Why is the Left so afraid of nuclear power?

Great Debates
141

IIRC the waste is no more dangerous than the original ore on the order of 10,000 years. Of course thats a rough number and defining dangerous is not an exact science. And of course the heavy metals in coal waste remain dangerous forever.

I think we can A: better engineer storage of the stuff than mother nature who threw the stuff around willy nilly. And B: If the pyramids can last 4000 years, I think stuff buried deep underground in a desert can probably be contained a bit longer than that with some level of confidence.

And, as Ralph notes, its not like its some law we gotta bury it and forget it. We can monitor it, and there is even the chance that in the future it would be dug back up because its a valuable resource.

142

Apology accepted. Thank you (not that it really offended me).

143

The real problem I have with the negative assumptions about the proposed method of storage is that it is based on a lot of worst case, apocalyptical thinking.

Sure sure, we won’t come up for any uses for this at all, we won’t figure out how to recycle it* and in the mean time, Humans will descend into savagery and will someday be harmed by this stuff leaking out. Really good view of Humanity there. Either the poor pitiful Eloi will be harmed by this leaking into their ground water, or the Morlocks dig into it and are killed. No chance of anything else, eh?

Then we have some people proposing we dump nuclear energy for as yet unknown and undiscovered technologies, while apparently not willing to concede that we may likewise discover better technologies for dealing with this waste.

  • We’ve already discussed how much of it can be recycled, the problems are political, not scientific.
144

If our civilization is gone, then who is going to be hurt by the buried waste? If you are suggesting that we will revert to hunter-gatherers or something, how are they going to tunnel down a thousand feet out in the desert, break thru the stainless steel casks with walls six inches thick, and then start wallowing in the stuff?

They burned the casks in fires at six thousand degrees. The casks didn’t rupture. They hit the casks with a train locomotive. They didn’t rupture. Then dropped them onto spikes from up in the air, They didn’t rupture.

But a thousand years from now, some post-hominid is going to cut a hole in them with a stone tomahawk. How do you figure that?

Regards,
Shodan

145

What, you think everyone’s going to put up solar panels of their own will? Solar panels are also expensive, and they also represent a large start-up captial. If everyone is getting solar panels, it would have to be part of a large government project. Those sorts of things are outsourced to companies. Now what sort of company would be best for providing electricity to the general population? Hmm…

146

Good point. And that was funny :slight_smile:

And how will they get into those casks? Morlocks got mad meat eating cask breaking skillz…

Actually I can see why this bothers the left. The Eloi are the peaceful hemp wearing hippies of the future. And the Morlocks are the evil high tech meat eating capitalists of the future. By burying our nuclear waste we are just setting up the Morlocks to grab even more power in the future.

147

If you reprocess the fuel, not only does the absolute quantity of waste go down because you’re removing the really high level waste and reusing it, but the waste left over will be back to the level of radioactivity of the original ore within about 1000 years. In addition, you get to reuse a lot of the uranium and plutonium generated, so you don’t need to mine as much.

This is already being done in many countries, including in small amounts in the U.S.

Canada’s CANDU reactor is a good example of a safe, modern reactor. The CANDU uses heavy water as a moderator and a coolant. If cooling systems failed and the water boiled off or leaked out, the reaction would simply shut down.

In addition, the use of heavy water means that the CANDU can burn natural uranium - it doesn’t even have to be enriched. In addition, it can burn spent fuel from light-water reactors, extracting about 45% more energy from them and reducing the level of the worst radioactive compounds by a similiar amount. The CANDU can also burn plutonium from nuclear warheads, making it useful in non-proliferation.

Canada’s last CANDU reactor built at the Darlington power station in Ontario went way over budget - entirely due to continuous legal challenges and delays imposed by anti-nuclear activists. During that same period, Canada built a CANDU reactor in China - on time, and on budget. The difference was that the Chinese didn’t allow delays and legal challenges. In fact, Atomic Energy Canada has built 7 CANDU reactors for other countries since 1995, and every one of them finished on time and on budget. It’s only in North America that we allow the kinds of endless legal challenges and regulatory changes that ensnare nuclear power plant construction and drive up the costs.

CANDU reactors can also burn thorium, which expands the amount of mined fuel available to them by a large amount.

There are 45 CANDU reactors currently in service - with a perfect safety record. Six more are currently under construction in India and Romania.

Here in Alberta, we recently approved the construction of a 2.2 GW CANDU reactor just north of Edmonton. It’s slated to go online by 2017. I’ll live right near it, and I’ve got absolutely no problem with that.

How much would it cost? The new Advanced CANDU reactor has a construction cost of around 4 billion dollars. It puts out about 1 GW of power, with a 90% duty cycle, and has a lifespan of 60 years.

To give you an idea of how solar and wind stack up to this, three of these CANDU reactors, at a total cost of 12 billion dollars, could replace all the power generated by every wind and solar farm in the U.S.

About 100 such reactors, at a cost of about 400 billion dollars, could supply as much energy as all the oil imported from the middle east, every year, for the next 60 years.

148

Solar power.

149

http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/ohb-face/Documents/SolarFatality.pdf

took all of 30 seconds.

150

What, you think people don’t get hurt working with that? A moment’s google gets me a story about a man injured by a falling solar panel; no pictures in that story but no doubt they are out there.

151

Don’t go there, BEG. The shit that they used to make solar panels is/was pretty toxic. There’s stuff, I’m sure.

152

The last one was a two fer

Here is a perfect article. Deaths per power for different power sources. Guess what? Solar kills more people than Chernobyl. LMAO.

153

The sheer scale that solar needs to operate on pretty much guarantees it will cause a lot of human and environmental harm, compared to something as concentrated as nuclear power. A relatively small power plant has a much smaller footprint than vast fields of panels, panels on roofs, the factories to build them all, and so on and so forth. It’s always struck me as funny that “small is beautiful” types tend to like solar power, when in fact solar is a technology that requires lots of area.

154

I provided several examples. Please go back and re read.

155

I’m liberal, though hardly left wing. That said, I still haven’t fully made up my mind about nuclear power, although I researched it somewhat thoroughly more than 30 years ago. Yes, TMI had something to do with it, but closer to my home at the time, Marble Hill was being built – then abandoned. cite

I began worrying about nuclear power not so much because of TMI or Chernobyl (which as we know came several years later), but because of the way the plants in the US were being built.

From the link about Marble Hill, above:

The next paragraph goes on to say that the PSI’s (Public Service Indiana, the power company building Marble Hill) seemed to ultimately blame the Soviets for spreading propaganda.

I don’t have a cite, but I seem to remember another nuclear power plant being built about the same time (late 70s-early 80s) in the West in which the reactor had been been installed backwards! (I googled, and found this article, which seems to say it was San Onofre.)

The other major objection I have to this argument is finding objective information. It seems to me that both sides distort and spin the discussion to such an extent that it’s virtually impossible to know what’s really true.

Finally, a concern I have that I have not seen addressed yet in this thread is not what to do with the spent fuel, but what to do with the decommissioned reactors? They won’t run infinitely–at some point, they’ll have to be replaced. Here is the NRC’s page on decommissioning. I’m not saying decommissioning a nuclear plant can’t be done, or can’t be done safely, what I am saying though is it’s a part of the discussion that rarely seems to be brought about.

Now, having said all that, it seems to me that nuclear power probably is the best hope we have for the foreseeable future. I just want it done right.

156

Implementing solar would be just as corporationized as nuclear.

157

Wait. You’re trying to say that the death was caused by solar energy production? He could have been installing skylights and suffered the same injury.

But regardless, I think the claim was:

Bolding mine. Try again.

158

And? Injury is injury.

159

Fine. This is the SDMB. How about a cite? Educate me. Just how toxic are solar panels in comparison to spent nuclear fuel rods?

160

Not a good comparison, since there’s no way they are going to be stored and disposed of the same way. It doesn’t matter how toxic something is if it never comes into contact with anything.