What's the problem with nuclear?

Great Debates
21

Coal mining is a hazardous industry which does result in long term pollution. I’m from Southwest Pennsylvania, and my best friend is an archaeologist who surveys sites coal companies want to mine in West Virginia. Here in Pennsylvania, we routinely have problems with subsidence from mines which were closed decades earlier, including along one stretch of I-70, if I recall correctly. Property owners have little or no resitution under state law. Mining accidents also aren’t uncommon, and there have been a few since the rescue of the Quecreek miners this summer. Things have gotten a lot better since the 30’s and 40’s thanks to OSHA, but it’s still hazardous, dirty work. Strip mining is also one of the most common ways of mining, if I recall. I think companies are required to do some reclamation after mining is complete, and if any of you find yourself in Greensburg, PA, Twin Lakes Park is an example of how reclamation can be done beautifully, but it still takes a while for the land to recover. In the meantime, burning coal also produces significant pollution, including greenhouse gasses.

Nuclear energy does require care, and there’s no way I’m in favor of building a nuclear power plant on a fault line, as I understand they tried to do in California. On the other hand, my father was at Three Mile Island installing a communications system during the accident. He didn’t receive any more radiation than normal, and showed no ill effects. He’s in his 70’s now, and neither he, nor my mother, nor my brothers and I have ever had any trace of cancer. That may be due to good genes, but I recently saw an article in the Sunday paper which indicated that the area around TMI did not have higher than normal cancer rates. For what it’s worth, there is also a herd of deer on TMI which apparently suffered no ill effects during the accident. Actually, they may have done well because the technicians would feed them through the fence.

Excuse me. I’ve gone so far out on a limb without a cite here in GD that I can see the leaves quivering. I am, obviously, in favor of nuclear energy in that I don’t see it as being any worse than any other form of power generation. I am aware of the long term storage implications, but, as noted, coal mining also does long term damage. I’d love to see more use of wind, geothermal, and solar energy, but in my neck of the woods, solar energy is a bit difficult to come by in November. They’re also harder to make money off of. Oh, and don’t ask my opinion of The China Syndrome.

I’ll now go and don my flame-retardant suit.
CJ

22

Spoken like a true city boy who needs to get out more! :smiley: Apparently, if there’s no strip mall on it, the land ain’t worth nuthin’.

I’m an environmentalist, and I love the wilderness; I don’t think it’s too much to ask of our society that we set aside a fair chunk of our territory, and just leave it alone, if for no other reason than as a concession to our lack of complete and perfect wisdom about how to “use” it.

Having said that, however, I think that nuclear power is the least damaging form of energy production. Yes, it produces some waste that has to be handled with some care, but it’s miniscule compared to the waste products of coal mining and coal burning. Yes, a nuclear plant can suffer from accidents (but don’t go by the Chernobyl experience - that plant had no containment structure around the reactor, for Christ’s sake!), but in this country, at least, nuclear plant accidents have killed fewer people than Teddy Kennedy’s driving.

Most of the alternatives proposed by the anti-nuke forces simply aren’t practical, at least not yet. Wind, large-scale solar, tide power, and so on, all sound like nice ideas, but can’t make a dent in our energy requirements, and often come with their own environmental downsides, to boot. (I refer to “large-scale solar” to differeniate it from some of the excellent solar housing designs that are now appearing - those make a lot of sense.)

23

Nuclear is a very good fuel - I think it is slightly more expensive then oil right now over the lifespan of the PP. It is a very good alternitive fuel to help stabilize oil price fluxiations.

Also it is very clean in the respect that all you get released into the air is some steam from the cooling towers - this is very good for places with bad air quality.

on the down side there are lots of very loud people screamign how their children will glow in the dark after eating a 3 eyed fish caught near the N.P.P… There is a very loud group trying to shut down the indian point NPP just north of the city.
You can check out the other side by visiting:

You can see it’s the typical fear mongering.

24

Well, well, well,… here we go again!

1) Most of the governments can’t control the radioactive stuff.
2) They do not know where to put it afterwards.
3) Their armies has no control over the situation.

You ask for a cite???
I do not have one, because I am too lazy too Google.
If You understand Finnish You can go to this cite: http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/teksti/juttu.asp?id=20021117OL1

So,
last night it was reported that one Finnish (of course Finnish, maybe my daughter) girl and a Swedish guy, broke into/got into a British nuclear Trident-sub-marine in the (military?) base in Davenport, in Plymoth, England.
They just made a hole in the fence, went inside the submarine and waited. They did not destroy anything, or something like that.
(I would have painted “bin Laden was here!!!” on the walls, but I am crazy anyhow).

Then they put the alarm on and got arrested. Their point was, that any terrorists can get into a Trident-submarine.

This after that Blair himself has put England of highest alert against terrorist activities.

I hereby thank the organisation “Trident Ploughshares”. The only risk there is left, is that maybe we learn something out of this.

25

[Montgomery Burns]

I think I’ll call him…Blinky.

[/Montgomery Burns]

And I’m with Early Out in hoping you were joking about that empty land in between the coasts, december. Much of that is what we call “farmland”, which produces a substance known as “food”. You may be familiar with it. Much of the non-arable land is either already being used for toxic waste “storage”, is being used for Native American stora…er, reservations, or (sadly) both. Plus the occasional military base/bombing range.

26

Nuclear Waste:

We could just stick in a desert mountain in Arizona. And we can build transport containers for it that are unbreakable under the circumstances it would be exposed to.

No mess, no fuss.

27

We can build 'em out of the same stuff we use to make our unsinkable ships.

28

That was overly sarcastic on my part. I apologize.

29

Early Out and jr8 – I’m an environmentalist, and my usual vacation is hiking. I’m particularly fond of the desert.

Having said that, there is a huge amount of vacant, useless land out there. The amount of space needed to dig a deep hole and store 1600 tons of waste a year is a just nothing compared to the amount of land available. Much of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and even California is vacant. I have seen it from the air. This land has no practical uses. Building a nuclear waste repository would not appreciably reduce the land available for hiking.

30

Not just any old land will do, though. It has to be a rock formation with very low permeability and high thermal conductivity so that the temperature of the stored waste would be absorbed by the rock instaed of building to the point of container fauilure. Even still, the rock formations could come under stress and fracture or allow water intrusion. Salt domes are a possibility, as they would be (theoretically) self-sealing in case of ground motion and free of water. Another one is tuff, ancient volcanic ash deposits. Nevada’s Yucca mountain is one proposed spot, but they’re not 100% sure there’s no volcanic activity in the area.

Problems like these have delayed the building of any permanent disposal facility in the US; the Department of Energy was ordered to have one by 1998 and couldn’t come through. In the meantime, Native Americans have to live with our dangerous waste in “temporary” repositories.

31

Note that Mother Nature put the radioactive material in just any old land. Yet, I’ve not heard of any disasters due to natural radioactive material occurring in the wrong type of formation.

We take the stuff out and will now be returning it to a safer location. Even if we store it in a less than ideal location, we’d still be safer than before it was mined.

32

dump in in an ocean … at a subduction point… few thousand years from now it will be the least radioactive rock in the area and it will be back at home.

33

Uranium isn’t found in nature in its elemental state. It’s found in ores combined with other elements in quantities of less than 0.1%. It has to be substantially processed to obtain pure uranium.

Even then, it only contains 0.7% of U-235 which is fissionable in a nuclear reactor; the remaining 99.3% is unusable U-238. So we separate out the U-235 to make “enriched uranium”. The waste we’re left with is very different than the material we started out with.

34

And while we’re at it lets just start dumping waste oil into the oceans, hell we drill it out of the ocean floor all the time, lets just put it back.
:rolleyes:

35

Nuclear power should be used a great deal more than it is. The reason why it’s not is largely political and emotional IMO. The reason why there have been so many safety hazards and concerns about current nuclear plants is that all of them are unique and custom made. If we were to use current reactor technology (Pebble Bed Reactors for instance) and a thorougly tested and standardized design the costs and safety issues would plummet. The only reason that fossil fuels are as cheap as they are is because governments subsidize them and our infrastructure is built around them. While true that the waste from nuclear power is highly toxic and long lasting, it does have the benefit of being compact and small in volume. The results of fossil fuel use, from acquisition, mining,transport and use are just as catastrophic but MUCH harder to localize and remedy. Let’s use an analogy… say you have a house… in this house is one loaded gun… very lethal but you know where it is… it is contained and locked away and is no danger as long as it remains locked safely away in an approved location. Let us say you have another house, now… there is nothing as supremely lethal as a gun in this house… but let’s say it has lead paint, asbestos insulation, bad wiring, plumbing that backs up on you, borders a major road with heavy traffic and the roof leaks. Which house would you rather live in? As much as ‘green’ energy sources sound appealing… they cannot provide for our current power needs much less our future ones IMO. I would rather live in a world with safe, standardized nuclear power than in a world clogged with the result of burning hydrocarbons and as I see it those are the only real choices we have before us.

36

There was a story on the radio this morning about a windmill in East Anglia which provides power for 15,000 homes, which raised some negatives in the wind power issue. Opponents of the windmill complain that it blights the landscape, although one rarely hears good things about the aesthetic value of other power plants (and personally, I think windmills are quite nice-looking). A more serious point is that windmills are really very noisy, which limits where they can be situated in relation to populated areas.

OTOH, if we put them out in that “huge amount of vacant useless land”, I doubt they’d bother anyone…

37

Actually, drachillix, seafood comes from the ocean. Oil comes from oil wells some of which are *beneath the ocean floor. :smiley:

  • And, it would be feasible to store waste oil into depleted oil wells (if waste oil disposal were an ecological problem.)
38

Nuclear Power is one of the great Hot Button issues. I am, myself, in favor of well-regulated and carefully run Nuclear Power. It’s the ideal submarine power system, and has been used for almost half a century by the U.S. Navy with no problems and the USSR/Russian Naby mostly safely. France has run a standardized Nuclear program pretty well. But:

1.) Despite years of effort (and a lot of lack of effort) there still is no proper depository for waste. And, dammit, there should have beeb ages ago. It’s not just political – it’s laziness and wishful thinking. Too much of our waste is still sitting in “temporary” storage pools.

As for what can happen in poorly-planned storage , consider the case of Chelyabinsk – far worse than Chernobyl, but much less publicized.: http://www.logtv.com/chelya/

2.) The potential for disaster in the case of a mishap is astoundingly high. The economics of power transmission dictate that power plants have to be placed near the cities they serve, but the potential for damage if an error occurs is correspondingly high. Yet, despite assurances that nothing can go wrong, poor judgment and cost-cutting have given us the close calls of Windhurst, Brown’s Ferry, Three-Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Being told that these are hundred-year events doesnm’t cut it when so many occur in so short a time (and there have been a great many others.
3.) The nuclear industry has had such a sleazy approach to criticism that it’s hard to take them seriously. They denied any problem at Chelyabinsk, condemning Zhores Medvedev when he even mentioned Chelyabinsk (which compelled him to write the book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals to defend himself, ages before the story was corroborated by the Soviet Union). They repeated the mantra that “No civilian has ever been harmed by a commercial nuclear plant incident”, which neatly stepped around the facts, like the death of three military workers in the SL-1 disaster. They respond to critics in the sleasy way of attacking them on minutiae, like the naming of reports, rather than responding to the nature of the criticism.

Nevertheless, I believe that the Nuclear Industry can be handled well. There was a very interesting artcile in Scientific American many years back about a natural fission reactor in Africa, with no harm to the surrounding environment. The idea of dumping nuclear waste into subduction zones has been suggested before, but I tend to agree with SF writer Robert Heinlein that we’re probably going to want that highly-enriched “waste” someday, just as we want the “waste” that resulted from refining petroleum in the 1860s today.

39

There’s one thing that’s always puzzled me, and I’m hoping some Doper can enlighten me about it: if the waste fuel from a nuclear reactor is still highly radioactive, why is it “waste?” If it’s still pumping out large numbers of decay particles, why can’t it still be used to boil water?

40

Well, one can recycle the waste in a breeder reactor to make more fuel, which greatly reduces the volume, but breeder reactors are slightly more dangerous than normal ones, and they make plutonium for the fuel. Japan and France have these, but the United States hasn’t built one due to political reasons.