Slashdot Mirror
Microbes for Bioremediation
The San Francisco Chronicle has a piece discussing current efforts to clean up nuclear waste sites with microbes. Current treatment procedures generally involve pumping out the contaminated groundwater, filtering it, and pumping it back, which is rather expensive.
Nuclear energy IS clean. The cost (both in dollars and human years lost) of operating a coal-fired plant is less than that of a nuclear plant. Your fallacy is in seeing the mistakes committed decades ago by an inexperienced (by today's standards) industrial and scientific community. Applying the same sort logic that you use to the space program would suggest that 90% of all rockets never reach even reach an an altitude of one mile, since your logic includes failures encountered early in the history of the technology. Applying your logic to the computer industry suggests that there's a global market for maybe 5 computers (at one point in history, there WAS a market for only five computers).
Technology progresses; I'd think a slashdot geek would realize this. Nuclear energy technology is no different.
I'd also point out that if you exclude insanely stupid events like the detonation of nuclear bombs, more people in the USA die in a year from car accidents than have ever died world-wide from radiation exposure. Americans (or perhaps humans in general) do a really lousy job in assessing risk. And don't get me started on the tragedy of SUVs (sure, you're more safe in your SUV...it's because of conservation of momentum. Never mind the poor sod you run into, because youre life is obviously more valuable than his). Anyway...never let good science get in the way of politics and mob manipulation. We fear radiation and throw ourselves under the juggernaut of the oil industry.
The dispersal rate of airborne pollutants is much higher than the rate at which nuclear waste is dispersed. This means that after a short time the waste which is released from a fossil fuel power plant is reduced to neglible levels when considering pollutant ppm. Nuclear waste degrades much more slowly and cannot be effectively dispersed in the atmosphere.
You can bet that I am not in favor of the prolonged use of fossil fuels as a primary power source. However, this does not mean that I must automatically subscribe to nuclear power as a sustainable and safe method of power generation.
Got that right. As long as the waste stream is managed well, it is much cleaner. Coal pumps enormous amounts of SO4 and NO3 into the air as acid precipitation and also offers plenty mercury and other hazardous metals. Unfortunately, it is also more expensive. Maintaining and disposing of that waste stream is tough, especially under the regulatory system. Even if there were some deregulation, it would not be cheap to manage the by-products. And don't forget: more Americans have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in radiation-related commercial nuclear energy generation accidents. It sounds like the owners of existing nuclear plants are planning to refurbish them rather than decommission. It appears it will be cheaper to upgrade ond operate the assets rather than maintain them as relics for which there is no disposal alternative.