Thank God the laws of physics were changed by Congress to make uranium so much less dangerous to store for the long term. Except they weren’t.
Santo was essentially correct. Nuclear waste, even “reprocessed” nuclear waste remains dangerous for a minimum of several half lives, on the order of 100,000 years. The public as a whole pays for that storage cost. So if the storage cost for the whole nation is a billion dollars a year, you need to calculate the present value of a one hundred trillion dollars over 100,000 years, which is beyond my capabilities, but I would think the present value of an indefinite stream of 1 billion dollars a year to be upwards of 20 billion dollars. Quite doable, but finding someone to manage this stuff for that long is problematic. Personally I don’t have a problem taxing the nuke power to make this a kind of “user fee”
The whole think makes me like wind and solar as a more doable option that can be done by private sector.
Our waste is doing just fine in its concrete casks on the waste pad and in the spent fuel pool. It’s not going anywhere and it’s not hurting anyone there. Should we ever make the decision to reprocess it, it will still be there or somewhere else like Yucca Mountain. Storage costs are minimal compared to the enormous amount of electricity generated, even for long periods of time (all you need is a fence, a few guards (biggest expense), and yearly inspections and basic maintenance).
You are apparently unaware of what the risks actually are. Concrete casks are only a temporary solution and will not hold up to high level nuclear waste over time. Nothing will. Same with the spent fuel pool. Yucca Mountain is for low level waste: materials that are radioactively contaminated but not expected to eat through containers over time. Reprocessing does not make the radioactivity go away.
You have no idea what storage costs are over the life of the danger. You aren’t even able to estimate your personal guesses of “minimal.”
This waste will exist for several times the length of recorded human history to date. Your solution is to dismiss the problem as “minimal.”
I think that the public should be informed of the exact costs that they will bear for the next 10,000 years. And it will be 10,000 years.
I work in this industry; I know exactly what minimal is. And I’ve heard your arguments before and they are always the same - What about the children??? Well, our children will have jobs putting that waste back to use; it’ll be good for fuel for a long time. I hope my son follows me into a nuclear career. The enormous benefits of nuclear power significantly outweigh the minimal risks. We know how to handle waste now and will continue to for the forseeable future.
This is a hyperbolic argument from a biased insider.
Arguments about nuclear waste have been way overblown. Absolutely true. And I have little doubt that the safety issues associated with disposal are dwarfed by the human toll from air pollution and, eventually, from climate change. But, it also true that very few people think the current method of storage is sustainable. Even the Bush Administration, no foe of nuclear power I assure you, thinks we need to solve the waste disposal issue.
According to the National Research Council, “There is strong worldwide consensus that the best, safest long-term option for dealing with [high-level nuclear waste] is geologic isolation." National Research Council, Board on Radioactive Waste Management, Rethinking High-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal: A Position Statement of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management (1990), p. 2.
Aside from all of the practical arguments (national security, long-term safety, etc.), the current storage method just isn’t politically sustainable. Nuclear plants have been licensed with the understanding, since the NWPA was passed in 1982, that waste would eventually be put into geologic storage. If the Feds (and to a certain extent the states, to the extent they have a say) thought that the waste would stay at the plant sites indefinitely, they would never have granted the licenses.
Moreover, if we were to adopt of policy of keeping the waste where it is now, indefinitely, I can guarantee you that the lawsuits that have plagued Yucca would rapidly be turned against on-site storage. Regardless of what you think about on-site storage on its merits (and that’s a debate worth having), it is a losing political and legal battle.
Plutonium is also useful as nuclear fuel; we shouldn’t store it as waste in the first place.
“Dangerous” being a relative term. It doesn’t need the kind of facilities we insist on building.
And such a “user fee” amounts to a special tax artificially raising the price of nuclear power, since other energy sources can pollute without paying it. Either all should pay or none. If coal and solar had to put their respectively radioactive and chemically poisonous waste in something like Yucca, you’d see their prices go up too. And yes, coal ash is radioactive, and the heavy metals used in solar panels are poison.
They aren’t; they can’t produce enough power, and are harder on the environment. In practical terms, we have the choice between coal and nuclear.
Because the stuff that lasts that long isn’t that dangerous. And we already use and dispose of any number of substances that remain dangerous indefinitely, not just a mere 100,000 years.
I agree you cannot power the country solely via wind/solar/hydro power but a combination of those (and maybe toss in geothermal) can put a major dent in the power production picture. You still need coal/nuclear plants for on-demand power and to pick up the slack but the point is you need fewer of them.
I think the ideal solution will encompass all of these to some degree once the economics of it are worked out (and if it costs more or needs a subsidy to get some clean tech in there so be it…worth paying some premium to minimize pollution).
Ontario’s nuclear plants were run by the government, and were criminally wasteful. By all accounts, both publically available and from what I have seen and heard, the level of corruption, waste and stupidity was indescribable.
It’s worth noting that since being taken over by a private company (Ontario Power Generation still technically owns the facility, but leases it out) the Bruce plant has, wonder of wonders, become profitable.
You work in an industry that promised that Three Mile Island and Chernobyl couldn’t happen. Back then, the risks were not even minimal, the public was told “it can’t happen”. Three Mile Island was bad, but nobody hurt. Chernobyl was really bad. But Three Mile Island and Chernobyl aren’t the only reactors that have gone screwy. Nuclear Power Plant Accidents document six others that have become public. Windscale probably killed a lot of people over time.
The nuclear industry should be trusted about as much as the tobacco industry. You aren’t well educated in the subject (I’m just guessing) and you don’t work at an academic institution, your own judgment is colored by your self interest. You are not even able to quantify what you mean by minimal.
You point to the Oklo reactors, there are 16 of them Natural nuclear fission reactor - Wikipedia as pointing to nuclear fission being safe over the long term. It’s an example that I was well aware of, but doesn’t prove your point.
We are not discussing movement of radioactive isotopes through the earth’s crust, but rather, people screwing around with it. There were no humans anywhere near to be injured for the next 2 billion years, by which time it has decayed to its present levels of radioactivity. It was found in a mine, and can be presumed not to have been at the surface.
And, of course, Oklo also demonstrates that having a lot of nuclear waste in one area (nuclear waste containing U238 and unspent U235 (and potentially plutonium) can lead to spontaneous nuclear piles that last for a hundred thousand years.
Flash forward: What happens when a waste storage pool no longer has water in it and is full of spent fuel? It’s not encased in a hundred meters of granite, its right at the surface. That’s right, it fissions. What are the chances of an unattended pool having the water evaporate? 100%. Better never let that water level get low. The U235 will be hot for a long, long, long time.
But there isn’t just one of these. There are hundreds of nuclear reactors with waste stored on site all over the world. Most of them are in guess what country? This one. That’s right, we have more by number (not percent, that’s France) than anywhere else. We already have a 100,000 year storage bill for what is available.
Ye-ah, to the extent that a lot of other natural rocks are. I’ve got pounds and pounds of coal ash right by me I use for some of my classes I teach (on coal ash and its hazards, of all things), and a working Geiger counter as well, and there is no perceivable difference between setting the counter next to the ash or the background of my house (I guess that could be a function of the fact that I have so many damn radioactive things in my house, including a still-radioactive sick Fierra , but I don’t think so.)
Yes, on a mass, annual scale a coal plant does release some radioactive material into the environment: uranium, thorium, radium, radon (also from coal mining), as well as several non-radioactive hazardous items: mercury, vanadium, chromium, lead, arsenic, antimony…etc. It’s possible that the sum total of radioactive materials released via coal generation is more than that of nuclear power generation (although I’m not so certain if one includes mining and processing operations, I’ve seen conflicting figures).
IIRC, I understand that it depends a lot on the uranium/thorium content of the coal you burned to get the ash. Although I wasn’t trying to make the point that coal ash is the Doom of Mankind; I was trying to make the point that coal power would be a lot more expensive if we treated it like we did anything associated with nuclear power. As would solar, for that matter; if we took the attitude that the heavy metals in worn out panels had to be sealed away forever ( since as I’ve said, they stay poisonous essentially forever, unlike radioisotopes ).
The whole rationale behind our supposed need for perfect containment that lasts for millennia is that radiation is this super-destructive force, and that a small leak a thousand years from now will be some kind of massive disaster. It’s not. You want to keep it being dumped into rivers or groundwater in large amounts any time soon; but if there are small leaks here and there over hundreds of years, big deal. Reasonable containment would be far cheaper. As would be containment facilities and nuclear power plants that weren’t crippled by constant lawsuits.
While there are certainly people who consider it a super-destructive force all by itself with no intervention and those people do have important political consequences, the real dangers are more with people messing around with it, or as I mentioned, neglecting it (the waste). Neglected waste in an abandoned and evaporated pool could easily result in another Windscale or Chernobyl. And what are the odds that human beings will neglect thousands of containment pools over the next several thousand years? Or that some terrorist will manage to drain one or more of them simultaneously? Human nature being what it is, those are unpleasant odds.
If you noticed the fuel in those casks spends at least a year in a cooling pool first. I guess his issue is somehow, somewhere, somewhen a pool might get drained or ignored and the water evaporate. Then what happens? I do not know but I am guessing the water is there for a good reason and it would be bad if there was none surrounding the fuel.
I’m pretty sure we can manage to keep the pools filled with water on a year-to-year basis; his issue was keeping them filled for thousands of years and that is just ignorance. The best way to minimize the risk is to put the waste in Yucca Mountain instead of leaving it scattered around.
In Quebec, virtually all power is hydroelectric (in fact, the word “hydro” by itself has come to be synonymous with power, not water). We pay about 5c/kWH, which is far below, I think, what most Americans pay. And the power authority Hydro-Quebec (which is government owned incidentally) pays huge profits into the governments coffers. Now some of the profit comes a sweetheart contract signed long ago with Newfie gov’t to help construct and distribute power from Labrador, a contract that will terminate in a few more years, but the fact remains that it is definitely not subsidized. One thing that is, is the sale of electricity to aluminum smelters which use gobs of electricity. Even so, it is not clear that money is lost on this.
Yes, pool fires are a danger. My closest nuclear power plant is Diablo Canyon. http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/506962.html The two pools at Diablo are nearly full, have never been transferred to the casks and that is not an unusual situation. The casks will be stored on site, above ground for the indefinite future. The casks were not designed to be long term on site storage. There are no current plans to move the casks once they are filled.
The annoyance I have with this is safety is brushed aside and the same kind of Wall Street bailout we just had, where the rich come demanding a handout from the rest of us will happen when the companies that own the reactors have distributed all the profits and stick the public with a site that needs cleanup and securing and by the way the corp is bankrupt and the public must foot the bill. Why wouldn’t companies do this?
, but I don’t think so.)