Hovercraft. Giant hovercraft. 
I feel like the people obsessing over nuclear waste in this thread are fatally missing the point. Of course nuclear waste is dangerous – no one has ever said it wasn’t. But the point is, is it more dangerous that leaving our carbon issue unaddressed? If we’re going to get so hung up because nuclear waste could spill on a highway that we leave substantially unaddressed the fact that this nation is annually putting 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that strikes me, to use Biblical language, as swallowing a camel while straining at a gnat.
After all, what’s the worst-case scenario with nuclear waste? A terrorist getting hold of some and setting off a dirty bomb? A spill by the highway? Both of those are bad, but both are essentially local events that would kill a couple hundred people at the absolute outside. Meditate on this: 100,000 victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were followed up for years afterwards – and how many additional cancer cases were there among them, attributable to their radiation exposure? A mere 400.
Meanwhile, the dangers of global warming are planetary in scope. Whole ecosystems could crash. The increasing acidification of the ocean could kill practically everything in it. Even with the unknowns of global warming, the downside is so serious that worrying over the almost infinitesimal global health effects of nuclear waste strikes me as the height of frivolity.
I didn’t say nuclear waste could explode. You said you discounted the possibility of an explosion, period. I thought we were talking about the inherent problems in transporting the waste to the storage facility, so I don’t understand what the last part of your sentence means in that context. This would be done on trains, yes? Trains can crash, right? They can catch fire, right? They can have missiles shot at them or bombs detonated near them, correct?
And that’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is long-term storage of the waste.
You keep talking about plans and designs. Do we have this procedure wherein the waste is encased in bomb-proof containers and transported to Yucca Mountain up and running? No, we don’t. The waste we already have is being stored in temporary facilities. We aren’t even yet equipped to deal with the waste we already have, and yet you are advocating increasing the number of nuclear power plants many times over.
I don’t recall arguing that we didn’t. The fact that we had to develop extensive procedures for dealing with nuclear spills just shows how dangerous they can be.
Yes indeed. Point of order, here: It’s an interesting discussion, but I wonder why so many of the pro-nuke crowd are resorting to ad-hominem arguments like: “obsessing”, “irrational”, etc. That doesn’t really help your case.
We are ignoring who constructs these plants.They are profit motivated and cut every corner possible. They have shown in the past they willing to lie,even about safety.
This isn’t the movies. When trains crash, there are no huge explosions. And as I said, the canisters are designed to withstand every type of crash scenario. And they aren’t exactly pressurized bombs. If one of them did crack open, it would just leak a bunch of foul stuff onto the ground. We would then have to clean that up. Again, this isn’t the end of the world, or even a particularly dangerous disaster.
If you aren’t going to accept this level of risk, then do you support hydro power? I suggest you look up what happened when a hydro dam let go in China. Any idea what the consequences would be if the Hoover dam failed? But I’ll bet you don’t lay awake at night worrying about that - not because the risks are less, but because understand rushing water and what could happen, and understanding it removes the irrational fear. But radiation is scary. It leads to unreasoned fear.
What a ridiculous argument. We shouldn’t implement our plans because…our plans haven’t been implemented yet. Is that correct? Does that make any kind of sense?
Of course we are ‘equipped’ to handle it. What we don’t have is a regulatory framework that allows us to deal with it properly, mostly due to NIMBY attitudes and pandering politicians responding to the fear created by an hysterical anti-nuke movement.
Really? We also have plans to deal with spilled acids and other chemicals. Should we ban them all? Are you seriously suggesting that the existence of a plan to take care of spills is an argument against transporting the stuff?
Frankly, given this last message of yours, it’s hard to take you seriously in this debate. You aren’t putting up reasonable arguments - you’re just throwing out whatever comes to the top of your head, hoping some of it will stick or you can just drown us in objections.
This is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from many anti-nuclear types. They don’t understand the science or engineering behind the issue. They just have their fears, and no amount of reasoning will change that.
I should amend this before someone drops in with an example of a train crash that exploded - trains don’t explode when they crash *unless they are carrying explosive materials. I think it’s safe to say that waste-carrying trains wouldn’t also be carrying large quantities of explosives on them. Locomotives run on diesel fuel. You might get a fire. But then, the canisters are tested by putting them in fires and leaving them there for extended periods of time.
Would you care to compare the safety record of the ‘profit motivated’ nuclear industry with the state-run nuclear industry in the ex-Soviet union?
That’s what safety regulations and inspections are for, and that’s true of everything constructed.
But then you have the problem of the eels!
I’m for nuclear as one of the solutions to warming, but I just want to interject here that it would only account for a portion of the problem; deforestation, all by itself, is one-quarter of the problem, more or less. This site is the best I could find on the subject.
Note that according to them, 20% of the world’s oxygen is produced by rainforests.
So, tree-huggers should realize that nuclear, all by itself, isn’t going to get us all the way there; changes, drastic changes, in our way of life are still going to be needed, so opposing nuclear on the grounds that it might enable current energy and land-use trends to continue is not a position that is based in reality.
So, just to be clear, my position agrees with the OP: nuclear needs to be part of the solution. There is simply no viable way to get from where we are now to where we need to be without it. But a lot more than just nuclear needs to be done, especially given that even uranium is a finite resource.
Remember, there’s two billion people in China and India joining the global economy. So, everything is finite. We are going to need to learn to live with that to an extent that I don’t think anyone in the developed countries really understands. That includes both the pro-nuclear folks and the environmentalists.
Well, now that we’ve established that:
[ul][li]We need to reduce CO2 and every other sort of exhaust gas emissions dramatically to combat global warming.[/li][li]There is no way that everyone will agree is safe to dispose of nuclear waste, and we cannot be bothered to put honest, competent inspectors in place to make sure nuke plants are built and run safely.[/li][li]Wind and tidal power are available but will have minimal impact on energy needs.[/li][li]Nobody is willing to address sensible, real-world scenarios of minimizing the potential liability of any power source.[/ul][/li]…
…the only fair thing everyone can do, to save the planet, is to immediately turn off your computer. Permanently. Then go throw the main breaker switch to disconnect yourself from the utility company. And leave it off. Permanently. Close down any lines bringing natural gas or LPG into your home. Stop using anything else you have as a heat source: oil or kerosene furnace, kerosun space heaters, coal furnace, fireplace. Drain your car’s cooling system and put it up on blocks. Find a job within walking distance of your home. Don’t worry, there are a lot of foods you can eat at room temperature, after you get used to it. (Did I mention making sure you’re within walking distance of a grocery, and that they have plans to remain open and keep supplied as we end hydrocarbon burning?)
This is not a joke. We have problems, which can be overcome by some intelligent risk-benefit analysis, planning, ensuring that things are built and run safely, and decrying the nay-sayers. (If you seriously believe someone can set up a plan to shoot heat-seeking missiles at a nuclear waste-carrying train, in this country, and carry it off without getting stopped, you need to enter a 12-step program aimed at weaning you from taking stuff like “24” and Tom Clancy movies seriously.)
There are damn good reasons why we have problems with nuclear power – we’re, on the one hand, binding the utility companies who would build them with Chicken Little regulations making impossible hurdles for them to jump, and on the other, not making sure that the people who inspect and regulate their operations are not overlooking slipshod work. Along with the fact that the nuke industry cannot compete with Exxon Mobil, BP Amoco, and the rest of them in lobbying efforts (and that it doesn’t own an Executive Branch of its own). There are real issues that need to be addressed. But not most of the ones raised here.
As of the late 1970s or early 1980s, the plants putting out the most radioactivity pollution were not nuke plants – including 3 Mile Island – but coal-burning power plants. I don’t have the statistic at hand to document it, but it was given in one of Jerry Pournelle’s analyses of the energy policy of the time. Today we have plants retrofitting to where a coal-burning power plant puts out substantially less pollution daily than the cars its employees drive to and from work. (You all know who to turn to for information on that.)
And put some decent money and intelligent thinkers into controlled fusion. We’re at the point where we can build fusion units that generate more power than they consume to start up. But for thirty-odd years, fusion power has been ten years in the future. Like Annie’s Tomorrow, it’s only a dream away. How about getting someone who knows what they’re doing and can solve problems into getting past that ten-year mark, and generating clean, cheap, safe power – regardless of how Exxon Mobil’s lobbyists and the politicians in their back pockets may think about it?
And if we can come up with fringey solutions like tidal and wind power, go for it – they’ll reduce the demand on the other sources. But never mistake them for a solution to the main demand problems; they’re only first aid to help while waiting to fix the real problems. They cannot possibly produce more than a few percent of energy demand at most. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing; it means we need to put most of our eggs in a different basket.
Or else go through weaning yourself from power use. Fortunately it’s a mild winter, and you will get used to ambient-temperature canned beans. But it’s the only honest thing you can do if you only want to raise objections to proposed solutions you don’t like, instead of tackling the problem head on.
It’s a serious misconception to take Oak Ridge as an example of a “Power Plant”. It was a wartime production plant for weapons uranium, which undoubtedly has left a nasty clean-up legacy (notably at K-25, as per the cite), and subsequently a government research lab. Both roles have involved building reactors, but not for the purpose of supplying power.
Whatever one’s attitude to civilian nuclear power plants, Oak Ridge ought to be recognised as a different sort of beast.
Well, that was a nice reductio ad absurdum, Polycarp.
I might just open a thread on the subject of all the things that modern humans in developed countries do that maximize energy and land use, and minimize savings. These would include things like moving into a detached, single family home with generous plantings of trees, cutting them all down so you don’t have to be bothered with picking up the leaves in the fall, and then sitting on the brand-new deck that you built with wood imported from elsewhere, thereby doing forest-clearing double-duty, and complaining about how hot it is on that deck, or in the house, which is now frying under a relentless sun with two compressors going full-tilt to keep the place from burning up. Geez, I wonder why?
I could go on, but my point is simple: you could live very easily while doing things that would greatly reduce the amount of energy you use and carbon you send into the atmosphere. It would take a lot of NOT doing things that make no sense at all and make your life needlessly expensive and uncomfortable. There’s more low-hanging fruit there than anyone thinks, I bet.
Nuclear will have to be part of the solution, and so too will people in developed countries ceasing to be excessive about everything, and then whining that they might as well live like cavemen 'cause they can’t do all the things they want.
I intended it to be. I’m firmly convinced the problem is soluble if we don’t make absurd demands on those offering solutions, but do hold those solutions to good solid tests. I half-expected to see someone worrying about the potential for mutant giant sandworm attacks on those nuclear-waste trains as they cross the desert en route to Yucca Mtn. On the other hand, there’s one nuclear plant here in North Carolina storing four spent fuel assemblies in a coolant pond designed for two, with ample room for error for the two so it can accommodate the four, but with that margin of error cut to the quick. I’m not an alarmist about nuclear power, but that little issue disturbs me. How many hurricanes hitting that plant (it’s near the coast) equals the same danger as shipping that waste to Yucca?
As for the states banning nuclear-waste shipments across them, there’s this little thing called the Interstate Commerce Clause. If that permits the Feds. to decide how much wheat a farmer can grow for his own consumption, it certainly enables them to supersede state law on an issue of national energy policy.
We do have finite reserves of uranium and of coal, but they’re more than adequate to hold us while we do some basic research to find other energy sources. But we need to be able to use them safely. And an energy program dictated to Mr. Cheney by his buddies in the oil industry is not accomplishing that. (Yeah, that’s a political snark. But it’s a first-cut accurate statement on what our policy is and where it came from, fine tuning and exceptions to be addressed later.)
You have a definite point about the silly-ass construction industry, Pantom. And yeah, it does need a separate thread. (FWIW, we do have a deck, built by previous tenants and I don’t know the provenance of most of the construction materials). But we have a group of native pines shading the house. And except for the core of the summer, with 95 days and 70 nights, the house is pretty well livable for much of the year. We need heat for about 3.5-4 months a year, and not a lot of it for most of that period.
Why are you mixing up energy with land use? They are totally separate issues (well, aside from the issue of Brazil cutting down rainforests to make room for Ethanol crops).
You can have a high-energy, high technology economy without deforestation. In fact, the wealthier you are, the less you need to chop down old growth forests, because you can afford to manage tree farms, make substitute materials out of plastics and other stuff, etc. So let’s not conflate them.
For our purposes, uranium might as well be infinite. One thing to remember when talking about the price of Uranium is that, unlike coal, oil, and natural gas energy sources, the cost of fuel is only a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power - around 25%. But that includes the cost of the ore, plus refining, enrichment, packaging, shipping, and all the other handling costs. The price of ore itself is less than 10% of the cost of nuclear power. So we could increase the price of Uranium by a factor of 10, and it would only roughly double the price of nuclear power. And at 10 times the current price, we get into the realm of seawater extraction of Uranium, and suddenly our available reserves jump to thousands of years worth. Unlike oil and gas, uranium is not located in ever-depleting geologic pockets. Uranium exists all through the crust. We can extract as much as we need, so long as we’re willing to pay to do so.
Also, we can burn thorium. Thorium is even cheaper than uranium. We can also burn our own nuclear waste (the CANDU reactor can burn the waste from typical U.S. Light-Water Reactors).
Nuclear isn’t a panacea. What it is, is a good replacement for high-density peak power sources such as our current coal and natural gas plants. Our energy future is probably going to be a wide mixture of different technologies - increasing use of wind and solar, geothermal, bio-fuels, and nuclear. Each has a role to play.
It’s also not a given that our energy use will continue to increase ad-infinitem. Technology could change a lot about how we live. Smarter homes with adaptable, multi-zone heating. increased use of telecommuting as that technology matures. Improving efficiency in cars - today we can make a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 mpg average on E85 fuel, meaning it gets about 500 miles per gallon of petroleum pumped out of the ground. You’ll start seeing these on roads in 2 or 3 years.
In fact, trying to cut back on our energy sources and needs is probably counter-productive. What we need to manage the environment of an Earth with 9 billion people is wealth. That means lots of energy. For example, there’s a current problem with permafrost freezing, which is exposing decaying plant an animal matter and releasing large amounts of methane. It could potentially be a bigger problem than human-caused warming. And the only way to fix it might be to undergo very energy-intensive reclamation and cleanup programs to sequester the material. Energy might be needed to sequester carbon in other ways. Certainly the richer we are, the more we can afford to do.
THat’s my big problem with the current green movement. They also seem to equate environmentalism with cutting back, downsizing, reducing energy consumption, and in general advocating things that will have a significant impact on economic growth. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s the poorer countries that have the dirtiest environments. You need wealth to live cleanly. Much better to attack the problem with technology and economic growth.
I really need to start proof-reading more.
I meant permafrost thawing. Here’s an article about the problem.
You should provide cites when presenting new info like that. I did find this on the feasibility of seawater mining of uranium.
For thorium, I found something that makes it sound like some sort of panacea: :
Very interesting. Not at all sure how true any of this is.
Therefore when the companies lied about checking welds It was ok. when they faked safety documentation that were caught. They have a history.
And how is that a problem that makes nuclear worse than any other power source ? That’s just how companies act.