Ok, I’m not an environmentalist, in fact, I’m a Conservative Republican, but I have to ask, when people advocate nuclear power because it’s a clean source of energy and doesn’t pollute, what do they think the nuclear waste that’s generated as a result is?
Controllable. Rather than being spewed into the air as particulates that effect large areas, it comes out of the plant itself. Store it safely and protect it, and there is no evironmental harm whatsoever.
Yes, but what about the waste that’s taken by train to other cities, they can derail. Also, don’t you face the same problem as landfills? Mainly, you fill up a space with stored nuclear waste, then you need to find a new location and fill it up, and so on, and so on. Right?
Well, yes, but the waste can be reprocessed and reused, with minimal waste products remaining. That this doesn’t happen is mainly a political and security issue.
Here’s Cecil’s take on the subject.
There’s still a whole lot of waste left even if we were to recycle, but compared to stuff like car emissions or coal-fired power plants it’s still better than the alternatives.
The containers that carry nuclear waste will not be damaged by simple derailment. They were tested by many means, including launching a JATO-pack powered F-4 Phantom II at one. Not a single test was able to breach the containers.
And the proposed nuclear waste facility in Nevada will be able to handle all of our waste for the forseeable future.
It IS clean power, since as Sam said, we can easily control and dispose of the byproducts.
Look at it this way: American reactors, even the old ones, are safe. Not a single person has been demonstrably killed by nuclear accidents in the US. Some argument exists regarding the death of 3 people back in the late 50’s/early 60’s, but compare that to the number of people with resperatory problems from fossil-fuel plants, I pick nuclear power.
I wouldn’t go that far. I work in the shadow of TMI, and even the most hardened person in the world would have a hard time looking at the two cooling towers with nothing coming out of them without shuddering at the realization that it was that close to being a disaster of tremendous proportions.
In addition, there is ample evidence, though disputed, that the accident at TMI had some effect on the health of the local residents here, though what effect exactly is in dispute. Still, I think it is safe to say that at least one person (and almost certainly more) died from the TMI accident.
So safe? Well, yes. But only as safe as the operators running it.
Sorry for the digression, but I thought that needed to be addressed as well.
-Dave
True, but think of how much monitoring and control technology has advanced since then.
We have several alternatives… we can just keep going as we are pumping pollution into the atmosphere, we can invest billions in massive hydro/solar/wind power generation that would be inconsistant and insanely widespread, or we can take the risk of some sort of nuclear accident and go with incredibly abundant and very reliable energy.
Personally, I think the risk of a train derailment strong enough to break open a case that’s almost capable of withstanding a small nuke is pretty damn small. And we shouldn’t let the bugbear of TMI scare us away from taking steps that allow us the abundant power that we need.
Doesn’t France get a lot of their power from nuclear facilities?
Marc
I live about an hour away from Fermi II, and drive past it everyweekend during summer/spring/fall. Not a problem.
Here in Detroit, we are no strangers to various colors of smoke coming out of factories and power plants. If I had a choice to get all of my power from sources known to always be unhealthy (fossil fuel), or from sources known to be clean (Nuclear,unless disaster strikes), I would choose nuclear.
Until we have Fusion power, however, we will always have tradeoffs in how we get our juice.
Yep, about 75%, produced by 59 plants generating 375 terawatt-hours per year. They have nearly the lowest-cost energy in Europe and they import, for all practical purposes, no energy. They are the world’s largest net electricity exporter, and electricity is their #4 export. Neighboring Italy is Europe’s largest electricity importer. They have no operating nuclear plants, and get most of their energy from France. Cite
Germany generates about a third of their power from nuclear, but the German government reached an agreement in 2001 to gradually shut down all 19 of their nuclear power plants. They intend to transition much of the power generating work to offshore wind plants, which even then will generate only about 60% of the capacity of the nuclear plants. Cite
I agree that nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power,
and the source is (of course) much more abundant.
I also agree that meltdowns are very unlikely.
And I know that the US (especially since last September) takes a lot of precautions with transporting the waste.
But it is my understanding that a lot of waste is transported, often times through many states. There is always a chance that something can go wrong, however minimal. And if something goes wrong, effects can be disastrous.
And assume that the waste does get to its storage spot safely. Now we have nuclear waste stored within the ground. Again, I know the US takes many precautions with storage, but isn’t this a little short sighted? Are we going to keep on using land to store waste, especially as we near closer and closer to carrying capacity on earth? Are their storage faciliites time tested? Do we know what the ramifications will be 3 years from now?
I think our only option is to further explore wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. Use nature (without harming nature) to power our interests.
We need a power source that is without waste. Otherwise, we are always going to be playing “catch-up,” always trying to fix one problem and finding another problem has resulted from the solution…and so on.
colin
So, how do France and Germany deal with transport and storage of their nuclear waste? I don’t seem to hear about them having problems in these areas.
Every power source has its waste and impact. They just might not be as visible as particulate pollution or nuclear waste.
A point about hydro power–as far as expanding its use in the United States, forget it. It’s a non-starter. Nearly all of the useful sites for large-scale hydroelectric generation in the United States have already been exploiter, and building dams at the few remaining useful sites would have environmental impacts that would make Green Party members’ hair stand on end. If that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make, great, but my understanding is that the increases in power generating capacity would nowhere near offset, economically and environmentally, the cost of damming those sites.
Wind power has some possibilities, but even with increasingly efficient turbines, you still need somplace to put them. Again, this is just my understanding (when is Anthracite coming back, anyway), but to supply power for even an average-sized city takes many hundreds of turbines on many acres of land. And the number of potential sites is limited, because you have to put them where there’s wind. That negates any other use of that land. Turbines only begin generating power at a wind speed of about 12-16 mph, so that further limits the available sites.
And it’s environmental impact can be noticeable as well. There are minor issues, like noise and visual concerns, but there is a wildlife issue as well. Specifically, wind farms attract burrowing animals, which attract predatory birds, which fly into or sit on top of turbines and get killed. Turbine and mounting technology is going to have to take that into account.
Question – since I am utterly clueless about the costs of these kinds of things – would it be at all economically feasible/advantageous to build the nuclear plants closer to where the waste is going to be stored, and export the power farther? Or would the costs/impact of transporting the electricity over that distance outweigh the potential savings from transporting waste less far?
Waste storage can be an issue, as evidenced by the dispute here in North Carolina about Progress Energy (CP&L) proposing to store additional waste in water-filled retention areas at the Shearon-Harris power plant here that were evidently designed (with a safety factor) for what they hold now, not for additional waste. There’s been a lot of dispute on this around here, with the folks opposed to nuclear power crying wolf (perhaps validly) and Progress Energy saying there’s no danger (perhaps validly). If Ultress is lurking around the boards these days, perhaps she will be able to furnish some additional data; I know she works for them.
Bottom line, IMHO, is that a properly constructed and run nuclear reactor with proper waste disposal is significantly more safe and less polluting than any fossil-fuel burning plant, and produces only marginally more “heat pollution” (i.e., waste heat) than do reusable-resource plants like hydroelectric and tidal generators.
Present American energy use cannot be accommodated without recourse to either nuclear or fossil fuel plants; there just is not enough useful reusable sources (especially considering the problems involved with flooding land for reservoirs for most hydro plants and the call to keep rivers free-flowing for things like recreation and migration of aquatic life).
The main problem with fusion power is that it has not yet been made cost-effective, and the time span to take it from where it stands at present to a useful power source is longer than a politician’s term of office.
All of the ‘issues’ that get brought up with regard to nuclear plants are basically engineering issues. The risk of train derailment or vehicle accident transporting waste? Design the containers so they can’t be breached at those kinds of energy levels. This is standard engineering work. We do it all the time. We can build a container that simply can’t be broken in those kinds of accidents. And we have.
And if there were a nuclear waste spill, what do you think the result would be? Since the stuff is a solid or liquid, we’re not talking about a Chernobyl or even a Bhopal. We’re talking about an expensive hazmat cleanup job, and that’s about it. It’s a small risk, and a manageable one.
No, nuclear power isn’t 100% safe. NO form of concentrated energy is 100% safe. But it IS the safest, cleanest form of concentrated power we have. It should be in widespread use.
I think the idea of locating a nuclear plant near its final waste repository is an interesting one. It’s expensive to do with conventional electric power production, but becomes more feasible with different transport methods for the energy. For example, I suspect that we will see hydrogen fuel cells coming into widespread use over the next 20 years. But fuel cells aren’t a source of energy - they’re a storage medium. It actually takes more energy to make a fuel cell than you get out of it.
If one day we have millions of cars driving around on fuel cells, then we will need a massive increase in our electrical production facilities. Why not build nuclear plants in Nevada near Yucca mountain, pipe in the water from lake Mead, and become the nation’s fuel cell production facility? Nevadans would go for it a lot more readily than they did Yucca Mountain, because it would be a huge source of investment, revenue, and jobs. And it’s even fairly well located for trucking or train shipping the fuel cells or raw hydrogen around North America.
This strikes me as an energy source far superior to electric vehicles and solar or wind. Fuel cells can be stored indefinitely, brought online on demand, and leave no caustic disposal problems like batteries do.
Three mile Island: No one died. And no one was made sick. The radiation levels right inside the plant were about what you’d get from your TV in a year. At the fenceline to the plant, background radiation was even lower.
And I don’t know if it’s fair to say that it was almost a huge disaster. The containment system worked within the bounds of its design. I don’t know if there were other possible scenarios of failure that could have done worse, but it was contained. Chernobyl didn’t have a containment dome, which is why the reactor core was exposed to the environment, causing all that damage.
But there are even safer reactors. Canada’s CANDU reactor, for example, uses the cooling water as the moderator in the reaction. It is IMPOSSIBLE for one of these reactors to melt down, because if the flow of coolant stops, the reaction can’t continue. The CANDU is a ‘breeder’ reactor that can produce reusable fuel, leading to much lower levels of high-level waste to dispose of.
When other forms of energy production lead to thousands of deaths per year from emphysema, black lung, and other problems, and emit large amounts of CO2, holding nuclear up to standards so severe that we won’t tolerate a single non-fatal accident is ridiculous.
There is another consideration that needs to be borne in mind when debating various forms of power. Nuclear power is an “always on” source. It dominates electricity generation in my country, supplying more than half of the daily load required. It cannot however work in isolation, there will always be a demand for easily available peak demand load. This is more or less done in Scotland by the provision of hydro-electric generated electricity. The stand-by time of a hydro generator is measured in minutes (but its delivery cannot be guaranteed) , that of a coal or gas fired station in hours (but needs to use materials that are useful in other contexts) , and a nuclear plant in days, if not weeks. Clearly a mix of various power sources is needed if a continuos, flexible demand is going to be met.
All these sources of energy carry environmental risks, but they are the best combination that are available to us. The alternative sources (wind-power, wave-power, solar-power) can help matters but they will never be able to satisfy the demand profile that we in the Western world have come to expect.
So I vote for fission, and hope that the fusion reactor (“within thirty years” , aye right I’ve been hearing that for thirty feckin years) will happen eventually.
Go Torus!
The problem with nuclear waste is the persistency. A lot of the radioactive elements in the waste have extremely long half-life. That makes storing it a thorny problem.
Another issue is the decommisioning of the nuclear reactors. The sites will remain hot for aeons, so the usual way of doing things is just to dump a thick layer of concrete over the reactors.
What makes the problems worse is radiation. It degrades surrounding materials by breaking bonds.
The wastes of both France and Germany are reprocessed atLa Hague . This result in 95% recycled nuclear fuel and 5% permanent wastes. The German wastes are sent back to Germany, I don’t know what they do with them. The French wastes are vitrified and currently stockpiled in pools near (I believe) the reprocessing plant.
And actually, there are issues with the transport of the wastes to and from the reprocessing plant. Greens activists block the railways on a regular basis when a shipment is announced. This is especially true for german wastes, the german Grünen being particulary active.
As for the final disposal of the vitrified wastes, France is in the same situation than the US, AFAIK (apart from the fact the quantity involved are much lower, due to the reprocessing). They’re searching for a suitable subterranean place to bury the wastes, and nobody wants it in his backyard.
Personnaly, I would prefer having vitrified wastes buried under my backyard than a nuclear power plant operating in my backyard, but nobody asked me. As safe as nuclear plants are supposed to be in western countries, I shudder when I think that a Tchernobyl could happen in France. Though the population density in France is the lowest in western Europe, it’s still very high compared to the US or Russia. There’s essentially no large french population center which isn’t relatively close to a nuclear plant (especially since they’re usually build in the valleys of large rivers, hence where the population density is particulary high). If something similar to Tchernobyl was to happen in, say, Nogent-sur-Seine, 60 miles away from Paris, what would they do? Displace 20% of the french population and transform Paris in a widlife reserve, like Tchernobyl?
I’m waiting impatiently for fusion plants, whioch should solve these problems…
[Eyeballs pop out of socket.]
Slight hijack. I could never figure out why so many libertarians are gung-ho on Nukes. (OTOH, maybe I am extrapolating from too low a sample size).
I’m not anti-nuke. But, AFAIK, nuclear energy would not exist absent massive governmental subsidies. To wit:
The watchamacallit-Anderson Act caps liability for a nuclear accidents at a relatively low level.
The government takes responsibility for long-term storage of nuke waste. (Although there may be waste fees, I’m not sure.)
And then there’s the R&D spending.
My objection to nuclear power is simply that the numbers don’t add up for the US: it is a noneconomical source of power that exists due to the largesse of governments and protected industries (operating under cost-based pricing).
In a context such as Japan, where interest rates are very low, it may make sense, however. I’m not saying it would; I’m just not ruling that possibility out.
Furthermore, if an entrepreneur wanted to build a nuke under circumstances where he was liable for waste disposal and accidents (and the emissions of his fossil fuel competitors were taxed, to make it interesting), that would be OK with me.
CANDU is a breeder reactor??? Didn’t know that. Do you mean that it produces plutonium? 
No, it’s not ridiculous. (It is, however, debateable.)
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People are more wary of catastrophic risk than they are of mundane risks. So an expected-life lost standard may not be appropriate.
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People are wary of unfamiliar risks and risks that invoke dread. And radiation poisoning is certainly a scary possibility. These, IMHO, are legitimate preferences that could reasonably be weighed by public authorities.
My view: Unless the numbers change, I believe that nuclear power should be treated as a research project, with permits rationed out accordingly. (The permits would reflect explicit governmental outlays needed to purchase insurance for accident risk as well as funding for a waste disposal fund.)