This is an outstanding comment, thanks for leaving it. I suspect that if you picked the right parts of the Pacific Coast or Northeast cities, you would see similar percentages to a question asking if Texas (or other parts of the Deep South) should be allowed to go, or even kicked out.
So much of any debate about this depends on the scenario in question. Assume a peaceful separation of the US into multiple parts. Now look at the Great Plains (use the map here, the Great Plains counties are shown in white). For that region as a whole, the population peaked in 1930 and has been declining ever since. If you look at where the east-west interstate highways cross, you see basically the same routes that were used for the transcontinental railroads in the 1870s and 1880s. I-25 runs up the west edge, I-35 stays well to the east. In round numbers, agriculture has been tried on a third of the area, grazing has been tried on another third, and the remaining third is largely untouched as unsuitable for either. Under almost any climate change forecast, the region gets warmer and dryer and less suited for either agriculture or grazing in the future. The exception to the slow collapse is areas where there are large hydrocarbon deposits. We've gotten good enough at extraction that much of those will be gone in 25-30 years. The main split in the US power grid is pretty much down the center of the GP; the eastern grid extends thinly in from the east, the western grid extends thinly in from the west, and there are a few minimal interties that help with local reliability in those very rural areas in the middle.
So, consider splitting up the country. Any piece east of the GP that wants to include Denver has to maintain infrastructure and connectivity across that 500 mile buffer. Any piece west of the GP that wants to control Kansas City has the same challenge. Heck, ask @morat20 about how well El Paso (west of the GP) is "connected" with the rest of Texas today. Here's a population cartogram based on the map above; El Paso looks like part of New Mexico, not Texas. The GP is a big empty space, getting emptier, that has little to offer. Anyone trying to do a practical partition would be well served to start by drawing the north-south line down the middle of the GP, saying "We'll conduct trade across that as practical", and then get on about their business.
James Cascio's The Long Crisis scenario with the US just sort of falling apart has an eight-way split in 2039. Some of it's just silly -- the remaining "US" stretches from upstate NY across the Great Lakes states, most of the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin, with its capital in Chicago. He describes its strength as "military power", and lists it as one of the world's major military powers, despite the fact that it has no ocean ports. I call it silly because in most any things-fall-apart scenario, the Great Plains is a 500-mile-wide depopulated buffer zone. Cascio's summary slides have gotten hard to find, except via the archive at the Wayback Machine (largish PDF).
During a graduate class on health care policy at the U of Denver, we had a guest speaker one evening who described himself this way: "If I'm on my meds, I'm an incredibly effective advocate for properly diagnosing and treating mental illness. If I've been off my meds for three days, it is not safe for anyone to be in the same room with me. When I'm on my meds, I want to stay on. If I've been off my meds for three days, I will kill you before I let you force them on me. The non-profit I work for provides someone to travel with me to verify that I take my meds."
As far as median age, yeah, they're an outlier on the low end. I'm not sure how much the rural part matters. 80% of the population is in the five Wasatch Front counties, and the lion's share of the state's population growth is there as well -- much of it from inward migration from other states, not high birth rate.
I would speculate that the story in Utah would be much the same as the behind-the-scenes story I've heard about in Texas -- the rural Republicans in Texas are effectively in federal court trying to pry power from the hands of the suburban Republicans in Texas.
Everyone leaves out the Mountain West. They'll go with the West Coast because they have far more in common with them than with the states east of the Great Plains: water, fire, public lands, energy, broad use of citizen initiatives...
If the question the Court chooses to answer is "Must states use something other than total population figures in districting?" -- which is what I understand plaintiffs are asking -- then there aren't five votes to toss most of the districting plans in the country in an election year. If the Court chooses to answer the question "May states use something other than total population figures in districting?" then maybe, but I don't think that's what plaintiffs are asking. Although I could see five votes for the idea that elected officials don't represent acres or trees, but do represent all the people who live in their district, young and old, citizen and not, so total population is the only metric.
There's a line somewhere between "nut case" and "representative of a significant minority opinion." There are parts of the country where a back-to-basics limited-choice approach to K-12 education is mainstream -- teach fewer things but teach them better.
I thought he was a nut case, or at least ignorant, on other subjects. A state can choose not to participate in Medicaid. They don't get to make that choice about SNAP (formerly food stamps). So the new state would have to have a bureaucracy and an approved computer system to handle client intake, send out the money, perform federally required audits, etc. Similarly for unemployment insurance -- a state doesn't have to have a conforming program, but there are steep federal tax consequences for employers if the state doesn't.
Secession movements motivated by "escape from the tyranny of the urban/suburban majority" in Colorado, California/Oregon, and Maryland that I know about in the last few years. I got to ask questions at a seminar where one of the panel members was the treasurer from the Colorado organization. He was well-versed in the legal constraints involved in creating a new state. He was also aware of what kind of budget the new state could support, but regarded no Medicaid, no higher-ed, K-12 education reduced to a bare minimum set of classes, and fewer paved highways as features, not bugs.
Thank you, Burt, I didn't realize how much I missed these summaries until I'd read this one.
The political power of rural America went into terminal decline ~1880, when the federal government ran out of high-quality farmland that it could give away. They've been granted a bit of a respite lately by "self district packing" by the urban areas in a bunch of middle-sized states. I think that's only a temporary thing, as the urban areas continue to outgrow the rural ones everywhere. Consider the case of Nebraska as an extreme example: when the Unicameral there is redistricted after the 2020 census, 25 of the 49 members will be elected from just three of the state's 99 counties. Some of my acquaintances in rural Nebraska are already expressing concern.
The Supreme Court is the most extreme example of this. The Court is overwhelmingly made up of people who went to college at one of the Ivies and whose adult life has been spent in the northeast urban corridor. I worry that this may be a Bad Thing (this is probably the only subject that Justice Thomas and I have ever agreed on). I subscribe to the unorthodox view that one of the things that motivates CJ Roberts is that his court not be caught on the wrong side of history. Combine that with the Court members' urban bias, and you get a prediction that Texas wins, with a possibility that total population becomes the only acceptable metric.
From a completely different direction, the motivation for this case -- which is not the same thing as which national groups may jump on the bandwagon -- could be entirely local. During the last drought, the Texas legislature set up a water projects bank using a portion of the state's emergency fund (which had gotten embarrassing large due to high oil prices). It was commonly understood that the real purpose of the bank was to fund projects that would collect and store water in rural East Texas for transport to the rapidly growing urban areas. Urban Democrats and suburban Republicans passed it, over almost unanimous opposition from rural Republicans. Ms. Evenwel's (and the Titus County Republican Party's) entire motivation may be based on that.
The fast flux reactor DOE built at the Hanover Site, I suppose. The NRC and DOE are currently going back and forth about the licensing procedure to be used for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype that DOE is supposed to build at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL is the federal government's official reactor research and test facility, and has its own set of clean-up issues to deal with.
Which says, with the benefit of hindsight, that the NRC shouldn't have licensed it for commercial use, and it should have been built at one of the national labs on the taxpayers' dime as a research project.
I'm not sure if I should be mildly offended or not. So far as I know, I'm the only one here trying to actually "organize" a conspiracy. Perhaps that moves me past "theorist" to practitioner, though :^)
Next week, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a male-only Selective Service registration system. My (quite possibly wrong) understanding of the most recent SCOTUS decisions on the subject upheld the male-only system because there were no combat positions for women. This case was filed a couple years back when some combat positions were opened to women. The District Court held in this case that male-only was still okay because there were some combat positions woman weren't allowed to take. That ended this week.
The current system is for registration only. An actual draft would require Congress to pass additional statute. I'll guess that the Ninth's decision won't mention gender; they'll rule that mandatory registration in a system that hasn't actually drafted anyone for more than 40 years is improper. Especially since 99%+ of the relevant personnel could be identified from Social Security and IRS information within days of a decision to implement an actual draft.
How much of this is because the matter gets settled at the provincial level in Canada? I live in a state with significant oil/gas/coal production -- not one of the biggest players, but it's a significant policy topic -- and my perception is that without the possibility of the feds overruling, the oil/gas/coal companies and the environmentalists would be able to reach this kind of compromise.
Granted, a new state tax would be a messier proposition in Colorado than most places, since such a tax would have to go on the ballot as a referred (or initiated) matter and be voted on.
This was not the first game I've seen this year where a team lost on a hail-mary pass on the last play. The ones where the pass was successful all looked the same: the defense rushes three, the QB dances around for 7-8 seconds and gets outside the hash marks, then stops, gathers himself, and throws it 60 yards down the field. A leaping 6'6" receiver pulls it in over the head of a much shorter defender.
Rush five, drop six, make the QB throw it in four seconds while he's running as fast as he can. If I were the head coach, I'd be looking for a new defensive coordinator today.
But as you say, it still goes in the Packers' win column.
This is one of the broad differences between being east or west of the Great Plains. To the west, reliable agriculture means water storage, management and distribution. It's true even in western places people think of as wet. Portland is drier in July and August, on average, than Phoenix. Willamette Valley farm land with water rights is worth a lot more than similar land without the rights.
@burt-likko
Well, you're certainly not alone here in thinking that's what should happen. But is there any evidence that California in particular will go in that direction (and to a very large degree, as California goes, so goes the West).
I usually limit my policy bets to one beer, but I'm willing to bet you a six-pack of a good microbrew that PG&E will retire the Diablo Canyon reactors on or before their current operating licenses run out (2024 and 2025, IIRC). Estimates for cooling upgrades to meet the new discharge standards seem to run from $2B to $12B. Assume $7B -- that buys a lot of natural gas-fired generating capacity, which pairs nicely (from a reliability standpoint) with the availability in a few years of a large and increasing amount of wind power from Wyoming. The Transwest Express transmission line's final environmental impact statement was blessed earlier this year, which will tie the SoCal/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle to the east side of the Continental Divide.
When I spin western secession stories, I never talk about California going off on its own. California sits at the center (figuratively) of an enormous energy network that extends as far as El Paso, Wyoming and Alberta. That's not a criticism, it just means that the West is a whole thing. The same characteristic applies to the Northeast Urban Corridor -- its energy network extends as far as Quebec to the north and Illinois to the West. The urban corridor is a whole lot more dependent on nuclear than California, though, and doesn't have the opportunities to build the kind of regional renewable network California can.
So what we really need is a joint public/private partnership in developing a single standard design that everyone buys into...
When I put my old systems analyst hat on, I see a need for at least two designs in the US. The Western Interconnect is arid and would need a design that can be air cooled, which requires that the reactor operate at higher temperatures and pressures to get acceptable efficiencies. The Eastern Interconnect is water-rich and can get similar efficiencies at lower temperature and pressure (and cost) using water cooling. To use the classic single-design example, France has comparatively little difference in water availability across the entire country.
One of the reasons that wind and solar are popular in the states of the Western Interconnect is that water for conventional thermal power plants is largely unavailable. Blue Castle Holdings is an at least semi-serious company looking to build reactors in the West, with most of the power to be sold into the lucrative Southern California market. Eastern Utah was the closest location where they could find sufficient available water rights to build a conventional nuke.
The Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado came close in terms of technology. Pebble-like fuel pellets that included fertile thorium material and resulting high burn-up rates. High temperature gas coolant provided thermal efficiency that light-water reactors only dream about. Passively safe in the sense that a core meltdown simply couldn't occur. Ultimately a technical success, commercially a nightmare. Wouldn't be a bad starting point if the West were adopting nuclear -- use a closed Brayton rather than Rankine cycle and you might get away with air cooling rather than water cooling, dealing with one of the major hurdles for thermal power plants in the arid West.
Purely for the sake of extending the argument... There are places in upstate New York and Vermont that would provide an excellent deep-granite repository site. Better hydrological isolation than Yucca Mountain. Local population already shrinking. Farther from the nearest million-person metro area. Much closer to most commercial reactors, eliminating tens or hundreds of thousands of cask-miles of transport.
Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, WIPP... New York or Vermont can take one for the team this time, with no greater risks.
My understanding of the current science is that the top two choices are deep salt domes and deep non-faulted granite (Yucca Mountain is neither of these). Salt domes are plastic and after about 60 years it's hard to keep the storage volume from closing up. That's good, unless you want to operate the repository for longer than that, or decide after a couple of centuries that you want to retrieve the uranium and plutonium. Granite has the opposite advantages/disadvantages -- it will stay open, retrieval is straightforward, but sealing isn't automatic. Salt domes are most common along the Gulf Coast. The best granite sites are northern Minnesota/Wisconsin and the Adirondacks in New York.
Recall that DOE's original plan was for a large repository in the East close to all of the Eastern reactors, and a much smaller repository in the West for the small number of reactors there. Both salt domes and deep granite were on DOE's original list of sites to be evaluated. Everything but Yucca Mountain was eventually removed from the list by Congress for political reasons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
This is an outstanding comment, thanks for leaving it. I suspect that if you picked the right parts of the Pacific Coast or Northeast cities, you would see similar percentages to a question asking if Texas (or other parts of the Deep South) should be allowed to go, or even kicked out.
"
So much of any debate about this depends on the scenario in question. Assume a peaceful separation of the US into multiple parts. Now look at the Great Plains (use the map here, the Great Plains counties are shown in white). For that region as a whole, the population peaked in 1930 and has been declining ever since. If you look at where the east-west interstate highways cross, you see basically the same routes that were used for the transcontinental railroads in the 1870s and 1880s. I-25 runs up the west edge, I-35 stays well to the east. In round numbers, agriculture has been tried on a third of the area, grazing has been tried on another third, and the remaining third is largely untouched as unsuitable for either. Under almost any climate change forecast, the region gets warmer and dryer and less suited for either agriculture or grazing in the future. The exception to the slow collapse is areas where there are large hydrocarbon deposits. We've gotten good enough at extraction that much of those will be gone in 25-30 years. The main split in the US power grid is pretty much down the center of the GP; the eastern grid extends thinly in from the east, the western grid extends thinly in from the west, and there are a few minimal interties that help with local reliability in those very rural areas in the middle.
So, consider splitting up the country. Any piece east of the GP that wants to include Denver has to maintain infrastructure and connectivity across that 500 mile buffer. Any piece west of the GP that wants to control Kansas City has the same challenge. Heck, ask @morat20 about how well El Paso (west of the GP) is "connected" with the rest of Texas today. Here's a population cartogram based on the map above; El Paso looks like part of New Mexico, not Texas. The GP is a big empty space, getting emptier, that has little to offer. Anyone trying to do a practical partition would be well served to start by drawing the north-south line down the middle of the GP, saying "We'll conduct trade across that as practical", and then get on about their business.
"
James Cascio's The Long Crisis scenario with the US just sort of falling apart has an eight-way split in 2039. Some of it's just silly -- the remaining "US" stretches from upstate NY across the Great Lakes states, most of the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin, with its capital in Chicago. He describes its strength as "military power", and lists it as one of the world's major military powers, despite the fact that it has no ocean ports. I call it silly because in most any things-fall-apart scenario, the Great Plains is a 500-mile-wide depopulated buffer zone. Cascio's summary slides have gotten hard to find, except via the archive at the Wayback Machine (largish PDF).
On “So Many Terrorists [UPDATED]”
During a graduate class on health care policy at the U of Denver, we had a guest speaker one evening who described himself this way: "If I'm on my meds, I'm an incredibly effective advocate for properly diagnosing and treating mental illness. If I've been off my meds for three days, it is not safe for anyone to be in the same room with me. When I'm on my meds, I want to stay on. If I've been off my meds for three days, I will kill you before I let you force them on me. The non-profit I work for provides someone to travel with me to verify that I take my meds."
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
As far as median age, yeah, they're an outlier on the low end. I'm not sure how much the rural part matters. 80% of the population is in the five Wasatch Front counties, and the lion's share of the state's population growth is there as well -- much of it from inward migration from other states, not high birth rate.
I would speculate that the story in Utah would be much the same as the behind-the-scenes story I've heard about in Texas -- the rural Republicans in Texas are effectively in federal court trying to pry power from the hands of the suburban Republicans in Texas.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Everyone leaves out the Mountain West. They'll go with the West Coast because they have far more in common with them than with the states east of the Great Plains: water, fire, public lands, energy, broad use of citizen initiatives...
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
If the question the Court chooses to answer is "Must states use something other than total population figures in districting?" -- which is what I understand plaintiffs are asking -- then there aren't five votes to toss most of the districting plans in the country in an election year. If the Court chooses to answer the question "May states use something other than total population figures in districting?" then maybe, but I don't think that's what plaintiffs are asking. Although I could see five votes for the idea that elected officials don't represent acres or trees, but do represent all the people who live in their district, young and old, citizen and not, so total population is the only metric.
"
There's a line somewhere between "nut case" and "representative of a significant minority opinion." There are parts of the country where a back-to-basics limited-choice approach to K-12 education is mainstream -- teach fewer things but teach them better.
I thought he was a nut case, or at least ignorant, on other subjects. A state can choose not to participate in Medicaid. They don't get to make that choice about SNAP (formerly food stamps). So the new state would have to have a bureaucracy and an approved computer system to handle client intake, send out the money, perform federally required audits, etc. Similarly for unemployment insurance -- a state doesn't have to have a conforming program, but there are steep federal tax consequences for employers if the state doesn't.
"
Secession movements motivated by "escape from the tyranny of the urban/suburban majority" in Colorado, California/Oregon, and Maryland that I know about in the last few years. I got to ask questions at a seminar where one of the panel members was the treasurer from the Colorado organization. He was well-versed in the legal constraints involved in creating a new state. He was also aware of what kind of budget the new state could support, but regarded no Medicaid, no higher-ed, K-12 education reduced to a bare minimum set of classes, and fewer paved highways as features, not bugs.
"
Thank you, Burt, I didn't realize how much I missed these summaries until I'd read this one.
The political power of rural America went into terminal decline ~1880, when the federal government ran out of high-quality farmland that it could give away. They've been granted a bit of a respite lately by "self district packing" by the urban areas in a bunch of middle-sized states. I think that's only a temporary thing, as the urban areas continue to outgrow the rural ones everywhere. Consider the case of Nebraska as an extreme example: when the Unicameral there is redistricted after the 2020 census, 25 of the 49 members will be elected from just three of the state's 99 counties. Some of my acquaintances in rural Nebraska are already expressing concern.
The Supreme Court is the most extreme example of this. The Court is overwhelmingly made up of people who went to college at one of the Ivies and whose adult life has been spent in the northeast urban corridor. I worry that this may be a Bad Thing (this is probably the only subject that Justice Thomas and I have ever agreed on). I subscribe to the unorthodox view that one of the things that motivates CJ Roberts is that his court not be caught on the wrong side of history. Combine that with the Court members' urban bias, and you get a prediction that Texas wins, with a possibility that total population becomes the only acceptable metric.
From a completely different direction, the motivation for this case -- which is not the same thing as which national groups may jump on the bandwagon -- could be entirely local. During the last drought, the Texas legislature set up a water projects bank using a portion of the state's emergency fund (which had gotten embarrassing large due to high oil prices). It was commonly understood that the real purpose of the bank was to fund projects that would collect and store water in rural East Texas for transport to the rapidly growing urban areas. Urban Democrats and suburban Republicans passed it, over almost unanimous opposition from rural Republicans. Ms. Evenwel's (and the Titus County Republican Party's) entire motivation may be based on that.
On “Why the Western US Is Anti-Nuclear”
The fast flux reactor DOE built at the Hanover Site, I suppose. The NRC and DOE are currently going back and forth about the licensing procedure to be used for a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype that DOE is supposed to build at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL is the federal government's official reactor research and test facility, and has its own set of clean-up issues to deal with.
"
Which says, with the benefit of hindsight, that the NRC shouldn't have licensed it for commercial use, and it should have been built at one of the national labs on the taxpayers' dime as a research project.
On “Linky Friday #143: Rise & Shine”
I'm not sure if I should be mildly offended or not. So far as I know, I'm the only one here trying to actually "organize" a conspiracy. Perhaps that moves me past "theorist" to practitioner, though :^)
"
Next week, the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a male-only Selective Service registration system. My (quite possibly wrong) understanding of the most recent SCOTUS decisions on the subject upheld the male-only system because there were no combat positions for women. This case was filed a couple years back when some combat positions were opened to women. The District Court held in this case that male-only was still okay because there were some combat positions woman weren't allowed to take. That ended this week.
The current system is for registration only. An actual draft would require Congress to pass additional statute. I'll guess that the Ninth's decision won't mention gender; they'll rule that mandatory registration in a system that hasn't actually drafted anyone for more than 40 years is improper. Especially since 99%+ of the relevant personnel could be identified from Social Security and IRS information within days of a decision to implement an actual draft.
"
How much of this is because the matter gets settled at the provincial level in Canada? I live in a state with significant oil/gas/coal production -- not one of the biggest players, but it's a significant policy topic -- and my perception is that without the possibility of the feds overruling, the oil/gas/coal companies and the environmentalists would be able to reach this kind of compromise.
Granted, a new state tax would be a messier proposition in Colorado than most places, since such a tax would have to go on the ballot as a referred (or initiated) matter and be voted on.
On “Fantasy Football: Week 12 (and Football Season open thread)”
This was not the first game I've seen this year where a team lost on a hail-mary pass on the last play. The ones where the pass was successful all looked the same: the defense rushes three, the QB dances around for 7-8 seconds and gets outside the hash marks, then stops, gathers himself, and throws it 60 yards down the field. A leaping 6'6" receiver pulls it in over the head of a much shorter defender.
Rush five, drop six, make the QB throw it in four seconds while he's running as fast as he can. If I were the head coach, I'd be looking for a new defensive coordinator today.
But as you say, it still goes in the Packers' win column.
On “Why the Western US Is Anti-Nuclear”
This is one of the broad differences between being east or west of the Great Plains. To the west, reliable agriculture means water storage, management and distribution. It's true even in western places people think of as wet. Portland is drier in July and August, on average, than Phoenix. Willamette Valley farm land with water rights is worth a lot more than similar land without the rights.
"
@burt-likko
Well, you're certainly not alone here in thinking that's what should happen. But is there any evidence that California in particular will go in that direction (and to a very large degree, as California goes, so goes the West).
I usually limit my policy bets to one beer, but I'm willing to bet you a six-pack of a good microbrew that PG&E will retire the Diablo Canyon reactors on or before their current operating licenses run out (2024 and 2025, IIRC). Estimates for cooling upgrades to meet the new discharge standards seem to run from $2B to $12B. Assume $7B -- that buys a lot of natural gas-fired generating capacity, which pairs nicely (from a reliability standpoint) with the availability in a few years of a large and increasing amount of wind power from Wyoming. The Transwest Express transmission line's final environmental impact statement was blessed earlier this year, which will tie the SoCal/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle to the east side of the Continental Divide.
When I spin western secession stories, I never talk about California going off on its own. California sits at the center (figuratively) of an enormous energy network that extends as far as El Paso, Wyoming and Alberta. That's not a criticism, it just means that the West is a whole thing. The same characteristic applies to the Northeast Urban Corridor -- its energy network extends as far as Quebec to the north and Illinois to the West. The urban corridor is a whole lot more dependent on nuclear than California, though, and doesn't have the opportunities to build the kind of regional renewable network California can.
"
I was trying to stay away from primary, secondary, and tertiary cooling loops, neutron moderation, and other techie porn :^)
"
You can go vertical as well. This picture shows a pair of 600 MW natural-draft dry cooling towers. These are 150 meters high.
"
Could you clarify that question, please?
"
So what we really need is a joint public/private partnership in developing a single standard design that everyone buys into...
When I put my old systems analyst hat on, I see a need for at least two designs in the US. The Western Interconnect is arid and would need a design that can be air cooled, which requires that the reactor operate at higher temperatures and pressures to get acceptable efficiencies. The Eastern Interconnect is water-rich and can get similar efficiencies at lower temperature and pressure (and cost) using water cooling. To use the classic single-design example, France has comparatively little difference in water availability across the entire country.
One of the reasons that wind and solar are popular in the states of the Western Interconnect is that water for conventional thermal power plants is largely unavailable. Blue Castle Holdings is an at least semi-serious company looking to build reactors in the West, with most of the power to be sold into the lucrative Southern California market. Eastern Utah was the closest location where they could find sufficient available water rights to build a conventional nuke.
"
The Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado came close in terms of technology. Pebble-like fuel pellets that included fertile thorium material and resulting high burn-up rates. High temperature gas coolant provided thermal efficiency that light-water reactors only dream about. Passively safe in the sense that a core meltdown simply couldn't occur. Ultimately a technical success, commercially a nightmare. Wouldn't be a bad starting point if the West were adopting nuclear -- use a closed Brayton rather than Rankine cycle and you might get away with air cooling rather than water cooling, dealing with one of the major hurdles for thermal power plants in the arid West.
"
Purely for the sake of extending the argument... There are places in upstate New York and Vermont that would provide an excellent deep-granite repository site. Better hydrological isolation than Yucca Mountain. Local population already shrinking. Farther from the nearest million-person metro area. Much closer to most commercial reactors, eliminating tens or hundreds of thousands of cask-miles of transport.
Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, WIPP... New York or Vermont can take one for the team this time, with no greater risks.
"
My understanding of the current science is that the top two choices are deep salt domes and deep non-faulted granite (Yucca Mountain is neither of these). Salt domes are plastic and after about 60 years it's hard to keep the storage volume from closing up. That's good, unless you want to operate the repository for longer than that, or decide after a couple of centuries that you want to retrieve the uranium and plutonium. Granite has the opposite advantages/disadvantages -- it will stay open, retrieval is straightforward, but sealing isn't automatic. Salt domes are most common along the Gulf Coast. The best granite sites are northern Minnesota/Wisconsin and the Adirondacks in New York.
Recall that DOE's original plan was for a large repository in the East close to all of the Eastern reactors, and a much smaller repository in the West for the small number of reactors there. Both salt domes and deep granite were on DOE's original list of sites to be evaluated. Everything but Yucca Mountain was eventually removed from the list by Congress for political reasons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.