Um … perhaps it’s the poisonous by-products that remain deadly for thousands of years?
I mean, really, how can you brush aside the serious problem of radioactive waste so casually?
And remember the fuel that nuclear power plants run on is not infinite, either. Already, the “prime” uranium ore is beginning to be depleted and plants are using lower-grade ores that are much, much less efficient.
Containment of radioactive wastes that remain dangerous for “thousands of years” is no different in principle than containment of chemical wastes that remain dangerous forever. It’s a political problem, not a technological one.
I don’t know about the cost but 265 sq. miles is approximately 0.023 Belgiums. So, they could probably even manage to squeeze it into Belgium itself without extraordinary upheaval if push-comes-to-shove. As xtisme noted, it would be easy to find very sparsely-used plots of land of this size in the Western U.S.
A square 256 miles on a side *is not *256 square miles.
A square 256 miles on a side is approx. 5.6 Belgiums.
I wonder if a sharp rise in the price of oil (as supplies run out) might result in the revival of local industry? Transport today (either by truck, rail, or ship) is dirt cheap-but if it became expensive, then local sources might be able to compete. Take New England (where I live). Up until about 1970, you could buy locally-made shoes, clothing, blankets, appliances, etc Now, all the stuff is made in China. If the cost of transport were to rise, perhaps we could revive local shoemaking-this MIGHT not be a bad thing!
This has always bugged me. Yes, nuclear waste is an issue but it’s only and engineering issue.
And the people who harp on it most don’t seem to pick up the ‘waste’ (in pollution and such from coal plants which are our main alternative. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Yes, but it would make shoes more expensive – make everything more expensive in terms of relative purchasing power. Economies of scale is the reason those big factories and long-distance hauling lines exist in the first place.
Because we’re capabale of thinking about the issue rationally.
I’m going to have to see some evidence of this, preferably not off an anti-nuke website.
My bolding
I really don’t think that economies of scale have much to do with it
Excellent point. I hadn’t noticed that Duckster’s original link said a square 256 miles on a side, not 256 square miles. It got mistranslated by Duckster and then the rest of us who responded used the erroneous number.
Indeed, it would take ~5.6 Belgiums in that case.
.by the time the last drop of oil has run out , I’m pretty sure nobody will even notice. Did you notice when whale oil disappeared?
The world will have adapted long before then. And probably wonder why we primitives continued our addiction to oil, when we already had nuclear technology and electric vehicles.
There is essentially no end to the amount of Uranium we have available to us. Unlike oil, which is created in special geology formations, uranium is found all through the Earth’s crust. We can extract enough uranium from seawater to provide all the earth’s power at current consumption rates for about 8000 years.
Yes, seawater extraction would be very expensive. It would increase the price of uranium fuel by several multiples. But the thing is, the cost of uranium is only a tiny part of the overall cost of nuclear power. Even doubling or tripling the price of uranium only causes the cost of nuclear power to go up a few percentage points.
In addition, our proven uranium reserves have less to do with how much easily accessible uranium there is, and more to do with the relative demand for it around the world. Increase demand, drive up the price by a factor of two, and you will see a new boom in Uranium exploration and extraction technologies just like we saw with oil.
As for the waste problem - Would you prefer your power plants to spit out their waste in dense, containable materials that can easily be sequestered, or would you rather have them blow their waste into the atmosphere in the form of CO2?
Some environmentalists have figured this out. The ex-head of Greenpeace, once a staunch anti-nuclear activist, is now lobbying for more nuclear power, because he understands the tradeoffs.
Any environmentalist who claims that global warming threatens to destroy the planet, and that we must spend trillions to stop it, yet who opposes nuclear power on the grounds that radioactive waste is a problem, is a fundamentally unserious person. Real life involves tradeoffs.
If you honestly believe that global warming is a major threat to the entire planet, how can you thumb your nose at the only energy source we have today which can possibly make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions within the next 50 years? It’s baffling.
I think that some of the more fanatical eco-facist types actually want us to have a major energy crisis and for our society to completely collapse back to some idealized agrarian state…a few million humans living in peace and harmony at a pre-industrialized level. Happy farmers, working and singing kumbya together in peace and harmony without all this evil industry and polluting technology. My sister is among these fringe types, and listening to them talk together sometimes is a bit chilling…its all about how, once the oil and coal technology collapses billions will die (none of THEM of course) and eventually the planet will recover from the terror and horror of humanity…and the good people of the world can go back to living as nature intended. Blah blah blah.
Kind of scary. The rest of the old school eco types I think block nuclear power because they were conditioned to block nuclear power…its sort of the same thing that makes folks knee jerk oppose stuff like smoking pot. They do it because they are conditioned to think that way from decades of being bombarded by propaganda SAYING they should do so.
-XT
When we completely run out of oil? Oil companies (by then…hopefully) would diversify their product and be in whatever form of energy we’re using at the time.
Middle Eastern countries would be in a VERY odd spot. It’s hard to say that they’d completely collapse and lose everything if they didn’t have this oil income. It’s also very easy to say that. You could also say that the Middle Eastern countries, with the money they’d have from oil as the oil boom is winding down, would be the early adopters of the new energy sources. The world is going to go as they go, for whoever holds the energy, holds the cards.
One thing is certain. I’m not wearing any pants.
For the record, I’m against nuclear power because there’s nowhere to put the waste. Give us a way to deal with the waste, and nuclear power it is.
I’d put money on THIS problem being the solution to the global energy crisis.
(What about space? It’s infinite! We could plot the orbits and shoot our toxic sludge out there around an inhabitable planet with enough atmosphere to have things in orbit. We’d have a small planet being an intergalactic dump. It’s almost crazy enough to work.)
I’d love to see some people that think this. I certainly can’t think of any, but the ones that might come closest are the ELF.
Even then, in their fanaticism, that’s not going to cut it.
In other words, this is a nice way of asking what in the fuck you’re smoking.
Isn’t there? How fussy are you on this point if, for example, sealing the waste in blocks of concrete and burying it in the heart of a dormant volcano in a region with a population density of less than one per square mile is not “nowhere” enough?
Well, if you ask me, I’m fussy enough to not want this stuff in/around us. The way I see it, even a dog won’t shit where it sleeps. We sleep on the earth, therefore, I don’t want the shit in my bed/earth.
If we can prove that this dormant volcano will not erupt a fun toxic magma cocktail and if we can prove that this waste won’t/can’t impact anyone that would happen across it, well, sure. Why not?
:dubious: I seriously doubt it…my guess is no matter what was proposed you’d find something wrong. What, specifically, is your issue with Yucca Mt. for instance?
As several posters above said, life is full of trade offs. You don’t want CO2 burning power plants? Well then nuclear is the only viable alternative. Don’t want either? Want a perfect world? Want clean, cheap, abundant energy with no waste, no risk? Well…it ain’t happening anytime in the forseeable future. So…pick the least bad and go with it. The least bad happens to be nuclear. Or going back and living in caves I suppose. Life is full of these little trade offs.
All I can say is…you need to get out more. 
-XT