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You just justified my opinion on the need for more nuclear research.

Yucca mountain ... will be hot for at least 10,000 years.

I'm sure we could find a way to reduce that dramatically. But not without sufficient research.

In 10 years, we will have made enough to fill up

Really?

"As of December 1999, the United States had generated about 40,000 MTHM of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. This amount could more than double by 2035 if all currently operating plants complete their initial 40-year license period."

We're not exactly filling it up every ten years. Although this is another thing sufficient research can possibly fix as well, rather than researching how to get the most boom out of your bomb.

For an analogy, just because gasoline is a pollutant doesn't mean we shouldn't research methods of increasing the fuel mileage on automobiles. Efficiency takes research. I'm not a nuclear physisist, but I do know an mp3 takes up a lot less space than a .wav file, and mp3 did not come first. Our current nuclear power methods are far from the ultimate, maybe one day we can power the whole country on one Uranium pellet. You never know.

Er, that is, the Oklo natural reactor.

Actually, there's a place in Gabon where plutonium was created naturally and on Earth two billion years ago -- the .

The space elevator has been featured in a lot of books, most recently David Gerrold's "Jumping off the Planet".

This is a great idea, but it has one big problem. It isn't energy - The idea of generating energy by dangling something into the atmosphere from space has been explored and proven that it will work.

The problem is this: With every gram of matter you chuck into space (or even lift from the surface), the rotation of the Earth slows in direct proportion to the cargo's mass relative to the mass of the Earth. In other words, every time we throw something in to space,the Earth will slow down just a bit, no matter how small the load. Proving yet again that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Fine, you say. It'll take a TREMENDOUS amount of mass to be lifted into space to stop the rotation of the Earth. I completely agree. However, if the Earth slows .000001%, (about 9 hundredths of a second, enough to win/lose a car race) then the days will get measurably longer unless we bring an equal amount of mass down.

Just to sate your curiosity, the earth weighs about 5.98 X 10^24 kilograms (or, 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, metric, roughly speaking. Source.). That said, it would just take us lifting 59,800,000,000,000 trillion tons into space to affect the aforementioned change. Again, a tremendous amount, right?

Consider this: New York city alone produces 13,000 tons of residential waste a DAY, and they've run out of places to put it (Again, Source). That's 4.7 Million tons a year. And they're currently paying PA to dump is for them. There are other cities with the same problem. Exactly how long do you think it will take for someone to decide to move the waste even farther away? Like Space? And that's just residential.

That's only one example. Let's add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 Metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of high level radioactive waste water (Call Claire at the Yucca Mountain Project (dept. of civilian radioactive waste mgmt. for more info -Link or 1-(800) 225-6972). Okay, lets add the "extra" garbage of all of the other states, countries, provinces etc who have run out of places to put their waste. It adds up REALLY quickly.

And that's not including the actual mass of the elevator itself, including it's anchor.

Mind you, I still think we should build it, I just don't think we should use it as a tool to get rid of our problems that's we're too stupid to fix, but smart enough to move out of sight.

Check this out. That's what casks have to be able to survive, an excerpt:

- a 30-foot free fall onto an unyielding surface, landing on the cask's weakest point, which would be equivalent to a crash at 120 miles per hour into a concrete bridge abutment;
- a puncture test, during which the container must fall 40 inches onto a steel rod six inches in diameter;
- a 30-minute exposure to fire at 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit that engulfs the entire container; and
- submergence of the same container under three feet of water.

To achieve certification, a cask must prevent harmful release of radioactive material even when subjected to each of these tests.

Convoys transporting radioactive materials have been in several accidents over the years and in none of them has radioactive material been released. The casks they use for transport are stronger than a main battle tank. Terrorists would nearly need a nuclear weapon to crack one open.

Worrying about a boogie man under your bed is more rational than worrying about terrorists obtaining (or releasing) radioactive material from these convoys.

1)Liberally pepper your post with oversimplified pseudoscientific pablum such as "...And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl" thereby craftily distracting your audience's attention away from any actual facts about the true magnitude of the disaster. For instance that annoying little statistic of Thyroid cancer(yes I did specifically pick a site from the WHO as a jab at your laughably out of context quote) incidence increasing by oh, 10 times or so. Or maybe the statement by the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation and the International Commission on Radiation Protection that the collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts released from Chernobyl to the population of the USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths(from the Federation of American Scientists) in that area?

2)Proclaim your unquestioned infinite knowledge on all things related to the topic at hand: "In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there." Phew good thing we have people like you to tell us such important things lest we waste millions paying doctors of geology to try to figure out such things.

3)Regurgitate amateurish propaganda supporting your cause which contains self-parodying scare tactics aimed at any opposing viewpoints: "Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!!". It's important to remember that while using this shoe-in of a tactic to attain your +5 that you should ignore all obvious holes in your strawman theory such as the fact that coal has BACKGROUND levels of radiation, and burning it has negligible effect on concentrating this radiation. By Spike hay's logic I could argue that the millions of human bodies incinerated every year in cremation ceremonies increases the radioactive pollution of the atmosphere and soil because of all that Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 released when your body burns. Why it must be thousands of tones total every year!!

4)Finally if all else fails, just make a link like he does to to the nearest nut job you can find whose home page should have the latest instructions on "How to Find Osama bin Laden with guaranteed anonymity" apparently using some whacked out pin number conspiracy theory or some such scheme.

That's all! Your're on your way to karma whore heaven! (p.s. i'm already at 50 so I don't really give a crap about what happens to this post)

Ever heard of the Oklo reactor? I didn't think so.

Yes, boys and girls, a naturally occuring nuuuuuu-clear reactor. Produced all sorts of fun stuff including plutonium.

Also, WTF do you think happens when a star goes bang? Supernova -can get some fairly heavy stuff - they found radioactive iron-60, and expect plutonium to be found on earth in supernova debris (bottom of referenced page).

Not that it would go anywhere fast on Titan. Liquid hydrocarbons are rather poor solvents for metals and other ionic species. The material would decay where it landed, long before long it got anywhere. Too bad your greenpeace membership didn't include a science education.

Darren

Finally, the CANDU reactors run on natural uranium.

This is also nice because it doesn't give the country an excuse to develop uranium-enrichment plants, which makes it a bit harder to build weapons[1], and also removes a potential accident source (like the recent Japanese mishap where they poured too much uranium into a mixing tank).

Interestingly, natural nuclear reactions in the ground are not unheard of.

The Oklo mine, in West Africa. Some details are here. It's pretty neat - water-moderated, and regulated because the water would boil away when too much power was produced. Sort of like a CANDU, actually.

[1] Bombs, plus the 'depleted uranium' bullets that the US seems to like spraying all over the landscape.