Which is WORST

[Dogmudgeon]

EDIT: restored full title.

I take the opinion that nuclear energy is one of the safest forms of energy production we have. Not risk-free, mind you, just low-risk.

Other people take the opinion that nuclear energy is worse -- or FAR worse -- than all other energy-generation methods.

I won't make the case either way here. Most of us are well aware of the arguments on each side. Make your choice.

This is a farced-choice poll. Notice that I am NOT offering neutrality, or a silly answer, or the ever-popular cynics' choice of "none of the above". It's straight yes-or-no, with a simple option for strong opinions to be registered.

So, tell us -- which is worst?

--p!

[Deja Q]

1. Properly set up and maintained, nuclear is far better.

'Clean coal' is said to be possible as well, but coal isn't forever. It's been said uranium can be renewed and re-used. Though I'm not a nuclear engineer and honestly don't know how it would be renewed.

[billybob537]

2. how many people died becouse of Chernobyl?

Now how many people have died in coal mines?
I'd be willing to bet thousands of times as many have been killed in coal mines. Coal is poisoning all the world.

[Buzz Clik]

3. "This is a farced-choice poll."

With that caveat revealed, I decided to vote for ... coal.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. That's got to be the morst typo I've ever wade

Check the Dvorak Keyboard if you want to see how it happened.

:blush:

--p!

[gravity]

4. It all really depends on what you define as safe.

Both are relatively safe with today's technology.

[hogwyld]

6. My main issue with nuclear

Is the enormous halflife of the waste. Can we really guarantee containment for trillions (I know it's an exaggeration) of years??

[jimlup]

7. nuclear waste lifetime

56,000 years...

Yeah, I do think that is the primary issue with nuclear. If there is another serious round of nuclear in the US, I hope there is a serious study to decide what type of reactors are the best from a safty standpoint. The new designs are significantly improved from the 1st generation of light water reactors.

I personally suspect coal is worse but I haven't seen the data and honestly tried to compare it.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. 56,000 years?

Where did that number come from?

I'm not asking that as a flame/challenge. But I have seen the following figures used: 250, 300, 500, 1000, 2000, 20,000, 240,000, 5 million, and 4.5 billion -- and now 56,000 -- years. The closest consistent figure I have seen is that "spent nuclear fuel" requires 300 years to decay to the background level, which I have seen cited in no fewer than four books in the 1970s-1980s. I assume this is for "MOX" fuel, "MOX" being "mixed uranium oxides", which is the commonly-used type.

I personally use the figure "under 1000 years" -- and add that "nuclear waste" is a misnomer, because it can be recycled everywhere but in the USA, where a law prevents recycling. Such recycling basically exhausts the radioactive energy in the isotopes' nuclei.

I have to agree, though, that radioactivity poses a serious risk. But it is stored in casks that last a lot longer than 300 years, and we know where all of it is.

Compare to non-radioactive waste: we dump it at will, can't account for it, and unlike radioactive material, toxic metals (e.g., mercury, cadmium, arsenic) are poisonous forever.

The major radiation threat today is produced by burning coal, which releases several tons of radioactive uranium and thorium isotopes per megawatt output per year. Yet most people are unaware of this. Recently, studies have been done to determine whether coal would be an economically viable source of nuclear material (it is).

If you, or anyone else, can point to definitive (physicists', not "activists'") figures on nuclear fuel decay, I'd greatly appreciate it.

--p!

[jimlup]

12. Waste half life

Well your challenge is fine. I'd prefer to find the real info myself. I confess that the number is straight from the top of my head. It is what I seem to recall but it isn't necessarly accurate. I'll look into it and post a more definite number if I can find it.

I am a Ph.D. nuclear physicist but reactor waste time constants are not my specialty. The stuff I work with usually has a half life of about 10^-9 seconds so this problem is at the other end of the ballpark for sure.

My recall is from articles I read years ago on the Nevada site and is consistent with the number that I recall for the Chernoble site but it is straight from the top of my head.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Well...

...you could always recycle it. That's what the Europeans and Japanese do.

If you did want to stick with a once-through cycle, you'd have something solid and contained - which is a hell of a lot easier to cope with than a gas which isn't contained.

Nuclear waste isn't melting the icecaps and turning the oceans to acid.

[hunter]

10. Coal is so bad we should set up a timetable to outlaw it.

If we had any sense we'd shut down every last coal fired power plant as quickly as we could, and I'd support nuclear power as one of many ways of doing that.

Build a nuclear plant, shut down a coal plant -- that would be a very rational thing to do.

[NNadir]

13. Indeed. n/t,

[silverweb]

11. Both.

They're both terrible choices and should be phased out as quickly as possible.

Our focus should be entirely on maximizing wind/wave/solar/geothermal choices.

[Dogmudgeon]

14. That's why I phrased it as a forced choice

Our two choices for primary energy are rapidly being constrained to coal and/or nuclear energy.

Sure, the other (a.k.a. "alternate") forms of power have passed the proof-of-concept test, but for all the hype, there has been nearly no significant effort made to generate energy with them. The "clean coal" hype is similar -- all talk, a couple of demonstration-model scrubbers, and a lot of self-satisfying greenwash.

In spite of what some of the anti-nuclearists here may think, this is NOT a case where I do the Happy Dance and chant "nyah-nyah". The constraint of energy choice is troubling in the long run. And both the "Green" and the smokestack lobbies depend on people thinking ONLY in terms of residential/domestic energy use. But we have almost two centuries of infrastructure work to do. It will take money, work, and the kind of long-term committment both Americans and Europeans have seem to lost after defeating Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich. Planning is "socialism". The Market is assumed to be able to act with perfect foresight. And the only phobia that is stronger than nuclear phobia is tax phobia.

However, nuclear energy has NOT turned out to be terrible. If so much as a single mouse farts near a reactor, Armageddon is declared. I lived downwind of Three Mile Island when it "melted down". I thought that all five million people in the Philly area would be on the move within two hours. It became quickly apparent that the "disaster" wasn't.

I am concerned that those "rolling blackouts" that plagued California a few years ago will soon become a permanent part of all our lives. Our energy grid is already stretched thin, there is pressure to drive up prices, and since at least 2003, we have been lucky, mainly due to a mini-boom in the natural gas market.

I understand how people could fear and loathe nuclear energy. But it's the safest thing we've got. Wind power and solar thermal are also about as safe, but there is no significant investment being made, and almost no industrial standardization. And we don't have much time to spare.

We may not even have enough time to build enough reactors.

The coming years are not likely to provide ANY of us with a sense of satisfaction for any reason. We will probably be limited to "muddling through" at some point, with any modern renaissances coming after. If all we have to worry about is the "flavor" of our energy choices, we will be very fortunate.

--p!

[rockyandmax]

15. It depends. I answered coal...

but clearly in a worst case scenario, that may not be the case. The devil is always in the details.

My understanding is that a pebble bed type reactor is very safe in use. A Chernobyl design isn't.
Then it depends on the waste and how that is handled.

[phantom power]

16. The first hundred years of coal were the worst.

The second hundred were the worst too. After that, we're all going to go into a bit of a decline.

[Dead_Parrot]

17. Mostly Harmful. nt