This thread is moving quite fast. I was wanting to add something to the nuclear discussion before, feels like I have to since I seem to have been the only one articulating something against nuclear power - but I do not have the time to engage myself too much. My main point is still the nuclear waste, because I think it just stupid to produce a problem you don't know how to solve - but of course, I also see that the damage is already done. Thinking that nuclear power has not been funded by private investors but by tax payers, massively, and it still has so many problems to it, couldn't have all these billions been put into some more reasonable technology?
Quite a few nuclear power plants have been build by private contractors, especially in the US. It doesn't work out that good though, as centralization is significantly cheaper because of standardized installations.
Additionally, Nuclear waste is solved. It's a patchwork solution though, but so are most things in life.
Also the whole nuclear fear could cause people to amalgamate shitty, inneficient, dirty and bomb-making uranium reactors with thorium salts reactors, or even, Science forbid, fusion reactor.
Because the technology is either not ready or it has some caveats which are not easy to explain to the journalists.
It's mainly a jab against the Greenpeace guy that said that fusion was the same as fission, but bigger. It isn't, but you probably now that.
Please provide examples of said caveats. Ok, fusion is at this time a fairly large money sink, but the first Gen IV Thorium reactors are expected to go online in 2015 (People's Republic of China). Additionally, several reactor prototypes have been build, and worked satisfactorily, with no significant problems.
As for costs, again I'm sure than even counting the cost of the clean up (With estimates going into the tens of billions), Japan is a net winner since it didn't have to import costly gas and coal for its electricity generation.
You may be right, I don't know. I do not believe, that this was part of the plan though. You may say the Japanese have been lucky after all, but the point is that they may also been less lucky, and not much was missing. Why gamble if we don't need to.
Because at this moment, and in the past, we had 2 options, either gamble, and have a chance to win, or don't , and loose for certain. Fossil fuels are, and should be on the way out. Renewables aren't ready to take their place.
As a side note, putting all costs combined, (fuel, construction, dismanteling), even A Gen II plant is almost as cheap as coal.
As a side, the Japanese were pretty unlucky. The Fukushima incident was several time worse than the worst case scenario.
Also, I never got what was so special about nuclear waste. Sure, Plutonium last a million year, but arsenic is forever and will kill you just as easily.
I agree, but that is hardly an argument for producing more of that waste. Chemical waste may need and have different solutions, maybe they are similarly blank on as to how to deal with it as they are with depleted nuclear fuel, but that is then another, no less serious problem to be discussed elsewhere.
Someone posted a radiation chart that was illustrating that actually it may not be dangerous to have some nuclear waste in your private basement, if you don't go down there too often (sorry, should not have been cynic). The problem with the waste is however not only the radiation, but that some of the active material may be spread into soil, water, plants etc, that we finally ingest into our bodies, where it radiates and radiates and radiates.
Yup. It's not really problematic, unless it happens in massive amounts (in case you happened to be unlucky enough to live near one of the 2 major power plant failures in the world, in 50 years). You receive more radiation from Television than you get from nuclear power plants, even if you were living near one. A single Medical scans can be 10 to 100 times as intensive as the worst nuclear accidents combined.
Besides, research has pointed out that low levels of radiation are essentially harmless, so unless there's a major screwup and tonnes of polluted water are dumped into drinking water at once(like happens in the Tsernobyl accident), it doesn't matter.
Additionally, there's a difference between different types of nuclear waste. Not all nuclear waste is highly radioactive, and lasts as long. As a generic rule, the more dangerous it is, the shorter it lasts. So by the time nuclear waste made it's way to us, it will be almost perfectly harmless, unless all other chemical wastes that are building up in the ecosystem.
Now, regarding the question of the waste... Well, we have several ways to go about it: Breeder reactor to burn them, or just dig deep enough. Making an underwater storage deep below the abyss would be my favorite solution: geologically stable, far away from anything, with clays that sticks to radioisotopes. The main problem now is a lack of will, not anything else. That, and no one wants to store waste in its backyard.
Can't tell about breeders, only guess that there are problems or risks to like there are with thorium.
Helping you out here, but anyway.
The only problem with breeders are those shared by most nuclear reactors, and additionally the fact that nuclear waste can be refined into weapon grade plutonium. Widespread nuclear breeders could lead to proliferation of the waste, and ensuing nuclear weaponry. Chances of that happening are pretty low though, as making a nuclear warhead is slightly more complicated as often said.
There are other types of waste destroying reactors though. You got subcritical ones relying on a particle arcelerator to speed up nuclear decay, and other solutions have also been theorized.
The problem with geological solutions is that they all involve a huge extrapolation about things that we really don't understand. The cartoons they show on TV always look so simple and intuitive. But nobody really knows what lies below our feet. All of these images are elaborated guesswork and extrapolation. While we can answer some questions by falsifying the one or another hypothesis, we can never do that on the long-term, and we can never be sure that have not overlooked something. (I should say "they" because almost all of the research results is classified)
In Sweden, they have this idea that even though the storage place is humid (water comes in and leaves) the water that comes into contact with the nuclear waste is underground water and will always be because of the circulation pattern, and thus never meet the Baltic sea or the groundwater. But have they really seen every water passageway? Can they really extrapolate how these circulation systems, or in particular, that they never will connect with the shallow water, while they know that Sweden is moving (rising for that matter) but at the same time aren't even able to quantitatively predict this process into the future? I am not at all an expert on the Swedish case so my criticism may be weak, but I bet that someone who has some overview over the projects would know about the weak spots, because weak spots are part of the game in this business.
IIRC, the holes in which they store the nuclear waste are those that don't leak water. While it's not unlikely that over time, cracks will form, it's not a big deal. High level nuclear waste is coated in steel, concrete, more steal, some lead for good measure, then more concrete. Even if the water broke through that, and carried the waste through the mountains, and into the Baltic, the amount of radioactive pollution would be so small it can't even be measured. It will certainly be neglible compared to the amount of nuclear waste that was dumped in the sea in the past. (Deep ocean storage is a very good measure, actually).
In fact, let's assume a worst case scenario, where all of Sweden's nuclear waste is dumped into the Baltic. (10 reactors * 40 years lifetime * 30 tons a year(unprocessed)= 12 000 tonnes / 21,700 km3= 500kg/ km
3 = 0.5 gram per cubic meter.) That's potentially harmfull, but certainly not deadly. Besides, as such an incident is unlikely to occur within the first 1000 years, most of the more dangerous, highly radioactive materials will have already decayed.
Besides, it's not like nuclear power plants make massive amounts of waste. An average plant produces 3 cubic meters of waste a reprocessed waste a year. (Reprocessing = filtering out short term waste, which can be safely stored above ground, or used for industrial/medical applications). In the US, only 1% of high level nuclear waste comes from Nuclear power plants, all other waste is a result of their nuclear armament program.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that the scientists there are doing a remarkably good work there far better than in to most places (had I chosen to ramble about Germany instead, I could have made a much stronger point), but still none of them will give you a guarantee, and it is also not their job to do that. No one ever asks a geologist for a guarantee, simply because (s)he can't give you one.
Geology papers end with conclusions like "Therefore, we believe that ...." and they use interpretations of geophysical measurements into which incredible vagueness I won't even enter now. Speculation in a maximum likelihood sense is their job. If they did their job on assessing a construction ground correctly, and the house breaks down later, they can not be held responsible legally, because they did their job right anyway. I say this just in order to clarify that geoscience does not happen in a laboratory, where you can say: "we know this or that now with this or that uncertainty because we were able to control the conditions." The lab is the real world, and thus things are more difficult.
They give recommendations and those are then passed on to decision makers, who may or may not understand much about the basis of the recommendations.
And that's the best(=only) way to deal with it - but you can't tell me that this is a favourable situation, or one that anyone intended before. It's a patchwork that costs a lot of money and is full of risks.
((Geologists have been held responsible for not predicting a quake, but that one doesn't count))
Point is, the waste is there, and most is not a result of civilian power. Breeder reactors can easily take care of newly produced High level waste, while low and Medium level waste can be safely stored in the reactors, or at separate facilities. Adding to that, the Nuclear Industry is the only power Industry which takes full (or any) responsibilities for it's waste.
And as for costing money, Nuclear is still the cheapest Co
2 "neutral" powersource. ((And if you take in Co
2 reducing measures, the cheapest power source))
Someone posted a radiation chart that was illustrating that actually it may not be dangerous to have some nuclear waste in your private basement, if you don't go down there too often (sorry, should not have been cynic). The problem with the waste is however not only the radiation, but that some of the active material may be spread into soil, water, plants etc, that we finally ingest into our bodies, where it radiates and radiates and radiates.
I do know some parts of the UK like Cornwall are sited on granite with loads of Uranium in it, with the result being that basements and houses have to be built specifically to stop everyone being killed by radon gas. But actual nuclear waste? You'd want that underneath your basement, well 100 metres below!
What, Radon isn't that harmfull. Ok, fair, it accounts for a significant part of our radiation intake, and causes 21.000 death's a year in the US alone, but those can be avoided. Besides, you're not going to build houses on top of Nuclear fuel sites, and even if you did, radon accumulation would be significantly lower than natural sources.
Unrelated:
Russia is investing in floating Nuclear plants. I'm not sure that's such a bright idea.
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