Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
General Discussion
»
Moving Nuclear Waste By Rail, Yay or Nay???

Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by trainheartedguy [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by macguy [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by trainheartedguy hey, why don't we drop the stuff in a volcano in the middle of nowhere in the pacific an Nuke it. LOL [/quote] Why not just load it up in a rocket ship and send it on a one-way ticket into deep space? [/quote] Well.....with our luck it would turn around and crash back down onto the landing pad. Bye Bye NASA[xx(][:(] [/quote] I was stationed onboard a nuclear powered cruiser for 3 years. During my time onboard, we removed and replaced both reactors (it has 2). There is a great exposure to radiation for the crewmember out on deck than for the crew running the reactors in the engineering spaces. There are so many safeguards and you have to have so many qualifications before you can get into those engineering spaces, the people who go through them get all sorts of proficiency pay from the Navy - over and above their regular pay. When the fuel and control rods are disposed, they are sealed into melted glass. I would much rather trust a rail car than a truck. I've seen the tests they do on the rail cars - they put them in the path of a speeding locomotive and let them get smacked. The trucks, couplers, and mounting gear scatter, but the tank that holds the material remains intact. Unless terrorists knew exactly which train was carrying the material and which car on that train was carrying the material, I doubt they'd be able to hit it. There was an episode on either The Learning Channel or Discovery Channel about a truck driver who is licensed to transport this stuff across country. The man carries a four-year college degree, has had over 2, 000,000 accident-free miles as a truck driver, and has had to undergo all sorts of certifications. I'd be awfully discreet about securing the route. The last thing I'd want would be a bunch of guys in 3-piece suits, sunglasses, and funny looking things in their ears scoping out the route - they'd alert even the stupidest person that something was up. As for disposing of the material in a volcano, temperatures in a volcano don't reach high enough to destroy the radioactivity. Shooting it into space has been promoted before, but the problem is the excessive weight of the materials to shield anyone working around the launch vehicles. You could easily exceed the payload limit of the launch vehicle just in shielding alone, not to mention any of the stuff you're trying to get rid of.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag