Their is no such thing as safe storage for nuclear waste and a ship. compared to a nuke plant, produces a minuscule amount of energy! McCain obviously doesn't know what he is talking about.
That is why many plants, like Seabrook, still has all their waste they have produced over the years still sitting on site!
Energy companies say it wpuld be 2025 before ANY would go on line!
Minerals such as zircon (ZrSiO4) are believed to have kept naturally occurring radioactive uranium and thorium locked in the Earth's crust for up to 4.4 billion years, surviving earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. As a result researchers have argued that zircon, or similar synthetic ceramics, could trap nuclear waste within their crystalline structures for at least 241,000 years, the time plutonium-239 takes to become relatively safe.
Now a study shows that this is unlikely. It turns out that alpha particles released as plutonium decays knock the atoms in zircon out of position faster than originally predicted, impairing the material's ability to immobilise waste (Nature, vol 445, p 190).
Ian Farnan of the University of Cambridge and colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, added plutonium to zircon and used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to distinguish between crystalline zircon and its leaky, damaged form.
The researchers found five times as many damaged zircon atoms as estimated by computer simulations. They conclude that radioactive plutonium trapped in zircon would start leaching out after just 210 years and lose its crystal structure entirely after 1400 years.
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19325865.400-setback-for-safe-storage-of-nuclear-waste.html
Anyone remember Chernobyl ?
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear reactor accident in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Northern Ukraine). It was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and the only instance of level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, resulting in a severe release of radioactivity into the environment following a massive power excursion which destroyed the reactor. Two people died in the initial steam explosion, but most deaths from the accident were attributed to fallout.
On 26 April 1986 at 01:23:44 a.m. (UTC+3) reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, near Pripyat in the Ukrainian SSR, exploded. Further explosions and the resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Four hundred times more fallout was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The plume drifted over extensive parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, and eastern North America. Large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. According to official post-Soviet data about 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus.
The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for a number of years, while forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive. The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. It is difficult to accurately tell the number of deaths caused by the events at Chernobyl, as the Soviet-era cover-up made it difficult to track down victims. Lists were incomplete, and Soviet authorities later forbade doctors to cite "radiation" on death certificates
The 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer), and estimated that there may be 4,000 extra cancer deaths among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed peopleAlthough the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and certain limited areas will remain off limits, the majority of affected areas are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity. wiki