You can’t quantify it but you think it’s ok to use the word “irrational”? As I stated previously, that is the weakest part of this debate. In reality, risks for most things are on a continuum that is very difficult to quantify and there are rational positions on both sides of the debate.
Keep in mind you are talking to a “pro-nuke”, I just think waste storage needs to be handled properly.
I have yet to see any data indicating that the problem of creating storage tanks that will not corrode within the lifetime of the waste has been solved. I’ve asked this one thing specifically multiple times, no answers yet. I’ve found lots of pages regarding research behind this problem and cited at least one.
Do you have a cite for the 400 years and the fact that we have storage containers that will last that long?
“Plutonium dust” is created as plutonium degrades as well as a byproduct of plutonium decay with other surrounding materials.
I don’t think the comparison is between nuclear waste and other hazardous chemicals, I think the calculation for any material involves lots of variables including:
How bad are the immediate effects
How long will the effects continue IF we are not able to properly contain it
Nuclear waste seems to have longer negative effects if not properly contained than some other chemicals that we already transport and use.
Is the process for cleaning up a nuclear spill the same as other chemical spills?
I assumed no. Can you provide a cite that indicates it is the same? I wasn’t able to find one.
You keep saying that spills are very localized, but if the waste has some percentage in liquid or dust form than it seems it would be difficult to contain those portions of it.
Based on what I have seen from the video’s, I would agree, the canisters do seem to be pretty sturdy.
I did post links regarding storage containers, but I’ll wait for your answers above regarding that same topic.
Really. Like, how many? If 500 new nuke plants are built, replacing 500 coal plants and over a 20 year period, one major nuclear waste accident occurs… I don’t see how the math supports you.
Obviously the absolute worst case scenario is complete spilling of all nuclear waste prior to reaching a storage facility, which obviously would be a serious problem.
I probably shouldn’t have even responded to that question, I don’t think it helped the debate.
I tend to be in the same camp as the OP re: nuclear power. But another counter-argument worth considering goes like this: We will not allow much of the world to develop high-tech nuclear power. Indeed, we’re actively preventing many countries from doing so. Additionally, the sheer initial cost of nuclear power will make it an unlikely solution in many parts of the world. The US is the country most likely to determine the development of energy technology, and if we go nuclear, we will retard the development of other solutions for the rest of the world. In short, since global warming is a global problem, it demands a global solution and nuclear simply cannot be that solution.
We recently went through a “Government report” on nuclear energy in Australia and the outcome was basically “it’s ok, but it will cost a bit”. This led to all sorts of media attention, including the state leaders saying stupid “never in our state” kind of rubbish. The only anti-nuke argument that I wasn’t sure about (ie that I haven’t seen rehashed over and over on the SDMB) was water usage. Water is a bit of a hot topic down here due to the awful drought, and I was wondering if anyone could compare the water usage in a typical nuclear power plant with the water usage in coal plants? What quality of water is required in either case?
Yes, but as absolute worst case scenarios go, it’s quite an unlikely one, and even if it did happen under the worst possible conditions, the damage wouldn’t be worse than, say, a major airplane crash in immediate deaths and a 0.05% increase in smoking in long-term deaths. To make it more damaging than the current deaths from conventional pollution, you’d have to propose such a maximized disaster once a week, ever week, for years on end, and that’s where you begin to slip away from being reasonable.
Anyway, that’s why I like numbers. Sal Ammoniac’s question, proposing a handling of nuclear waste that would be criminally negligent by modern standards (and presumably being the worst possible way to handle the problem) does deserve a response. How much damage would it cause? If a thoughtful disposal policy could reduce that damage by a factor of a million or a billion, would it be acceptable to you? If not, what would? Would anything?
RaftPeople, you totally copped out of answering Sal Ammoniac’s question on #115. Let me ask you this:
If you could choose between getting a raffle ticket with a 1 in 10 chance of winning $100 and one with a 9 in 10 chance of winning $1000, which would you get?
The point is that even a super worst case scenario with a nuclear train hitting a schoolbus full of terrorists in the middle of Manhattan killing a million people and leaving the entire state of New York uninhabitable for 10,000 years is nothing next to the certainty of massive ecosystem loss, agriculture collapse and world-level crisis that will come from a continuation of our carbon habit.
Accident vs accident is a straw man. You need to consider the entirety of the consequences of one alternative over the other. Even if fossil fuel energy generation had zero accidents (which is not the case, I personally lived the Tacoa explosion and I am sure there have been hundred others), it still has a human cost.
Yes, I know it is not all nuclear vs fossil. There are other alternatives. The reality, though, is that they are not ready for primetime. Nuclear is ready and tested and even better nuclear (pebble beds) is ready to be deployed. If we are to stop this environmental trainwreck (no pun intended) we are heading to with raising CO2 levels, nuclear is the ticket out (and let us just hope we are still in time) even if just for the first leg of the trip.
I believe I answered the question quite accurately, and I still believe the question (“what is the absolute worst case scenario”) and the answer doesn’t add anything to this debate.
In addition, Sal Ammoniac is under the impression that it would be fine to dump nuclear waste into steel barrels in the ground or in the ocean. Because he/she is making such radically different assumptions about the safety of nuclear waste than I am, it really didn’t seem worth investing more energy in even trying to determine what he/she may have really meant with that question.
For the sake of review, this is where we are:
Some posters feel that any opposition to nuclear fuel is “irrational”
While I am myself pro-nuclear (with good waste storage), I disagree that opposition is “irrational”
In addition, based on what I can find, the waste storage container problem has not been solved
Sam Stone says the waste only really lasts 400 years and that the storage container problem has been solved (we are waiting for a cite on this)
Sal Ammoniac thinks it’s ok to dump nuclear waste in steel drums in the ground or in the ocean
Given the dangers of nuclear waste, it is my “rational” conclusion that the storage containers should last until the waste is safe.
Finally, consider the numbers you used in your question and then consider this scenario:
Storage containers don’t last as long as waste is dangerous
In the future most of the containers fail
Waste material conaminates the soil and potentially water in that area
This could be a large problem years in the future, I’m not sure how to map that into your lottery ticket numbers vs co2. Can you show me how you would assess the odds of it happening to various levels of danger and do the same for co2? I am only able to go on gut feel, but I would be happy to consider whatever math you feel is reasonably accurate.
This sort of claim is made quite often in these debates, but I haven’t seen much evidence that it is true. When I was at a conference on energy issues a few years ago, one of the speakers talked of a study that compared the economics of nuclear power in Japan, France, and the U.S. The conclusion was that the reason nuclear power was more advantaged (and thus doing better) in Japan and France was not because it was cheaper there than in the U.S. but rather because the fossil fuel alternatives were more expensive than in the U.S.
And, unfortunately, when talk of pushing nuclear power comes up, what seems to come out of it are proposals for large subsidies, the government taking over insurance risk, etc. I have a hard time understanding the need for such subsidies for what is now a quite mature technology. I’d prefer to see the playing field leveled not by subsidizing nuclear but rather by removing subsidies from (and imposing carbon taxes on) fossil fuel sources. In other words, rather than foisting the nuclear solution onto the public, why don’t we make some attempt to let the market understand the costs associated with carbon emissions and let the right mix of solutions (involving conservation and efficiency as well as different energy sources) emerge?
As for the dangers of nuclear, I agree that they are to a fair degree overblown and that people hold nuclear to a higher standard than, say, coal…which we know with a pretty good degree of certainty kills many thousands of people a year. On the other hand, I do think there are some real issues here…of which nuclear proliferation worries me the most, with terrorist attacks on plants as second, and nuclear waste disposal and plant accidents of some concern but less so.
Did you really think **SA ** was advocating wanton abandonment of nuclear waste?. Do you think I am proposing sending nuclear trains through downtown Manhattan? They are just ridiculous worst case scenarios to drive home the point that even the worst case accidents pale in comparison to the daily reality of tons of greenhouse gases released on the atmosphere.
There is no perfect storage for nuclear waste. We must trust that whoever will be there when our current storage starts to fail will have the good sense to repackage those wastes in the case they don’t have a better solution then.
If you think that burying waste under a mountain is worse than pumping it into the atmosphere, which is what we are doing with our fossil fuel waste, I want to hear your reasons why.
I have no interest in reading through the entire thread so forgive me if this has been mentioned. I was amazed to catch this BBC documentary on TV only last night.
The premise of the program was:
*On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up. Forty-eight hours later the entire area was evacuated. Over the following months there were stories of mass graves and dire warnings of thousands of deaths from radiation exposure.
Yet in a BBC Horizon report screened on Thursday, a number of scientists argue that 20 years after the accident there is no credible scientific evidence that any of these predictions are coming true.
The anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident in April saw the publication of a number of reports that examined the potential death toll resulting from exposure to radiation from Chernobyl.
Environmental group Greenpeace said the figure would be near 100,000. Another, Torch (The Other Report on Chernobyl), predicted an extra 30,000-60,000 cancer deaths across Europe.
But according to figures from the Chernobyl Forum, an international organisation of scientific bodies including a number of UN agencies, deaths directly attributable to radiation from Chernobyl currently stand at 56 - less than the weekly death toll on Britain’s roads. *
As the article discusses the program presented explanations for the failure of the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model of radiation exposure.
It certainly stimulated me into wanting to find out more about the subject of radiation exposure.
No one said it shouldn’t be handled properly. No one is denying that there are risks. The point I’ve been making is that the risk to the world of nuclear waste is wildly overblown, and subsequent demands on the industry are irrational because they are based on the hype and fear generated by people with an axe to grind. Thus, we have a situation where people would prefer the status quo of blowing millions of pounds of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the air every day, because they can’t be guaranteed that our alternative energy source won’t cause some indeterminate localized problems 25,000 years from now.
If you define ‘lifetime of the waste’ as “until it stops being radioactive”, then you’ve got a long wait. If you take a more reasonable stand and say, “At least until it’s no more radioactive than the original ore it came from”, then we have a manageable engineering problem.
As for being able to build a canister that can contain it that long, surely you don’t think that’s a problem? Hell, the Romans built Amphora that kept wine isolated from the ocean for hundreds of years.
This thread has described numerous plans for the disposal of waste. Canada’s plan is to drop it in the Canadian shield, never to be seen again. You can even wait for a few years for the most lively radiactivity to decay away, then mix the the rest of the stuff in with the tailings from uranium mines and put it back where it came from. Another plan is to vitrify the material, encase it in steel, and drop it in subduction zones in the deep ocean.
But for my money, there’s nothing wrong with just stacking it in a stable geological area, such as Yucca mountain. My guess is that one day the stuff will actually be valuable again. In any event, our technology will improve over time, and if Yucca becomes a problem in 300 years, well, I’d rather deal with that then with technology 300 years advanced from where we are today than try to stop runaway global warming in 50 years.
And how does the dust get out of vitrified waste stored underground in sealed casks?
Alarmist nightmare scenarios aside, here’s what would happen in most likelihood if a canister failed in Yucca and somehow started leaking - inspections or sensors would detect it, alarms would go off, and a cleanup crew or robots would go in and fix the problem. If the whole repository started coming apart in unexpected ways in 50 years, well, we’d just have to transport the stuff out and put it somewhere else. In 50 years it would also be measurably less dangerous to handle than it was when it was put in there in the first place.
Let me turn this around - you keep demanding cites and explanations for all your concerns - how about you site some plausible scenarios for disasters worse than the potential disaster of global warming, or even a disaster that could threaten any major population? What exactly is the risk you are worried about, and the consequences that would come about if your fears were realized?
Does it? Hiroshima is once again a thriving city. Even the area around Chernobyl is recovering nicely.
As for immediate effects, you’ll have to show me a potential scenario for nuclear power that could even come close to the thousands of people that die each year due to conventional power sources, or the thousands killed in the Bhopal disaster, which 23 years later is still a heavily contaminated site - and which didn’t stop us from using deadly industrial chemicals.
It’s similar to other spills. A search for ‘Radioactive spill’ turns up all kinds of hits. The difference is that the waste matter is disposed of as radiological waste, which has different procedures than other chemical wastes.
Not that difficult. Earlier I linked to a weapons plant that has blown millions of pounds of uranium dust into the atmosphere. The stuff is heavy. It settles out of the air pretty quickly. So the stuff wound up contaminating a 1050 acre area around the plant. That is being cleaned up now, at a cost of about a billion dollars. How will they clean it up? By searching for the material and scooping it up and putting it in bags, would be my guess. They have an acceptable threshold of contaminants per area, so they’ll keep cleaning until random sampling throughout the area shows the concentration to be lower than the minimum threshold. Then they’ll separate out the radioactive material, and store it as radiological waste.
Can you imagine a crash or terrorist attack that could aerosolize vitrified waste and inject it in the air high enough that could could leave the immediate region? I can’t.
Yep.
Btw, Here’s an interesting article on waste disposal. The article points out that MOX fueled reactors recycle the uranium and plutonium out of the waste. It is removed from the waste by reprocessing it, then fed back into the reactor and burned. This makes the resultant waste less dangerous by a large factor.
I don’t think I missed SA’s point at all. Here I will answer the questions above again:
Lots of bad stuff could and most likely would happen if we just dumped the waste in steel containers in a hole in the desert or in the ocean and while it may not be that the bad effects reach every corner of the planet, they would certainly be substantial.
What I inferred from SA’s questions, was that he/she does not think that dumping nuclear waste in steel drums in a hole in the desert or into the ocean poses a serious problem.
SA’s worst case scenario was putting nuclear waste in steel drums into a hole in the ground or into the ocean and he/she doesn’t think that would pose a problem.
I disagree.
If you agree with SA then tell me and we can agree to disagree on that point. I don’t think it’s a defendable position but more importantly, if someone holds that view, I don’t think there is anything I could cite that would make them change their mind.
Something to consider: If it just isn’t that big of a deal, why are we spending what is estimated will be $50billion to cleanup Hanford?
Why have studies shown an increase in cancer rates in the surrounding counties?
Why have studies shown an increase in mortality to cancer in the Oregon counties exposed to the Columia river?
Why not solve it now before we bury it? Is 5 or 10 extra years (if that’s what it takes) of co2 worth burying storage containers that will corrode and leak?
They aren’t the same types of waste and their risks take different forms.
I’m fine with burying waste if it’s in a storage container that won’t leak before the waste is safe.
I don’t see any reason for the water usage to be higher in a Nuclear plant compared to a coal, or other fossil fuel plant. Water is used in two applications, cooling the plant and in steam turbines. The water used for cooling is simply discarded back into the river whence it came. Some (most?) plants release the steam used back into the atmosphere, which I suppose counts as a loss. I can’t imagine that being a significant amount of water usage, but if the water situation is that dire the system can be a closed loop. In other words, the steam used will be cooled to water and reused.
Come on, RaftPeople, you just keep stepping around the point. The point remains that the way we are disposing of fossil fuel waste products is irresponsible and causing very serious worldwide effects that affect every human being, plant and animal on this planet. Nuclear worst case scenarios would be one-of affairs that could never even get to affect a one-thousandth of the world population and have absurdly low probabilities of coming to happen. “Normal” nuclear accidents are very localized affairs that we are very well prepared to handle.
Yes, nuclear waste is a serious concern, nobody is arguing that. Nuclear power generation is a path with costs and risks. But the alternative, continuing our carbon habit, is much worse (by orders of magnitude, I believe).
If you have any numbers that show the human cost of nuclear power generation in 10, 100, 1000 years and how they stack with the human cost of carbon power generation, please show them and we can make an informed decision.
You are making a gross assertion that is backed up by ‘thousands of experts’.
Because, according to you (and thousands of experts), we are heading for an environmental disaster, we need to start building shed loads of Fission plants that are a darn site nastier than than something that is essential plant food.
Yesterday I was listening to the BBC World Service and a Prof of Biology from London was saying that this environmental disaster stuff is religious:
Mega disaster - Noah’s Flood
Reason, as punishment for sins
Solution we must atone
and suffer
Actually London and other UK cities used to suffer from ‘smog’, not any more they don’t.
The Scandinavians used to bleat about UK sourced acid rain, well they don’t any more - it seems that pine needles are rather acidic.
So what if sea levels rise ?
There is plenty of higher land.
If anyone thinks that nuclear fission is safe, then I suggest that they spend a year on Woomera or Bikini.
Also the Chernobyl stuff is distinctly suspicious.
Much is being made of the idea that we won’t know if the storage casks will last as long as the waste is hazardous. The waste at Yucca Mountain won’t just be dropped in a deep hole and covered over. The casks will be kept in tunnels and accessible. They will be monitored and tested. The waste will be removed and transferred to new casks if the old ones are failing, or if we decide to reprocess the waste in the future.
Properly, sure. I think the problem is that the anti-nuke types define “properly” as “in such a way that there is a 100% guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong under any conceivable circumstances for a hundred thousand years, and until then we can’t do anything.” Which is unreasonable, especially if the status quo is unacceptable.
The argument is that problems with nuclear energy are not significantly worse than problems with fossil fuel, and in many ways are better. Apply the standards that the anti-nukes use for nuclear energy to anything else. You can find some nightmare scenario that will show that people will die there, too. What if someone bombs Hoover Dam? What if wind farms interfere with the migration patterns of the Western Boobie? What if there is a chemical spill at a factory that makes solar panels? What if geo-thermal vents cause earthquakes in California?
Until someone answers these questions, we can’t proceed. So let’s continue as we are. Right?