Accidents dim hopes for green nuclear option

[jpak]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0719/p04s02-usgn.html

As concern about global warming has swelled in recent years, so has renewed interest in nuclear energy. The main reason: Nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases tied to climate change, at least not directly.

New reactor designs make plants safer than those operating in the days of the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island decades ago, advocates say. And there's no group of OPEC countries in unstable parts of the world controlling the main raw material – uranium.

But that was before an earthquake in Japan this week rattled the Kashiwazaki nuclear power plant. The plant's operator "said it had found more than 50 problems at the plant caused by Monday's earthquake," The New York Times reported, adding:

"While most of the problems were minor, the largest included 100 drums of radioactive waste that had fallen over, causing the lids on some of the drums to open, the company said.... The company said that the earthquake also caused a small fire at the plant, the world's largest by amount of electricity produced, and the leakage of 317 gallons of water containing trace levels of radioactive materials into the nearby Sea of Japan."

Meanwhile, accidents at two German nuclear reactors last month prompted German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel to call for the early shutdown of all older reactors there, reports Bloomberg News.

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[Taverner]

1. I keep saying this, Nuclear is no safe alternative

And in the end the question comes up: what do you do with the waste afterwards?

[Dogmudgeon]

3. "What do you do with the waste afterwards?"

What do we do with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuels?

What do we do with all the other pollutants from fossil fuels?

What do we do with the toxic metal by-products of semiconductor manufacture?

What do we do with the airborne uranium and thorium fly-ash from fossil fuels, almost 50 tons per year per gigawatt from Appalachian coal?

What do we do with the oceans themselves, which contain 30 milligrams of uranium per cubic meter, 3 PPM?

But back to your question:

We could store it in a mountain. We are already building one, but hundreds of groups are working to prevent it from opening.

We could recycle it. It's illegal in the USA, to the delight of both the uranium industry and environmentalists. With much less spent fuel around, there would be less to stoke fear with.

We could transmute it. That's still expensive and wasteful, but it can be done.

We could even put back the spent uranium where we found it, only with less radioactivity.

But why do we have to live in fear of something that has a better safety record than everything else?

:shrug:

--p!

[Taverner]

4. None of that is germane to the question

What do you do with the waste? What do you do with by-products, such as the irradiated water?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a possibility - but it's a technology that needs more R & D.

It's not ready for prime time.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. I mentioned several possibilities

We could store it in a mountain. We are already building one, but hundreds of groups are working to prevent it from opening.

We could recycle it. It's illegal in the USA, to the delight of both the uranium industry and environmentalists. With much less spent fuel around, there would be less to stoke fear with.

We could transmute it. That's still expensive and wasteful, but it can be done.

We could even put back the spent uranium where we found it, only with less radioactivity.

Storing it where we found it makes the most intuitive sense to me, though I may be wrong about that. In the future, recycling will become a much more efficient way to deal with it. "The future", in this case, means "as soon as we decide to just do it."

These technologies actually are well-developed ("ready for prime time"). The problem, which we see again and again in energy development of all kinds, is implementation, financing, investment, and building the equipment we need.

None the less, this is one energy issue we don't really have to be in a hurry to solve. The total amount of the material is a small fraction of all energy-production waste which we currently just dump. We can, and do, store nuclear waste safely.

This isn't to say that we should be lax about it, or any aspect of nuclear energy. It's just that we have been gulled into believing that nuclear waste is some special class of material that brings instant death -- and that's just not true. Most nuclear "waste" has had nearly all of its radioactivity exhausted from it in the process of generating power. Not much is left. And radioactivity is not some form of black magic that bears the evil juju.

Incidentally -- and I don't want to be persnickety here -- water can't be irradiated in the way you described it. Water doesn't "pick up" radiation the way iron can be magnetized. Radioactivity comes from the decay of unstable atoms' nuclei. It can not be "caught" except under very particular cirumstances -- usually by another unstable isotope. There is so-called "heavy water", deuterium and tritium, present in nature, but they are difficult to make. It's the effects of radiation that count. If you expose water to enough radiation, you can kill pathogens in it, but the water does not become radioactive. The water used by a reactor for cooling isn't radioactive unless there has been a spill of radioactive material into it.

Don't take my word for any of this. Since nuclear energy will be getting more attention as we come to grips with peak oil and climate instability, there will be more opportunities to read up on it. It is not too difficult to stay away from the pro- and anti- groups alike for your basic information -- the Energy Information Administration is a good place to start, as is Wikipedia.

--p!

[phantom power]

2. The accidents didn't dim my hopes. The public reaction to them has, though.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. So...

...civilisation will die, along with a million or two species.

No great loss. Well, apart from a million or two species, that is.

Seriously, I look at some of the E/E posters and wonder why the fuck anyone even pretends to care about the Earth.

:shrug:

Fuck it.

Hurry up, let's get extinct.

[silverweb]

5. Good.

The risks of devastating, long-term consequences from nuclear accidents, however rare, are NOT worth it. We have plenty of other options.