XT, I didn’t bring it up, but do you mind saying a few words about the nuclear waste disposal problem? I see it as a ‘tail’ that pro-nuclear advocates seem to not want to mention. Then again, while I have a math and science education, I am not an engineer, and I also have not followed the nuclear issue very closely and am not super confident wrt my own opinions on this question.
The specific issue I see is something like this: France, which gets a significant amount of its power from nuclear, benefits nicely from that for the first 100 years or so. But then, for 100,000 years after that? 25,000 years? 500,000 years? they have all of this mortally toxic waste to manage, waste which AFAIK no method has been devised to safely contain. So, while AGW is absolutely a ticking time-bomb we’re dropping onto future generations through our use of fossil fuels, nuclear waste is arguably just a different kind of time-bomb, only one that lasts effectively forever from a human perspective, while you said yourself AGW might be resolved within a ‘mere’ 500 years. A long time, but we can look back at the records and read about humans setting each other on fire for saying the wrong thing about the local culture’s favored prophets and so on 500 years ago. 100,000 years is effectively unimaginable in terms of human history, forward or back.
The basic science behind climate change is compelling, and the seeming increase in extreme weather incidents disturbing.
The younger generations potentially have much to lose, and speaking out on these issues is important. I could do without the theatricality of spending sixteen days going to a meeting or making melodramatic comments.
It is important to balance economic interests with climate concerns. More clear headed, conservative media like The Economist claim this can be done in a way which makes money and can garner votes. But it isn’t easy. It is economically popular not to disturb influential and profitable industries. It isn’t politically popular to raise taxes, ask for sacrifices, offend job providers or increase debt.
World leaders are to blame if they don’t acknowledge the existence of a problem. It is easy to blame others when a coordinated solution is required. The solution is difficult and it is hard to know how much sacrifice may be needed. So the people who vote for world leaders share some blame too. I support solutions like nuclear plants, but the industry has not always been forthright and this is unhelpful. Ontario, at some cost, has abandoned coal. China is unlikely to do so soon. Leaders sometimes overpromise and are relying on future innovation instead of making progressive changes now.
Activists sometimes favour solutions which are not yet very feasible. Some solutions, such as not building pipelines, ignore current economic realities. The proper balance is hard to ascertain. Disparaging successful industries is not always helpful. Some progressives give too much credence to “pie in the sky” proposals or bundle too much other dogma in with climate change, which is probably more important.
We would have to separate dead waste from recyclable waste, since I am assuming that irradiated metal is getting stored with spent fuel rods. This was several years ago since I last looked into why exactly we are keeping this waste without actually doing anything with it. From what I was told, the spent rods have some sort of value and that sending them into the sun was problematic for a number of reasons.
The reasonable solution is to have the waste worth money so that it can be traded on the open market, in the same way that gold is. So simply put, we ship it to the moon and placed where it can be monitored. For anyone that mentions, yes i did watch space 1999 as a kid and no i dont think that is going to be an issue.
On planet short term storage is not a problem, but there is no viable long term waste storage solution that is 25 thousand years or more, viable on planet.
Sure, why not? You need to start by getting some perspective on the problem. Global climate change is going to be, as the name implies, a global phenomena (do do dadodoodadoododadoododadoodoodoodutdutdutdodoo). It’s going to affect the entire world. From a human perspective it’s going to be pretty terrifyingly devastating, especially to the poorer countries and people. Droughts, floods, much more energetic storms. It’s also going to accelerate the already happening extinction of species, especially those who’s climate will change the most.
Nuclear waste, on the other hand, would be a strictly local event…or non-event. I’m not sure what the scale of this is in your mind, but we are talking about nuclear waste that is the size of a few box cars, at most, per plant. Not mountains of radio active waste.
The second aspect is, part of the problem in the US is self inflicted wrt nuclear waste. France doesn’t have the issue the US does in part because they recycle their waste, and we don’t. There are all sorts of reasons for that, and I’m not going to get into them here, but from an engineering aspect it makes disposal more difficult since we have more waste to dispose of. There are several other things we could do to mitigate waste, but recycling or reprocessing is a big one.
You’d still have some waste no matter what, however, which means you are going to need a repository that will, indeed stand up over time. I don’t think this is an insurmountable obstacle…there have been plans for a central repository for decades, and we even spent billions mostly building one, only to abandon it due to political pressure. In fact, part of the cost that the folks building a nuclear plant in the US is SUPPOSED to go towards such a facility or facilities.
In the end, it’s the perspective though. You have the potential for, perhaps, a really nasty local environmental issue. Or you have the the certainty that we WILL have a very real global climate event that will affect the entire world. Weighed against each other, even if we couldn’t mitigate the nuclear waste issue at all, that’s the lesser of two weevils. And, of course, we CAN mitigate it to a greater extent than we are…it’s more politics and fear than engineering wrt nuclear waste storage.
Ok, I asked how we deal with the nuclear waste problem. I admit I don’t know the answer. One response was, “Store it off planet on the moon.” I’d be cool with that if I were convinced nuclear waste could be 100% safely blasted off the Earth to the moon and stored there somehow.
The other answer was, “We can store it here on Earth for 25,000 years, but politics derailed it.” Yucca Mountain, I presume?
In both cases, the posters rest their cases on their confidence that they are right. No offense guys, but can I get a little more meat with these potatoes?
Given that I saw an article citing a farmer in Georgia whose crops were destroyed by hurricanes twice in a row, but still said it was just weather, the spoof is depressingly accurate.
Well speaking from my point of view , we already have a system in place that would put nuclear materials about 90 percent of the way before as they say, what goes up must come down. No, its just an engineering problem with a fifty year backlog of waste but putting it on the moon might be more viable politically than Yucca.
But no, your never going to get a 100 percent safety launch especially with the culture that led to the Challenger disaster.
I don’t think it would be. The optics are terrible. Humans have spread their muck to somewhere else; what was a pristine, tranquil environment for billions of years is now another dump.
And it’s always there: “The moon doesn’t look the same to me any more, now that I know the right most black blob is a no go zone”
I’m pro nuclear and I’m not even necessarily saying putting it on the moon is a bad idea. Just that politically, it will be protested / resisted as much as anything ever.
As far as launching stuff into orbit to send to the moon, leaving aside the increased risk of trying to do that (which is going to be a much higher risk than just storing it here on earth), I’ll lay out the issue and you can do the math if you want. So, the largest rocket that I’m aware of can lift about 150 tons of cargo into low earth orbit. There is, currently, about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste in the US. Today, again from memory, it’s currently around $10k per pound to put something into orbit. This doesn’t count the cost to then send it on to the moon, though the major cost is getting it into orbit.
Not really feasible, even if you dropped launch cost to $1000 per pound (which is the goal right now). I’d say that even if it were cost effective, the risk would far outweigh the return, at least until you could have a much lower mean time to failure rate on space launches. Currently, we don’t have any infrastructure to do this, including the logistic infrastructure to take it and move it to the moon and store it there. Hell, we haven’t even been back to the moon since the early 70’s at this point with anything larger than a robotic rover.
Of course, you COULD do what I said, which is just reprocess the waste. You would end up with a lot of weapons grade material, but you’d have a lot less waste. I don’t recall exactly, but I think we are talking about over half of the waste being stored could be recycled and reprocessed back into something usable…it might even be more (for some reason I was thinking it was over 80%, but I am probably mis-remembering). So, we COULD cut down that 90,000 tons to something a bit smaller just doing that. As for the rest wrt long term storage, there are several options. I seem to recall that vitrification works pretty well, putting it into a long term stable format that is also easier to house and store.
The thing is, storage of waste isn’t a show stopper. We have options. The real issue isn’t storage of waste…it’s fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Well, and everywhere else in the US and in many other countries to boot. Cost is also a factor, but I think costs could be brought down…or, if this is REALLY the emergency that folks say (and I think it is), then why are we balking at cost for nuclear while not for all this other stuff folks propose?
It’s kind of a moot point though all around. We have been using nuclear for longer than most folks have been alive. We have tons of nuclear waste. Even when we let the last creaky nuclear plant go silent, we’ll have to deal with the waste. Our current plan is stupid, of course, which is just entomb it at the plant sites and I guess hope for the best. We have been and are just kicking the can down the road, and the only thing we are doing is just letting those plants die out and replacing them with fossil fuel burners (natural gas mainly) for base load while we build out tons of solar and wind that only work when they work with no current large scale backup. Eventually, that will (hopefully) catch up and we’ll have that backup (it’s going to cost a HUGE amount). I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 years down the road. The other part is, we aren’t going to get new nuclear in the US. It’s not going to happen. So, like I said, it’s a moot point all around, no matter what we do.
Its not like we have to do Lunar today or tommorow but the planning for what we will do has to start sometime. I dont see what we are going to do with the stuff even if it is recycled. I dont really see any planning for breeder reactors which I assume this waste would be going to.
Thunberg is a terrible messenger. Inslee’s approach, sunny can-do optimism, is the right one. Scolding and scowling and exclaiming “how dare you” is not an effective form of communication or persuasion.
Well, if you count inspiring and energizing millions of people as being “terrible”, I guess.
It sure communicated with and persuaded a lot of people who are now very motivated about climate activism, though. There’s room in the movement for Thunbergs and Inslees too; we don’t always have to be pathologically fearful of confrontational attitudes just because oh noes somebody might be antagonized by them.
My 19-year-old son is one of them. It is because he texted me to say how inspired he was by her speech that I went to watch it in full. I was aghast. I think it’s actually disturbing to think about young people being “inspired” by her, because I honestly don’t think that’s psychologically healthy. Like a lot of people his age, my son has tendencies toward depression already, so it’s hard for me to see how this is helpful.
But in political terms, it’s preaching to the choir and turning off everyone else. Furthermore, her rhetoric is so strident that I have to assume we are to take it as Inslee not really being any better than Trump. It’s Ralph Nader‘s “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” all over again. Well, I have news for you: it’s either going to be Tweedledee or Tweedledum who gets elected president, so if young people are persuaded it doesn’t matter and it’s all bullshit unless we go way more radical, that is a prescription for disillusionment and apathy.
She is not just confrontational, she is completely scornful of people who are trying to be her allies but also to be pragmatic. The “how dare you!” was not aimed at the coal industry or Republicans but at center-left politicians. Right? That’s the only communication I have seen from her, so maybe there’s some small chance that I misunderstood—but it sure seemed like that’s what she was getting at. And if it was not what she meant, she was not communicating clearly at all.
I think it’s more likely that she was quite clear, with a scathing and uncompromising message that will ultimately be counterproductive.
So, he’s inspired, you’re aghast, so far it’s a draw. If there are more of him than of you—and from what I’ve read, that seems like a reasonable inference—then she’s being an effective messenger overall.
Including, apparently, getting a lot of new people to join the choir, and getting a lot of other people who were only nominally choir members to start showing up and singing.
I don’t think Thunberg should necessarily be held responsible for what you choose to assume.
:dubious: I think UN politicians as a group may not be quite as thinskinned or resentful as you might be about catching some forensic flak from an indignant young activist.
Even if they are, though, ISTM that what really matters is the popular response. If the inspired public really starts pushing for more decisive action on climate change, elected “world leaders” are going to have to step up their game whether or not they personally enjoyed getting “how-dare-youed” at.
Remember, lots of people of all political stripes, no matter how pragmatic they are, rather enjoy the sight of some little Ordinary Folk getting a platform to rebuke the powerful elites. Hell, there are tens of millions of Americans who like that schtick so much they even bought it from Donald Trump, of all people. And sensible grown-up politicians recognize that they have to be prepared for popular indignation in crisis situations, even if they personally feel that the popular judgement is a little harsh.