In a recent Yucca Mountain story, reporter Keith Rogers at the Las Vegas Review Journal wrote that “a Department of Energy plan to install thousands of titanium alloy drip shields in the distant future to keep water from corroding nuclear waste canisters inside Yucca Mountain has failed to convince Nevada officials that a repository, if built there, would be safe.” Apparently the executive director of Nevada’s Nuclear Projects Agency, Bob Loux, has written a three-page letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission explaining the inadequacy of the plan. Rogers said Loux's letter claimed that installing expensive drip shields a century from now (to protect the waste cannisters from corrosion) probably won't be possible because the DOE's plans rely on using robots that (a) have yet to be invented and (b) will need to be able to install the 5-ton shields by remote control in hot, highly radioactive rock-strewn tunnels. Additionally, Loux said that the amount of titanium needed for the 11,500 drip shields "would consume about a third to half of the world's current annual titanium production" and that the "availability of such quantities of this material...is not something anyone can assure with any confidence.”
Not sure Loux needed to cite concerns with future titanium quantities after pointing out that the DOE "plan" called for giant not-yet-invented heat-resistant anti-radioactive remote-control robots smart and agile enough to carefully install 10,000-pound drip shields over each of Yucca's underground waste cannisters. (You can't make this stuff up, folks!)
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