to build a vitrification plant that turns the waste to glass (the plant is about 50% completed). The first part of the process is to retrieve it from the tanks, then pipe it to the pretreatment (PT) facility (the largest, most complex and costly radiochemical processing plant in the world). PT separates the waste into high and low activity fractions. The bulk of the waste is Low activity, it is the Cesium and Strontium primarily that is very hot. Those fractions are then to be treated in the Low Activity Waste facility and the High Level Waste facility where the waste is turned to glass.
The low activity waste cannisters will be stored on the Hanford Site, and in theory, the High level waste will be shipped to Yucca (otherwise the people around here will be pissed, remember NIMBY).
There are some tanks that are known leakers. This is monitored very carefully however, there is a small contribution to the Columbia River. It should be noted that the Col. River already has some radioactivity primarily due to preavious atmospheric Nuke tests (at least thats what I have read). the contribution to the Col River from Hanford is about the same as the amount already in the river before it arrives here. The levels are very low and you probably get way more rad from regular dental checks (I am not a rad expert though).
While this project is extremely costly and probably one of the most complex plants in the world, I believe it is the right thing to do, as it was the manufacture of plutonium for nukes that created this probalem from 1944 - about early 90's. The Gov owes it to the people to clean it up (even know it is our pockets paying for it).
Rox, those cannisters are drop tested and very tough. Some of the cannisters we used to ship nerve gas in were drop tested from 40 feet onto a 4" spike and I think that these are similar.
Now I have really gone OT.
BTW, my father wanted to use all of that waste heat too, jstan...
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2009 - 11:01pm PT
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alright, this thread is not titled, "Nuclear Waste Management".
Start your own thread!
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