By “contaminated,” do you mean the waste is radioactive, or chemically toxic? That’s an important distinction. Plutonium, quite apart from its radioactivity, is the most chemically toxic substance known. (I read that once in the Guiness Book of World Records – years ago, and for all I know something more toxic has been discovered since.)
It is an urban legend the Plutonium is one of the most chemically toxic substance known to man. It is as about as toxic as any other heavy metal, and many common substances are more toxic. For example, after Ralph Nader repeated this urban legend, Dr. Bernard Cohen challenged Nader that he would eat as much plutonium as Nader was willing to eat caffeine. Nader turned this challenge down, wisely, as caffein is more toxic.
Radioactive contamination. Chemical risks aren’t any greater at a nuclear facility than any other industrial site, for the most part.
Pu is rather benign stuff as radioisotopes go.
Plutonium Toxicity.
Years ago, I recall reading that there is about 10 times as much thoriumin the world as uranium 235…and that resaerch had been done on a thorium-fueled reactor. This research was halted, because the uranium reators were far more efficient. Has anybody gone baclk to the idea of using thorium as a reactor fuel?
Surely you are mixing two issues. We will need to clean up after our early (read: messy) attempts at fusion, whatever course is chosen for the future production of energy. My understanding is that we have come a long way in developing Fusion reactors especially in reducing waste.
I’m always bemused by the way nuclear power discussions continually turn to clean up and potential damage issues when such things are also out there for coal plants.
Mining environmental damage.
Personal costs in miners lives.
General pollution costs.
Fuel transportation costs to get coal to the plants.
Most people blow past these indirect costs to the generation of electricity via coal.
Chalk me up in the ‘all for nuclear’ camp. I’ll take the risk of damage as opposed to the damage that I know is happening.
A well-run fission plant is both the safest and most environmentally-friendly means of generating quantities of power. However, note that underscored modifier. Many environmentalists are fearful of present-day fission-plant engineering and operation because there is concern for the extent of problems that would result in worst-case scenarios, and the relative probability of such scenarios coming to occur.
Technically, we have four reasonable potential sources for fissionable nuclides: U-233, U-234, U-235, and Pu-239. Th-232 and U-238 will not themselves produce useful chain reactions, but may be irradiated in a breeder reactor to produce U-233 and Pu-239 respectively. Others have detailed why breeder reactors are vanishingly scarce. U-234 is the breakdown product of U-238, and while present in nature, it is vanishingly scarce – U-235, relatively rare as it is, is a couple of orders of magnitude more common.
As for fusion, we have reached the energy breakeven point successfully and reproducibly. The problem lies in the technology of taking a “laboratory curiosity” energy-breakeven fusion reaction and converting it to an economically breakeven technology that can be used to generate power in reasonable quantity. This is why I am wholeheartedly for an infusion of funds to produce that technology – because economically-feasible fusion power is reasonably close to being a panacea for our energy needs at minimal environmental effect, and the methodology is present; all that is needed is engineering to turn it into a cost-effective proposition.
However, the problem here lies in the fact that scientists and consumers would benefit, but it would adversely affect businesses whose investments are in the other means of generating power – and they have a strong and influential voice in national energy policy. (And I’ll stop there, to avoid turning this into a political rant. But that problem does exist in any honest assessment of the real-world feasibility of the situation.)
Avoiding the politics of lobbyists… :dubious:
And this is the point I always try to bring home. Many of the arguments against nuclear power center of the potential danger of the power source. But I never seem to get headway on the dangers of coal both in terms of environmental and health dangers.
Sure, there MAY be environmental danger from nuclear. But we KNOW there’s environmental danger from coal. It’s just not as obvious or spectacular. So it seems to me that we’re trading a noisy problem for a quiet one that’s easier to ignore.
Really? I had not heard this. Any cites?
I used to feel that way – and I still do, as regards some of the unrenovated plants polluting the planet. (I’ll get into the business about acid rain with you – I have a couple of horror stories, including a creek carrying spring runoff on an upland just east of Lake Ontario that had the same pH value as dilute laboratory hydrochloric acid!)
But check out some of the material that Una Persson (FKA Anthracite) has posted on what can be done to build or retrofit a coal-fired plant to expel no more pollutants than a typical panel delivery truck, give or take a few percent. Or invite her to comment here on it.
I don’t like coal as a long-range power source – not only is it not renewable, but it’s contributing heavily to greenhouse gas buildup. But the environmental-pollutants and health hazard aspects of burning it are largely a thing of the past – thanks in large measure to our own Una and the firm she works with. (Coal mining is, of course, a completely different subject – and a hijack from a thread with an OP on nuclear power.)
It took me an hour to understand this. I love the way you suggest that more regulations would “reduce subsidies”. I agree with the sentiment, but not the reality of what it means.
Documentation is proving elusive.
ICLEI noted that a British Tokamak reactor reached energy breakeven in 1991.
Stephen J. Zinkle cavalierly remarked in 1998 that energy breakeven was regularly accomplished:
A July 2001 article in New Scientist implies that researchers have hit but not much exceeded breakeven:
And there are any number of sites on the Internet that are reporting 1980s data saying that the breakeven point has not been reached.
I do recall articles of a few years ago indicating that energy breakeven had reliably and reproducibly been reached regularly – but that there was little or no net energy production. But I don’t seem to turn up any information beyond what’s cited here in a Google search.
Thanks for the cites. I got overly excited when I saw your post, because I didn’t realize that there was such a big gap between break even and self sustaining.
I may be misunderstanding you, but Mercury is an element. It does not have a half-life. Only radioisotopes of elements have half-lifes. According to Wikipedia
The danger with Mercury is not radioactive isotopes, it is the element itself forming organic compounds with organisms in the food chain(especially fish). These compounds can cause birth defects or developmental issues in small children. These are the most immediate effects. It requires higher concentrations to affect adults. Coals contain various levels of Mercury and it vaporizes as the coal is burned and escapes with the smoke. Is there some reaction which produces the radioisotopes of Mercury in this process that I am missing?
Enjoy,
Steven
I think the point was that coal disperses dangerous compounds which remain dangerous far longer than radioactive isotopes.
I’m not really sure this proves that coal is more dangerous than Nucular power. But it certainly is something to think about everytime you hear the old cannard about “And that stuff will be dangerous for the next hundred thousand years”.
<hijack=“Fusion Breakever”>For what extent of time do these fusion reactors exceed breakeven? From my time spent on sci.physics.fusion it wasn’t uncommon for the cores to flare out- begin producing a large amount of power, lose containment, and die. It doesn’t really matter if we’re “regularly and repeatably” reaching/exceeding breakeven if it’s only for a fraction of a second under uncontrolled conditions. I recall people being pretty excited when the Large Helical Device achieved 61% of breakeven during a 12 minute run in 1998. Though it could have been excitement over how long they managed to sustain the plasma, rather than the output… I didn’t get that impression.</hijack>
Anyway, coal contains Uranium and a number of other radioactive substances as impurities. Coal isn’t nuclear power, though, so they don’t have to take the same precautions or maintain the same records. Just like older coal power plants got grandfathered out of obeying various environmental guidelines, coal power in general got grandfathered out of radiological control for the most part, too. BUT, nuclear power creates concentrations of radioactive stuff, while coal power spreads it out in a thin layer over the surrounding country.
Yes, that was my point. People are scared by long half lives. Well mercury is forever, so doesn’t it have an “infinite” half life?
I’m not sure how modern technology can clean coal exhaust to be free of smog forming chemical, mercury, etc.
Part of the transition away from oil will probably be something called a “plug in hybrid” which is like today’s hybrids but can be plugged in. The electric charge would take you 20-50 miles. So for most people, most days could be all electric. A kwh hour of electricity in a battery takes you farther than a kwh in the form of gasoline because of efficiency. But where will all this extra electric supply come from? If it comes from coal…
Anyway, I think the US should have what’s known as an “energy policy”. I think we should replace coal starting with the older grandfathered coal plants with nuclear. Natural gas is running out to, we have something like a 8 year supply of natural gas in North America…and gas can’t be shipped easily because of it’s lack of density. So that’s about to hit the fan also. We should phase out gas electric plants, they won’t be very competitive with gas at $8-$10 a MBTU anyway.
So I think we should replace coal with nuclear for baseload.
Use coal gasification and coal to oil technology to create synthetic gas and oil. I think it’s easier to take mercury out of gas or liquids than coal exhaust. Use hybrids and plug in hybrids to drive our consumption of oil down by about 50%. Use wind in the Mid-west where it can be a cheap contributor to the grid, especially in winter. All this would take many years to completely switch over.
Right now we have 100,000 MW of nuclear. It contributes 20% of electrical supply. We’d need another 300,000 MW or so. Wind installations could be in the 100,000MWs of thousands in the Mid-West. Wind intermittency can be coupled with nuclear energy…when nuclear is not needed (when the wind is blowing) part of the nuclear heat is used to create hydrogen. The hydrogen can be piped into coal to oil plants to make it more efficient (less coal needed). We’d use about 1/2 the coal we do now and generate about 2 billion barrels of oil per year and 5 tcf of gas. Just an idea.
Since the OP couched this as a liberal-treehuggers vs. commonsense-conservatives debate, I’ll go directly to put-up-or-shut-up mode.
The wide-open spaces of this country, which is where one would want to situate a long-term nuclear waste storage facility, are pretty much all in Red America, as it’s been known for the past 3.5 years.
As soon as Red America can agree on where to locate such a facility, this resident of Blue America is game for a serious discussion of generating more of our electricity via nuclear power. AFAICT, the Nevadans seem to be pretty strongly opposed to Yucca Mountain.
Until that time, I can’t see the point, quite honestly. Until we have a place to dump the garbage, there’s no basis for a discussion.
I don’t think you’ve read much of the thread.
The “garbage” is minimal compared to a coal plant. Much of the gargabe can be reprocessed or turned into fuel and burned (in a breeder reactor). It doesn’t leave much “gargabe” after that. The spent fuel rods are actually a waste of fuel that can be burned, that’s where most of the gargabe is.
You’re basically imposing an impossible standard on any energy source.
One that isn’t met by coal. Since the country burns 1 billion tons of coal per year, 10 million train cars, it’s environmental effects are greater by orders of magnitude. It’s just that the waste is dispursed into the air instead of concentrated in one small place.
As for the waste, it’s encased in glass and rendered inert. After a few thousand years, it’s about as radioactive as the ores it came from and you’d have to melt the glass to get at it. Yuca Mtn. is a vast overkill, IMO, but that’s what needs to be done in our culture. Radioactivity of any kind of bad but mercury and NO, which kill thousands and pollute the air are ignored. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. The absolute volume of waste is minimal.
If the Nevadans don’t want it you could put it somewhere else, I don’t know. Put it in glass and ship it to China. They’d probably take the stuff for a small fee. It’d be a lot cheaper than Yuca Mtn. But waste as one scientist called it “isn’t an environmental or scientific problem…it’s a political one.” It would seem a shame to give up on something so promising for specious reasons.
We won’t see a nuclear power breakthrough until we desperately need it. I’m sure that there have been some nuclear power efficiency breakthroughs in the more than 25 years it’s been since a nuclear plant has been built in this country. [Although I still maintain that our methods with hydrogen, concrete, water, and the naturally occuring radioisotopes are our best bet].
Second: yeah, we have to rid the public of their fear. Certainly nuclear tragedy is a deadly affair, but not all nuclear power plants are going to end up like <a href=“http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html”>Chernobyl</a>.