Nuclear power

[Shodan]

We don’t need to store it for hundreds of thousands of years.

In October 2007, the DOE issued a draft of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement in which it shows that for the first 10,000 years mean public dose would be 0.24 mrem/year and that thereafter to 1,000,000 years the median public dose would be 0.98 mrem/year, both of which are substantially below the proposed EPA limit. For comparison, a hip x-ray results in a dose around 83 mrem and a CT head or chest scan results in around 1,110 mrem.[36] Annually, in the United States, an individual’s doses from background radiation is about 350 mrem, although some places get more than twice that.

Cite.

The rest of it is a combination of NIMBY and “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. We can’t build a facility to store some of our waste, because it can’t store all of our waste. So we just leave it on-site, while we pursue other solutions that the anti-nukes will oppose endlessly - and then claim that we should implement technologies that don’t scale up, kill more people, produce toxic waste, and cost more.

Regards,
Shodan

[Hermitian]

I find the poll results interesting. I am guessing that it is not very reflective of the American public as a whole.

[bump]

@engineer_comp_geek

That said, I don’t think nuclear power is the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my mind, it has two main problems. First, we really don’t have a good way of dealing with the nuclear waste. Second, as long as you have nuke power you are going to have accidents. Anyone who thinks we can build new, accident-free reactors is deluding themselves. The accidents may not be terribly common, like maybe once every few decades, but they are going to happen.

To me it seems like the question (and I don’t know the answer, nor whether it can be reasonably answered) is whether or not the environmental impact of the nuclear accidents every few decades is greater than the environmental impact of burning howeve many kilotons (megatons? gigatons?) of coal over the same period in lieu of that particular nuclear plant during the expected lifetime?

In other words, Fukushima is undeniably bad, but are the effects overall worse than had the plant been burning coal for 40 years straight?

And I tend to agree with Chihuahua; 3 Mile Island and Fukushima are more testaments to the safety systems in place, than proof of how unsafe they are. To extend his Chernobyl car analogy, if you spin out on a wet road, hit a tree, and end up with a broken nose or burns from the air bag, or little cuts from flying windshield glass it’s not necessarily proof that cars are unsafe, but rather that everything worked extraordinarily well to keep you from being dead or maimed.