...because there is no safe way to transport spent control rods. So the control rods are store on site and exceed original design capacity forcing the reactor to go offline. ANd it hasn't really failed so much as has been put on hold.

Anyone who reads the case histories of shielded control rod transport knows that for some reason the shielding fails and the truck or whatever becomes dangerously radioactive in short order.

Folks still don't quite understand the atom and frequency relationship. I suspect that the spent control rods act as a magnet for any natural radiation in the environment and that is why these transports needed to be hosed down every few miles and the drivers and crews changed, even though the seals were triple-checked and had not failed. Yet the radioactivity of the trucks was off the charts.

I get the heebie-jeebies when they want trains to transport nuclear materials to Nevada and a permanent storage site, because I know only low level radioactive waste is safe to transport. The more radioactive material collected, the more dangerous it becomes to everyone. The reason they want to use trains is because the engineer can be as distant as possible from the cars carrying the radioactive waste. But trucks and other folks have to be put in harms way to bring the waste to the trains. It's a nightmare.

Control rods need to be recycled on site and the expansion of existing reactors new tanks to store rods has been the best answer, so far.

A big nuclear waste dump is a bad idea because, like the truck carrying control rods, it will act as a huge magnet for environmental radiation and never be safe unlesss, really, really deep and no one has to work there, automated robots can haul and handle the materials and the routes taken are set up so that several miles on each side of the tracks are cleared of human habitation and the train never stops for more than a few minutes with built in series of automated washing arcs installed over the tracks every few miles or so (sort of like a car wash) that can rinse the train as it travels and gathers radioactivity. Train life can be extended that way, before the entire train needs to be discarded and buried as well!

I'm not familiar with the way the French handle the waste, but would be surprised if it was something other than on-site, Casks or some other method.

Folks who are pro-nuclear usually have no idea how severe the control rod problem is, and for folks like myself who are pro-nuclear and still aware of the problems, really dislike when bad decisions are made (such as the Nevada burial site) which could kill nuke power altogether when the inevitable control rod related disasters occur.

Dotting the nation with reactors drowning in control rods is a bad idea and one of the reasons no new reactors have been built. Folks want to see fully recyclable technology employed - and in an ideal world new advanced reactors that can consume control rods would be built alongside the old reactors and slowy consume the rods stored in overcrowded tanks and casks. That's the holy grail of nuclear proponents.

We are still just learning about the atom. The more we learn the better neuclear power will become. My own holy grail is perfecting a technique outside of fission or fusion that generates power from the atom - absolutely safe, clean power. Field manipulation is the answer. Nature surrounds us with fields powered by giant dynamos, such as the sun and the galaxy itself.

Learning how to excite, manipulate and transfer fields and store field energy, tapping energy from the sun/earth field relationship or the atomic vortex is the answer to safe endless power on demand. It's not "free" energy or "zero point" energy, but is merely a tapping the natural power dynamos of our universe.

That day when every factory, home and vehicle is powered by clean, limitless energy will be a very joyous one for mankind.