All I know is that a TOW anti-tank missile will make a softball sized hole in the containment vessals used to transport nuclear waste across the country. Somehow, this isn’t good enough in some people’s minds.
Does anyone have a link to the video I saw a couple years ago where a locomotive runs into one of these vessals and slightly bends it (as part of a test)? I mean, c’mon.
And yet toxic materials continue to affect our lives in very real ways. What else can one do with toxic materials that already exist? But if we’re talking about a major ramping up of nuclear power, wouldn’t it make sense to solve the potential problems first rather than just going ahead with it and then “looking for ways to make it safer”?
A little “oops” with a train full of coal is quite a different thing than a little “oops” with a train full of nuclear waste, wouldn’t you say?
Please do so.
Is the waste we have even at the Yucca Mountain facility? Is there any waste being stored there? Last I heard we didn’t even have that going yet. You want to start generating many, many times more waste when we don’t even have our shit together with what we’ve got?
The only reason it’s not at Yucca (or someplace comparable) is years of pointless legal obstructions. One seriously bad thing about the new Democrat-majority congress is the incoming Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is a Yucca opponent and likely to do all he can to push back implementation even further, though he has no good reason for doing so.
Re the radioactive waste issue: you constantly hear the refrain that nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. This is accurate in one sense: the half-life of plutonium-239 is about 23,000 years, and current U.S. reactor waste contains goodly amounts of Pu239. However, this is an artifact of our current half-assed system of nuclear energy, NOT something inherent in the physics of fission power. How US nuclear energy production currently works is this:
The US government offers for sale to the nuclear industry partially enriched uranium, with enough U-235 in it to power a reactor but not enough to use in a nuclear weapon. The reactor-grade uranium is made into fuel rods to use in commercial reactors. As the fuel rods are used, three things happen to them: the amount of U-235 goes down as fission consumes the fuel, fission fragments (the isotopes the U-235 splits into) build up, and stray neutrons bombard the non-fissionable U-238 in the rods and form a number of isotopes, including Pu-239. After a certain time, the rods are no longer usable: the amount of U-235 in them is too low and the amount of fission fragments (many of which are strong neutron absorbers, which limits the chain reaction) is too high.
The spent rods are removed from the reactor, stored in water-filled cooling pools until secondary heat generated by the shortest-lived (and therefore most radioactive per gram) fission fragments decay, and then the rods are… well, so far no one has worked that out yet. The rods were supposed to be in a permanent storage facility by now, but for too many reasons to go into here are not yet. For now, they’re kept on site.
Now, the rods could be reprocessed: the fission fragments (which form only a tiny percentage of the total weight of the fuel) could be removed, and the Pu-239, which is a perfectly fine nuclear fuel in itself, could be concentrated into a form usable in a second-stage reactor. In fact, you can have a reactor cycle which overall produces more fuel than it consumes- a “breeder reactor”. The waste the breeding cycle would produce would be the fission fragment isotopes, which Ronald Reagan once famously said the yearly production of which could fit under a desk. The reactors themselves would be radiocative scrap when their service life expired, but they would be hazardous for decades or centuries, NOT millenia. And a lot of incidental “low-level” waste generated by the nuclear industry is things like latex gloves that have tiny traces of plutonium on them. Again, if you could just recover the plutonium, your “dangerous for 20,000 years” waste goes away.
(Incidently, why is plutonium considered so hazardous? Because when it’s not undergoing fission in a reactor or bomb, it’s main mode of radioactive decay is emitting alpha particles- highly energetic helium nuclei. Alpha radiation is negligible when it’s external to the body (it can’t penetrate more than a few millimeters of tissue, such as skin) but is highly damaging when taken into the body. Other alpha-emitters like radium and polonium have nasty reputations as hazards, and although plutonium isn’t quite as radiocative per gram, it isn’t something you would want in your body. The extreme figures often given for plutonium toxicity are based on the fact that theoretically you could contract cancer from a microscopic speck of plutonium lodged in your lungs.)
So given all this, why don’t we currently use breeder reactors and recycle nuclear waste? One word: proliferation. The current US system of nuclear energy was designed primarily to limit the availability of bomb-grade fissionable material. If all the electricity in the US was produced by breeder reactors, it would involve the production of enough plutonium yearly to create hundreds of nuclear weapons if diverted. If the technology was adopted globally, dozens of nations would have the potential to create nuclear weapons.
Despite this, France, Japan and other fossil-fuel poor nations are moving towards plutonium cycles to meet their energy needs. And newer technologies may limit the scope of proliferation. Some designs have the potential to breed fuel which is fissionable but unsuitable for bombs. But although the current clumsy system the US is wedded to is responsible for nuclear power being much dirtier than it need be, there’s another reason why nuclear power has been unpopular in the US, which is the subject of my next post.
As an additional note, unless Reid or someone else introduces further delays (or human-caused global warming is discovered to be a fraud or something), Yucca Mountain is scheduled for full operation on March 31, 2017. I’m hoping the problem will be addressed before a crisis hits, but I’m not confident.
The real reason why nuclear power has stagnated in the US is not because it’s dangerous or dirty (although as I said earlier, our current system is a lot dirtier than fission power need be) but because of ideology and politics. Put simply, a lot of people hate nuclear energy because they hate the type of society that can produce and in turn be supported by nuclear power production. They would oppose nuclear power even if it were infallibly clean, safe and cheap; they might in fact feel more threatend by the advent of such an energy source, which they would have fewer grounds to criticize.
I am referring to the faction that I use the deliberately perjoritive name of “Eco-Socialists” for. As has been stated in previous threads, they seem to actually welcome the idea that our current fossil-fuel crisis is the beginning of the end of our entire mode of civilization, and dismiss the idea of improved nuclear energy as simply more of the same techno-industrial mindset that they blame for our current condition. What they propose to substitute for it is less clear. The most moderate propose renewable energy sources and conservation measures that minimize the big industry model of power production. Many propose, seemingly with longing, that scarce and expensive energy will force the adoption of low-energy lifestyles: fewer cars and freeways, denser, more community-based population centers, less consumerism, etc… A handful are openly neo-Luddites, proclaiming that we have to return to a pre-industrial mode of existence that they romanticize.
Beginning in the 1970s, they opposed nuclear power as being the ultimate expression of the “system” that they opposed. By playing up public fears of safety after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, they gained enough political capital to virtually halt further progress on nuclear energy in the US. And they dominate the debate over global warming and petroleum depletion by pushing their vision of the future as the ONLY viable one.
In short, nuclear energy is a solution that they simply don’t want. And it’s this ideological debate, rather than technical points of the merits of nuclear power, that will determine the course of the future.
The problem with coal is not the potential of a train load spilled on the floor. The problem with coal is the certainty of thousands of train loads of carbon pumped to the atmosphere. That is what must be weighed against a potential nuclear train wreck.
To my recollection, that’s the most insightful two-line post I’ve ever seen on the SDMB.
If nuclear power provided a clean and safe alternative to the pollution of coal and oil and poisonous gases, there wouldn’t be an environmental group in the country that wouldn’t be pushing for it at every opportunity. They would be lobbying the legislators and fighting in the courts and demonstrating in the streets.
What’s it really like at a nuclear power facility?
Here is a list of environmental developments that one reporter in the Tennessee Valley kept for a three month period about ten years ago.
These have to do with the Oak Ridge Power Plant:
Of course, maybe your faith in the Department of Energy and the captains of the energy industry has been restored since then. Meanwhile, do you want nuclear warheads in trucks on the interstate?
A train wreck of radioactive waste wouldn’t necessarily mean anything dramatic anyway. We’re not talking about an explosion blasting radioactive materials into the atmosphere - we’re talking about a spill. Maybe a very expensive one. But localized effects, with no after-effects once the spill is cleaned up and most likely without any major risk to the greater population. This stuff isn’t evil magick - it’s physical material with known properties, with established methods for cleaning it up.
How about nuclear power in the Third World? I support nuclear power in general, but in Thailand they’ve been talking about building a plant for a few years now. I sure hope they don’t! Considering the safety record of industries over here in general, I would not want to trust the local authorities with something like that.
But that MIGHT be of inetrest for those on the natural-disaster thread who enjoy seeing them. :eek:
I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that cleaning up a nuclear spill is that easy. Also, why are you discounting the possibility of an explosion? Yes, nuclear waste has known properties: It stays radioactive for thousands of years, and it makes humans who come in contact with it ill or dead. What’s the “established method” for cleaning it up? Dig up millions of cubic feet of soil and take it to a waste storage facility? Then just hope you got it all and wait to see if anyone dies?
I didn’t say it would be easy. I said it could be very expensive.
I’m discounting the possibility of an explosion because nuclear waste can’t explode, and it’s transported a far distance from other things that explode. In addition, the canisters are designed to withstand car-bomb type explosions. In fact, they’re designed to withstand conceivable accident scenarios, so the chance of a spill is remote in the first place.
As for cleaning it up, do you realize that there are established procedures for cleaning up radioactive spills of all sizes? Radioactive spills happen. Hospitals have radioactive materials on hand. So do universities and research facilities. And of course waste storage facilities. In 1981, one of these leaked 25,000 gallons of slightly radioactive water onto the floor of the facility. It took a few days to clean up, and left no permanent damage.
The high-tech procedure for cleaning up a spill is to get some shovels or other equipment, and shovel up the material and put it in hazardous material containers. The area is tested until the contaminant level is below certain accepted thresholds. If it’s not, they clean up some more. Eventually, the hazmat suits the cleaners wear is also discarded as low level waste, and any equipment used is decontaminated or, if radioactive, disposed of.
And that’s in the case of an almost inconceivable chain of events that would be required to cause a spill during transportation of waste in the first place.
None of this is a mystery. During the cold war, there were numerous spills during nuclear weapons manufacture. They are routinely cleaned up, and the environment is just fine. And even huge spills can be cleaned. For example, one plant that made weapons materials ejected over 3 million pounds of uranium dust over its lifetime, which landed in a 1050 acre area round the plant. Even this is being cleaned up - it’ll cost about a billion dollars, and when it’s done, the area will be just fine. No one contemplates a spill of anywhere near this magnitude ever as a result of nuclear material transport.
This is a manageable risk. The level of safety is totally appropriate for the potential amount of damage that would ensure should the inconceivable happen and the waste be spilled, and especially as a tradeoff for the reduction in risk of harm to the environment from spewing ungodly amounts of CO2 and particulates into the atmosphere from our current energy sources.
Personally I find nuclear waste very disturbing.
It is darn dangerous, it hangs around for a long time and one only needs human incompetence (a plentiful commodity) to create a very nasty situation.
At present France and others are setting up a consortium to build a fusion reactor, I would sling money at that as one potential alternative.
There are plenty of other ways of generating electricity, and I don’t mean wind farms which I consider a bit of a joke. Tidal power uses simple, known technology and can be highly controlled - we understand hydro dams.
My suspicion is that we are getting bumped into nuclear fission.
Incidentally I’ve seen a number of reports that cows in the UK produce more methane than UK cars produce CO2.
France has mentioned in this thread as an exemplar of responsible nuclear power use. So, what does France’s nuclear power program look like? What sort of safety and oversight provisions do they have? What do they do with their nuclear waste - where do they store it, long-term, and how do they transport it? How do their practices differ from ours?
I remember reading 'Adam Smith’s book, Paper Money, when it came out around 1980. (Got a copy somewhere in this house, but damned if I can find it.) There was a delicious quote there from someone in the French nuclear power program to the effect that they had highly trained engineers working in their nuclear plants, while we employed garage mechanics. That may well have been an exaggeration even then, but nonetheless: I do not trust the nuclear power industry to police itself. I do not trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is generally viewed as a captive of the nuclear power industry, to regulate the nuclear power industry responsibly.
I have no brief one way or the other on nuclear power. I’m for anything within reason that will reduce the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere. But I’m also aware that in order to keep up with the expected growth in our energy needs over the coming decades, we’d have to be building one hell of a lot of new nuke plants - so the first order of business is to reduce that demand growth curve, no matter what mix of energy sources we plan to rely on. Meanwhile, I don’t hear a case being made by the nuke proponents other than you should stop being scared of nuke plants.
Sorry, but that’s not a case. Saying how you’re going to remake the NRC into an actual regulatory body with teeth, that would be part of a case. Saying what exactly France does to supply 75% of their electricity needs with nukes, what part of that is different from what we do, what we’d have to do to make that work here, and how that’s doable, that would be part of that case.
Another France question: how does their demand growth curve for electricity compare with ours? Because they’ve kept producing the vast majority of their electricity from nukes for an awfully long time now. How are they doing this? Are they building lots more nuclear plants all the time? Are they building new nuclear plants that generate a lot more power than the old ones did? Are they keeping a tight lid on the growth of electricity use? Or some combination of all three?
Without knowing the answers to some of these questions, an ignorant voter like me has no basis to conclude whether the French approach would work here, or even what that approach is.
My understanding is that the French Nuclear authority is under strict government control.
Purely based on a passing knowledge of how they do things and an absence of hearing that they’ve changed.
In the late 1960s I knew two guys who worked for the French Nuclear Authority, they struck me as pretty bright.
Personally I reckon that some things are better government controlled, private industry has an incentive to take a short term view and cut corners.
It’s completely irrelevant to the thread, but there’s a fundamental disconnect behind this question. Warheads are manufactured in factories. Missile silos, naval bases and air force bases (i.e. the people that want the warheads to stick on the ends of their various rockets) are all over the place. How do you think the Point A to Point B problem should be handled? Fly the warheads in helicopters?
OK, I went to the site linked by **Struan ** at Post #62, watched the videos. Even assuming that the videos were made by people intent on proving the safety of the transport vessels, I’m still impressed with the integrity of the shipment casks. For me, a hugger of trees and huge fan of NPR, Barak Obama and Keith Olbermann, the issue of the safety of transport vessels is resolved. Move on to the next argument, please.
The problem with “fissionable material does this” vs. “fissionable material does that” is that, as a layman with a science education that ended with high school, I don’t know who to believe. I mean, I watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” and as much as I admire and respect Al Gore, he left some huge questions unanswered. It was NOT a balanced presentation of the facts. And scientists are among the most fractious, irrascible group of hotheads I’ve ever known. Trying to get real information from these folks is damn near impossible – everybody has a damned agenda!
I want cold, hard facts, made understandable, so a person with a high school education (not that that’s saying much these days) can make an intelligent choice. In other words, something so unlike our election process as to be alien to most Americans.
Look, guys and gals, I’ve read every single post in this thread, some of them multiple times. I’ve followed the links, looked at the video, and this quote from **Smiling Bandit ** sums it all up for me:
Look at this way: do you care that the cancer killing you comes from radioactive waste or heavy metals or air pollution? Probably not. If you could reduce one of those dangers tremendously at the cost of increasing another slightly, wouldn’t it be worth it?
I would add one other choice: Do absolutely nothing, and within the lifetime of my children or grandchildren, be reduced to burning wood for heat. Biofuels, solar and wind energy are in their infancies, and won’t economical on a large scale for generations yet. One poster posed the question about becoming “addicted” to nuclear power. And that’s worse than our addiction to fossil fuels exactly how?
It’s fun to debate this stuff online. But Straightdope.com, despite my most fervent desires, doesn’t set national policy. I honestly think all of our energies would be better expended trying to get Cecil installed as Supreme Ruler of All the Americas.
It’s a good question. But the preliminary question is still: is such a tradeoff possible?
Looks like it is. According to the Department of Energy, we ran through something in the neighborhood of 3.9 trillion kWH of electricity last year, with demand expected to rise to about 5.5T kWH annually by 2030.
Right now we have 103 nuclear plants which produce about 780 billion kWH per year. So we’d have to basically triple that number by 2030 to keep from having to burn more fossil fuels for electricity than we do now, assuming the same average level of power generation. (If new technology improves power generation per plant, that number can be reduced.) Then anything we can get from renewables and conservation actually reduces the amount of carbon we dump into the air through power generation.
200 nuke plants by 2030 means we’d have to start about 10 a year, given the lead time required. That’s big, but doable. But before we get started, let’s talk to the French, see how they do it, and if at all possible do it their way (including their regulatory structure) and hire some of their best people to build the first generation of new nuke plants here to French standards.
OK, that takes care of carbon from electricity generation. Now all we’ve got to do is take care of carbon emissions from motor vehicles, and we’re set. We should be able to knock that problem off before tiffin. (And we take tiffin pretty durn early in these parts, buckaroo. ;))