Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste

Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"

Comments

Who should decide?

[Auckerman]

How about ones that are qualified to properly dispose of nuclear waste. Presumably, leading engineers and scientists. You know, the ones that could potentially design a place to put the waste into, where by the local envrioment takes as small of an impact as possible. I don't think politicians and random interest groups typically qualify for this task.

Re:Who should decide?

[Auckerman]

Excellent plan, then we just move to wherever they are living since the storage obviously won't be in their back yards!

I find this view really odd, you know the "not in my back yard view". People are perfectly comfortable living in a place with continual toxic waste emissions. Car exhaust, toxins in everyday objects (paints, walls, toys, you name it), but the moment the word "nuclear" comes into play, all of a sudden images of toxic waste man comes to mind and superstition overrides reality. The fact of the matter is, as far as overall envriomental damage, nuclear is FAR clearer than how we typically power our cars and cities. It is a solvable problem and quite frankly people just need to realize it's less dangerous to live near a nuclear reactor or permant nuclear waste facility than it is to live near a coal powerplant or coal mining facility.

Re:Who should decide?

[hey!]

Engineers design.

Design is creating a solution to a specified problem with a specified set of constraints.

Engineers don't get any more say than anybody else what the problem or constraints should be.

Re:Who should decide?

[Hal_Porter]

Hasn't it occured to you that a government consultation excercise might be just be a PC way to describe giving people a description of the problem and a list of all the technically feasible solutions with their pros and cons. That way they realise that none of the options are ideal, and yet one of them must be picked. If you describe it properly, they'll usually pick the best one. It's not like the men from the ministry arrive and listen to a bunch of women describing half arsed schemes for shooting waste into space.

The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.

Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.

Mayhaps a bit of common sense here?

[Entropy]

What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?

Engineers.

What about the Men's Institute?

[bgibby9]

Oh wait a minute, there isn't any!

bah

[machine of god]

Lets face it, it's a political issue, not an ecological one. They'd put it in juice boxes if it was cheap and nobody cared.

Re:So they should ignore the story?

[ackthpt]

What should The Guardian do? Bury the story because it doesn't play into your preconceived notions of progressive politics and what newspapers should print?

Instead of exaggeration by picking out one institute which has done one unusual thing for publicity (which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers) they could have simply headed it "1700 forms distributed to broad cross-section of community seeking public input", but that would probably not pique interest, would it?

Consider the source, mate.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[gid13]

Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but please. The public is the LAST group you want involved with decisions like this. The vast majority of people have not studied nuclear systems or the waste involved, and should probably not have a say in it. Sure the government's job is to do the will of the people, but the will of the people who don't know anything about the topic at hand should be to defer to those who do.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[EvilSS]

Science policy via opinion poll. Yea, just ask Kansas how well that works.

Oh crap. pollies solutions sux worse than pollies

[cdn-programmer]

Clearly they have the wrong people making the decisions. The obvious answer is to reprocess the fuel and pull out the Plutonium which can then be combined with uranium to make mox and stuffed back into reactors where it can be burned.

If the waste is from light water pressurized reactors then the next best thing is to ship it to Canada where we have Candu reactors and we'll burn it for them. Waste from light water reactors is still more radioactive than what the Candu system is designed to run on (natural uranium - 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238) So a Candu can make very good use of it. But it should be reprocessed to remove some of the undesirables.

We need about 75 BIG 1GWe Candu's to support Tar Sands operations but it seems only Total SA has caught on. Why waste 25% or more of the carbon mined producing CO+CO2 as a byproduct of generating the Hydrogen we are desperatly short of when you can just electrolize water? The difference is that by 2015 Tar Sands will be ramping up to about 3.3 million Barrels of Synthetic crude per day. With Nuclear assitance that can be closer to 5 million. By 2015 I expect the world will be in a HUGE energy crisis because I expect world oil production to peak by 2007 and then go into decline. If we have 8 years decline of 3% per year that is a loss of about 20 million barrles per day of world production. (World production is about 82 million barrels per day. USA consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. China is about 7 million and India about 2.5 million barrels per day. Yet I see the press blames China and India for high oil demand and hense high oil prices. Thats the press for you - just a source of distortion.)

If anyone things the oil crisis of the 70's was bad I can say right now that is was a picnic compared to what is comming!

Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.

The wisdom of this will be very clear long before 2014. By then the short sightness will be felt every summer when the electricty is out and also every winter when the heating oil is short.

IFR technology is proven and it burns all actinides leaving only short lived waste which has industrial uses such as gamma sources and atomic batteries.

In short - none of the so called waste is really waste. It is actually very valuable if used intelligently.

Furthermore it can solve our energy needs for at least 100's if not 1000's of years.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[marcello_dl]

The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say.

Could be worse: Italy recently restored an electoral method that an overwhelming majority of people had voted to get rid of, back in 92: so we have three kind of governments, UK that asks people about their opinion, USA that ignores em, Italia that does the exact opposite of what people wanted.
But did anybody ask the people before going to war in Iraq in any of the three "democracies"?

Technical or political?

[peacefinder]

If they're asking non-technical people to make technical judgements, then it's daft.

But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.

Re:So they should ignore the story?

[ScottyUK]

(which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers)

Page 2 in most of the (admittedly tabloid) Scottish papers I've seen is dedicated to "politics" of a sort. The mere thought of some of those women makes me shudder. Ann Widdecombe anyone? :|

Perhaps you mean page 3 ;) Unless you're discounting the front page as page 1, of course.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[Krach42]

WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in Carlsbad, New Mexico was entirely completed during the Clinton era.

It *also* had the same sort of sensationalistic criticism, as people are now attributing only to Bush.

Every administration that tries to do anything about getting rid of nuclear waste is going to hit resistence by the public, who are going to detest whoever is in charge, whether they ask them nicely or not.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[Chrononium]

Perhaps one more thing to nit-pick: the USA is a republic, not a democracy (as in, the people get to have their say by proxy, not by direct voice). The country's founders thought direct democracy was a horrible idea (i.e. mob rule). That's why the President of the US was never to be elected through popular vote (and still isn't). The people don't need to be consulted because the idea is that they elected voices for themselves. If they don't like those voices, then they don't have to support them the next time elections come around. Unlike some other countries, there is no federal referendum in the US.