What standard of proof would satisfy you? One geologist’s opinion that it won’t happen within ten years? Ten opinions that it won’t happen within a hundred years?
So… You think the nuclear waste problem is more dangerous than Global Warming?
The thing about anti-nuke activists is that they always try to sound reasonable by saying things like, “Just solve the waste storage problem, and I’m there.” But of course, they utterly reject any proposed solution, no matter how safe it is. Their idea of a ‘solution’ is to make the waste somehow leave the earth. Without, of course, actually doing anything to transport it off the earth. So they want magic.
Remember how many idiots tried to scuttle the Cassini mission to Saturn because it had a small reactor aboard? You simply can’t reason with those types.
Our only hope is that the rest of us get sick of listening to them and let them wail and moan about the horrors of nuclear power while we get on with the necessary job of building nuclear plants. That’s what France did. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear. The enviros went bananas - and were completely ignored.
When people start seeing $500 electricity bills, and then hear that their cousins who get their electricity from nuclear power only pay $150, the public sentiment in favor of nuclear power will change, and the anti-nuke activists will find their rantings falling on increasingly deaf ears.
Then maybe we’ll have a chance to actually do something about global warming.
By the way, I’ll happily live next to a nuclear plant. I’d much rather live next to a nuclear plant than almost any other kind of large power production facility. In fact, I’m an advocate for Alberta to build a nuclear plant to provide steam for the Tar Sands instead of using CO2 generating natural gas. Such a plant would be built where I live, and I think it would be great.
I have pictures of that launch, though you can’t see much because I was using a crappy digital camera. There were guys around me who had zoom lenses and tripods and stuff. What really annoyed me was that I wasted all my exposures on the rocket when five minutes later I could have gotten an incredibly cool shot of a security helicopter silhouetted against the full moon.
Anyway, I figure if an unprecedented environmental disaster was going to strike Florida, I may as well be in the middle of it.
This is quite an interesting discussion. I think one can look at the example of Nauru a nation that was supposed to have set aside part of the profits from Phosphates to live on when the source was exhusted and they didn’t. Now the nation is a mess.
It will be interesting to see if trends like suburbanization will reverse. The car made the suburbs possible and suddenly cities like Chicago lost almost a million people to the suburbs. Would these people move back in?
Yucca Mountain? After reading a little bit on it (the Wikipedia page, that is), if it’s not going to impact the environment, then I’m for it. I’m slightly leery because it’s only a hundred miles from Vegas, but if that’s the best we can do, then that’s the best we can do. My concern, after reading a couple more websites is the impact of global warming and possible changes that we could have no control over. Outside that, then Yucca Mountain it is.
Of course life is full of trade offs. Try a few of them. They won’t kill ya. 
So, given this new information that I’ve provided you, like my blessing (which you asked for), what’s there to say? I’d rather it on another planet, but it’s as good as on another planet deep inside ours and as good as we can possibly/feasibly get, then there ya go.
No need to be reasonable about it!
Sorry, would you prefer I be more rabid?
There’s gotta be a really bad top-grossing movie in that.
Sure, why not? A bunch of terorrists drive in, kill all the inept guards (well, except the crooked one who helps the terrorists, who gets killed by them anyway), bring in heavy machinery to smash apart the steel-and-concrete “coffins” of highly radioactive waste and begin a highway run to Vegas where they intend to blow up their trucks and irradiate the city for, in the words of one scientist character, “50,000 years!”
And the only one who can stop them is a Nevada State Highway Patrolman who just came off a suspension for seeking rough justice by playing by his own rules…
Call it Deathrun.
And it’s the highway patrolman’s last day before retirement. And his plucky daughter works at Yucca.
I smell blockbuster.
I say we change the name of the movie to Barrels of Terror.
I was thinking along the lines of the radiation leaking and turning people into zombies running amok in the streets of Vegas and zombifying their victims, and nobody notices because gamblers are such a zombified breed to begin with!
But what the hell, that could be worked in too. The Highway Patrolman just has to turn Zombie Fighter in the second act.
Heh. I think this thread is just about closed.
Nuclear waste makes me a bit nervous, blasting it into space is expensive and potentially dangerous.
Bury it and who knows what will happen. Radioactive Mineral Water ?
Who knows, the Fusion experiment might work
- failing that we can generate energy from tidal
Here’s a somewhat more optimistic view (or not, depending on your POV) of what happens when the world runs out of oil.
No, mods! Please! No! Then it can never become a Zombie Thread!
Oh, don’t be such a baby. You’ll be whining to me to save you when the zombie threads come to eat your brains.
…sweet…sweet…braaaaaainssss
Now that’s one scenario I can’t see. Water aquifers are replenished by rainwater soaking into the ground due to gravity. If the current theory of liquid petroleum’s “original cause” is correct, there is a finite amount on the planet and it is not being recycled the way water is (evaporation, condensation, precipitation…).
I can see some seepage from nearby petroleum deposits, but those could be tapped immediately by sinking more wells. And they usually are. That’s not the same as the hydrological cycle, which is perpetual.
Although I recall one idea that the source of some petroleum is not dinosaurs but processing by specialized bacteria. If that is true, it sure would change things.
Sorry I’m late to this thread, but it seems like the ultimate disposal of nuclear waste would not be to put it underground or in orbit, but shoot it into the sun. Since the sun is a nuclear factory already, it would be sorta like coals to Newcastle, no?
Why do we want to get rid of nuclear waste? It might be useful someday. There is plenty of Federal desert out there. Just pack the stuff into glass bricks and stash them somewhere at White Sands, or in the far reaches of Nellis. We might need the stuff in a hundred years or so. After all, the Romans thought all the petroleum they got when they were digging for water was “waste” as well. Look what a difference 1500 years makes. 