Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I'd expect this from The Mirror, Sun or News Of The World
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.
I think this could be an issue of overreation. The public is being involved. Maybe the government plans all along to just ditch the input, but if it all comes a cropper then they do have the minor leg to stand on that they did consult with the public, so the public ought to just shaddup about their NIMBYism*.Interesting that the House of Lords has a Science and Technology Select Committee which is highly critical of the project. Ironically it's the Lords which are often derrided for membership qualified by title and/or heredity that are no stranger to bombast.
* Not In My Back Yard
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just what is the "Women's Institute"? And is there a "Men's Institute"?
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?
how about using it before it is "stored"
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.
Why is it then that the owners of nuclear facilities don't have to fully insure them, and they need laws limiting their liability?
I vote for having middle school students decide this based on the available evidence. Let them call witnesses and decide on the process.
Oh, I realize this will piss off the scientists. Think of it this way: these adult politicians and scientists are suggesting handing over the responsibility for extremely toxic and long-lasting waste to future generations. It's a persistent reminder of our failure to use cleaner alternatives, and we should be made to account for this.
Although we can't ask the 7th generation what their wishes are, we can ask the next. Does this infuriate you? Do you think they're not responsible enough? Think this through: they will be handling that waste when you're wearing diapers.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
A common theme when it comes to burying nuclear waste is "Not in my backyard." Everybody agrees that it should be done, but nowhere near where they live. This happened with the AECL hearings back in the 1990s. The plan was to dig into the Canadian Shield (which is all Precambrian Shield), and bury the waste safely and backfill it. It did seem technically possible, but the public wasn't going to have any of it. Kind of a shame when you consider that hundreds of engineers and researchers spent a good chunk of their lives developing ways to do this. My Dad is still one of the few remaining engineers there, but I know lots of people who were laid off after the political pressure was against doing it.
Real shame.
I can't spell ripburger
They have just desolated huge areas of Washington State (Hanford) in the US and Cumberland (Sellafield) in the UK. Thus the polititians are looking for alternatives. My own sugestion is to drill a hole into the ground as far as is possible i.e. several kilometres, let off an appropriate nuke to create an underground chamber. Drill again to make an entrace to the chamber. Drop waste down hole, repeat exercise as needed. Do this in a uninhabited part of the world.
The millions of people who live along the Columbia River, and drink its water, and eat food irrigated by its water, would disagree with you that Washington State is desolate. Southeast Washington is known for its produce -- wheat, onions and asparagus (and increasingly, wine) from the region are eaten all over the globe.
Barring another chernobyl (which is impossible with western reactors due to the negative void coefficient and containment structures), what damage could be done to a large area that a utility would be liable for?
Yes, an accident like Chernobyl is probably impossible, but nevertheless, the Three Mile Island cleanup has cost roughly a billion dollars so far, and will cost a couple of hundred million more when the other reactor there is shut down and the whole facility is decommissioned. This wasn't paid for by the owner or the owner's insurers, it was mainly paid for by the ratepayers in that region. Under the Price-Anderson Act in the US, and similar legislation in other countries, the owner's liability is limited.
If owners of reactors were required to carry sufficient insurance to cover an accident like that, then electric rates would be higher and profits would be lower, but the cost of the electricity they produce would better reflect the reality of the danger they pose.
This thread started with a claim that nuclear plants are safer than coal, and that is probably true during normal operation, but coal fired plants don't have catastrophic accidents that cost so much to clean up. Coal plant operators should be required to clean up their emissions, but nuclear plant operators should be required to clean up after their accidents.
Yeah, that little bit of revisionist history isn't playing well over in Italy right now, especially due to Nigergate (Italy was the source of the Niger memos; former Italian intelligence officers drafted them long ago to make money, but the US, British, French, and Italians wouldn't buy them because they were obviously bogus; however, this time around, not only did they take the very documents that they had filed as bogus, then passed them off to the British and Americans as genuine). Of course, that's just the start; they were the funnel for half of the INC and other groups' tripe that flooded in as "intelligence".
The prime backers of the war were:
1) US
2) Britain
3) Spain
4) Italy
5) Australia
Check UN speech transcripts. Check disclosed memos. Check the transcripts of Bush and Burlusconi's public meetings. Check anything - those countries were pro-war every step of the way. Aznar got kicked out of office by the antiwar Spanish, and it looks like Berlusconi, who went against the overwhelming will of the Italian public in supporting the war and is up for elections in a few months, is trying to avoid the same fate. Barring a miracle, it's not going to work. He's in serious trouble, and is trying to pretend that one of the war's staunchest lobbyist on every forum was secretly trying to undermine it. At least Britain and Australia only had small majorities against the war; Spain and Italy were 70-80% against it. Really, he doesn't have much of a chance.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Buried in sealed plastic containers from last time they tried to build an atomic bomb, back in 91. They were allowed to have this, before anyone gets any ideas, and we knew they had this and let them keep it.
Note that 500 tons of yellowcake isn't anywhere as impressive as it sounds. Yellowcake's the stuff you get uranium from. And after you get uranium, you have to enrich it. It takes a lot of yellowcake to make a nuke.
But while 500 tons may or may not have been enough to make a nuke, and there are arguments on both sides about whether or not the yellowcake they had could have made an atomic bomb, much less a 'program', it obviously would have been in Iraq's best interest to use their own stuff first. We found no indications they had done so. None of the certifuges required, none of the labs, none of the many complicated things that turning huge mountains of yellowcake into tiny qualities of uranium 232 requires. Much less any of the complicated things it takes to turn uranium 232 into a bomb.
Which makes the 'Iraq was trying to buy yellowcacke from Niger' even more preposterious. They had yellowcake. They weren't doing anything with it, but they had it. You don't go shopping for things that will raise suspicious when you already have them. You build the facilities and use what you have first to refine the process, and then you go shopping.
About the only thing that Iraq had that they officially weren't allowed to have was some missiles that could apparently go like 5% farther than the weapons range they were supposed to be restricted to, and that's probably because someone screwed up the math somewhere, not because of some secret invasion plot. (Not that Iraq could attack the US with these missiles under any circumstances, the missile restrictions were to keep them from attacking Kuwait.) If Iraq was going to delibrately break the rules they would have bought missiles that flew a lot farther and actually hid them, instead of showing them off to various people.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"Highly toxic and radioactive" implies both highly toxic and highly radioactive. That is absolutely not the case. While uranium, like any heavy metal, is toxic if ingested, it's not only not highly radioactive, it's bordering on inert. Because almost all the U-235, the active isotope, is gone, it's far less radioactive than uranium in its unrefined form.
Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. The more radioactive an element is, the shorter its half-life is. For those who don't remember the definition, half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in a substance to undergo radioactive decay. Therefore, something that is emitting radiation at a high rate -- that is, undergoing a lot of atomic decay -- is necessarily going to have a short half-life; something with a long half-life is mostly sitting there, and once in a while a nucleus decays. In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years. As radioactive materials go, that's pushing pretty close to not radioactive at all. In fact, depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding to block gamma rays!
Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper. Substantial amounts of air. Try it yourself sometime: get your hands on an alpha source (your local antique shop can probably supply you with a piece of red Fiesta Ware pottery) and a Geiger counter (surplus stores often have them). Put the Geiger counter's tube by the Fiesta Ware, listen to the nice clicking. Now put a sheet of notebook paper between them. The clicking stops.
He'd have had to be eating the depleted uranium to get anywhere close to that level of exposure. At which point, he'd be dead from heavy metal poisoning already, so any radiation wouldn't be an issue. Remember, something doesn't become radioactive from being exposed to alpha particles. You need slow neutrons for that, and U-238 is not a good slow neutron source. Enough slow neutrons to make a human being radioactive will also make him dead. Enough depleted uranium in the body to produce measurable radioactivity will kill him just like a large amount of lead, mercury, or other heavy metal.
As for "5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation"
Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.