{"id":5025,"date":"2008-12-19T12:09:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T20:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=5025"},"modified":"2008-12-19T12:09:49","modified_gmt":"2008-12-19T20:09:49","slug":"the-high-cost-of-an-enormous-nuclear-arsenal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/19\/the-high-cost-of-an-enormous-nuclear-arsenal\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Cost of an Enormous Nuclear Arsenal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States has spent somewhere in the realm of $5.5 trillion<\/a> creating its enormous nuclear arsenal, but even as they look to God-only-knows-how-much more on modernizing their warheads<\/a>, a much less recognized expense, what to do with the enormous stockpile of waste from their construction<\/a> looms large. Fear not, the Department of Energy has a plan to cut corners here.<\/p>\n

Of course there’s plenty of opposition, but essentially, the plan is to hollow out a mountain near Las Vegas<\/a>, and chuck all the material in there. If that sounds dangerous, don’t worry: in another hundred years the Energy Department will send an army of yet-to-be-invented robots into the facility to install some likewise yet-to-be-invented titanium shields to protect the waste from the water and the water from the waste. Win-win, at least in a hundred years. <\/p>\n

Nevada’s Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux doubts it’ll ever happen<\/a>. The titanium would already cost $8-$10 billion in today’s prices, who knows what it will cost in a century. Project director Rod McCullum thinks its reasonable though, reminding us that “everything’s made out of titanium these days.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States has spent somewhere in the realm of $5.5 trillion creating its enormous nuclear arsenal, but even as they look to God-only-knows-how-much more on modernizing their warheads, a much less recognized expense, what to do with the enormous stockpile of waste from their construction looms large. Fear not, the Department of Energy has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5026,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions\/5026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5025"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}