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
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?
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.
"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.