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  1. This post has been duly linked to the “Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission” page on Facebook. The fanatic SA antinukes had been having a virtual field day on the page until Christine Brook and I got involved. BTW, I found it researching the issue for your last podcast.

  2. As a Utahn, I am sort of jealous that my state isn’t taking a similar course of action. We have some “ideally useless” desert that could bring in some great revenue if a couple of square mile of it were devoted to storing spent fuel.
    Anyway, hats off to the visionaries in South Australia.

    1. Some people have been trying. Specifically, they have been trying to get part of the Skull Valley Reservation approved for such a purpose.

      1. Yes, that was back several years ago. The Goshute tribe was going to work with a company called Private Fuel Storage. Governor Leavitt had a fit about it. He worked to make sure that no rail spur could be built to bring the casks to the reservation (and any other way to stop it).

    1. There’s a qualitative difference between covering hundreds of square miles of desert in material that moves at high speed or concentrates solar incidence to high levels and building a few concrete pads and a fence on less than a square mile of desert and setting some inert concrete casks (the equivalent of big rocks) there.

      Do you really need help making the distinction or were your fingers just itching for a little keyboard workout?

      1. Just imagine the great habitat these casks would supply for local birds and what not. Slightly warm during the cold desert nights and up high away from scrounging vermin. Poa obviously has no idea how very little “spent” fuel is produced at commercial Nuclear Power Plants.

    2. @poa

      It’s a matter of scale. A single square mile would be sufficient space for storing an inventory of all of the used fuel created in 55 years of nuclear plant operations in the United States. During the last 30 of those years, fission has produced 20% of the electricity in the US.

      Please compare that to the amount of land that is required to collect enough solar energy to provide a steady output of 1000 MW for 24hrs per day.

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