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
Why do they always leave the sweeping up to the women?
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.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The Garbage Men, of course.
I suspect there may be a number of Garbage Women, too, and their input is more than welcome in the design of the nuclear waste disposal facility restrooms.
We should hire the guys who hid the WMD in Iraq. They know how to make stuff completely disappear!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?
Engineers.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Oh wait a minute, there isn't any!
http://www.gibby.net.au
What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?
As a senior member of the Lufthansa-pudding party, I advocate putting all matters regarding nuclear waste in the hands of mustachioed women.
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.
I believe this issue is too complex to be knowable and any solution that does arise should be attributed to an, as yet unnamed, Creator.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Liberalism must be preserved in the forum!!
The "scientists" in question are probably Intelligent Design GOONs.
Stop Bush now! Support a Womans Right to Choose nuclear waste disposal...
Ask Slashdot: Where would YOU put the UK's store of lethal radioactive waste?
Yucca Mountain
Loch Ness
Orbit
The basement of The Women's Institute
CowboyNeal
Breasts!
CowboyNeal's Breasts!
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
how about using it before it is "stored"
It's their right to change their minds.....
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
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.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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
"What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"
The bastard who designed the shrink wrap on CD-Rs. You know the one, where you pull the little tape that splits the plastic coating except it snaps so you run your nail along it except it's so bloody flexible that it won't tear. Then you have to get a really sharp knife and cut it scoring the jewel case. I mean for f***s sake, if getting a CD out of a wrapper can be made such a pain in the arse by a thin bit of plastic just think the container he/she could make if given enough steel, lead and time.....
And another thing.. F***king blister packs that need a friggin scalpel to open... NNNNNNNRRRRGGGHHHHHHHH,.,..... World turning red..... can't think...... I think I'm lapsing into unconciou
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Perhaps you mean page 3
Nice weather for penguins...
I would like to see gangsters consulted on this. They are good at making things disappear and seem to have a knack at avoiding governmental red tape. Of course, pirates are a close second.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
There is plenty of oil to last for a good while. I suggest a little more research. The tar sands themselves will last a good while and plenty left to drill before it hits the peak.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for developing new energy sources, just not into the scare-mongering "peak oil" crap that isn't close in the near(50 to 100 years) future.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
Congress? Or, in the UK, Parliament?
That is all.
Since I live in Calgary Canada and work in the industry then I'll put it this way. If you know where to drill then why don't you make some suggestions. British oil companies certainly don't because the North Sea peaked in 1999-2000.
Mexican oil companies don't because Canatarell production is expected to go into terminal decline in 2006 and Pemex has some prospects but not much. Indoneasia doesn't seem to know where to drill because Indoneasia became an oil importer this year as did Britian. Indoneasia use to supply Australia.
Iran doesn't know where to drill. The Saudis say they can up production but they have been saying this for years and so far no real joy. The USA doesn't know where to drill because their production peaked about 1970. Two years ago the largest geophysical field operations company in the world shut down North American operations. It seems there was not enough exploration work to keep them going. They were a client of mine.
Ok. More research.
1) Saudi Ghawar field 5 MBOPD
2) Mexico Canatarell 2.1 MBOPD less 14% per year starting 2006
3) Kuwait Bergan 1 MBOPD
4) China DaQing 1 MBOPD less 7% per year starting 2004
These are the 4 largest sorted by production. Ghawar is running over 55% water cut with over 7 million barrels of water injected per day. 65% comes from North Ghawar. Original reserves were estimated to be about 65 billion barrels and 55 billion have been produced to date. Most of the flank wells on the anticline have become injector wells. With the remaining reserves clearly dropping (but no acknowledgment from the house of Saud) the arial extent of that feild is significantly smaller today than it was say in the 70's. It is about 1/4 or less in fact. The writing is on the wall and the Saudi's can lose 2 MBOPD production at the drop of a hat.
So I don't know where you get your information from. I get my information from industry sources including the Geological Survey of Canada. I do consider myself informed. Now if you want to beleive the DOE be my guest.
As for the Tar Sands. Yup - it will last a good long while because there is something like 1.8 trillion barrels in them. However with over $1 billion per year being invested in production facilities we are going to be lucky to get production up to 3.3 MBOPD by 2015.
So if you feel you are up to it I guess we can go head to head and compare each and every oil project in the world. When we do this the numbers come out to 2007 as being the most optimistic realistic estimate for the world peak.
But yes - you are correct there is lots of oil adn lots more to be found. We just cannot find it fast enough to replace our consumption.
A MASSIVE building program to tap every renewable and alternative energy source should have been underway 10 years ago. In addition we should re-engineer our homes to capture as much solar energy as possible, probably via more insulation - over R50 and passive solar designs.
There is no reason that all new housing should not be energy self sufficient in fact. It can be done. I know how to do it. I've been in houses in Calgary that demonstrate the principals - houses without a furnance.
Since North American Natural Gas production peaked in 2001 we have lost a large percentage of the North American Fertilizer industry and now we'll be losing the plastics industry. The president of DOW Chemicals has already announced possible plastics shortages. This is due more to hurricane damage - but declining production is in the picture as well.
The way I see it - North America does not have a workable energy program in place. The world does not have a workable energy program in place. The political administrations are dreaming and are proposing solutions like wars.
As I see it - the only reason the UK and USA are in Iraq right now is control over oil and a desire to liberate Iraqii oil. I would prefer to see engineering solutions instead.
If people think nuclear waste is difficult to handle then I will suggest it is a lot better to handle than 1000's of body bags filled with dead kids.
Here is how. The new energy sources have already been discovered but have not been exploited. I like technology that is decades old because we can count on it working!
1) Thermal decomposition.
Put some hydrocarbons in a bucket - put the lid on - heat it up under pressure and we get oil. There is a plant near a butterball turkey plant that is doing this. We can use thermal decomposition for any organic wastes including sewage. However we might be better off turning sewage into organic fertilizers.
2) Fischer Tropshe.
Put some carbon (or hydrocarbon) in a bucket. put on the lid - heat it up under pressure and inject water. Depending on how you do this you can get liquid fuels or gas such as methane. The Germans did this int he 2nd world war from Coal and South Africa has been doing this as well. Its tried and proven. This will be the basis for the Hydrogen plants Suncor is building at a billion a pop for their tar sands expansion. They decided to not go nuclear. Their pres doesn't want to hear the word used in fact. The next pres may feel different.
3) Passive and active Solar.
I know this will work. Photons arrive with high energy which is typically not captured. If you take a glass tube and evaccuate it and put a collector then without cooling the collector will melt. So this has a lot of potential. The energy per meter is max about 1 KWatt. That is a considerable amount of energy that can be captured. Our houses were designed to discard almost all incomming solar energy and then replace this with energy from a "cheaper" source. This IMHO is a very short sighted plan. A well designed solar house can be cheaper to build because you can leave out the furnace. If you check Fiberglass insulation - then you'll note that the R50 insulation costs about $1 buk per square foot. Wall construction labor and other materials are not changed - its just the wall thickness needs to be about a foot. A 2000 sq ft home might be 30x40 so that is about 1400 square feet of wall surface plus another 2000 for the ceiling. Upping the insulation in the building envelope to R50+ would cost only $3500 or so extra. This will _really_ cut down heating and cooling bills and has a pay back of only a couple years because you can probably subtract out the HVAC.
4) Vaccume panels.
Europe has these in testing now. They can do R40 per inch. The ones they are testing are a passive system. The factory builds the vaccume into the panel and once installed they are expected to last several decades. I figure one can use an active system. A vaccume pump can be purchased for $250 bux (maybe too small - but it only needs to top up the vaccume). Or a serviceman could come by once a year to pump down your walls. R 40 - R70 is in the range we need. Replaceable panels are also an option. IE - they can look like siding.
5) Geothermal coupling with radiant heating.
Currently quotes in Calgary are $20,000 for a contractor to install a soil coupled heat pump. Water Furnace International has systems running as well.
To couple your HVAC to an air source which has low thermal coupling and a delta-Temp that wanders all over the graph is just stupid. Soil or water coupling is far more efficient and the temperature gradients are much much smaller.
For that $20,000 an active solar system with more insulation will probably eliminate about 90% of the energy costs so I really think the Geothermal coupled heat pump is probably not the way to go.
6) Fiber Optics and the virtual office
Most people are now doing Intellectual service work which typically can be done from a home office. A virtual commute will add 2-3 hours per day of free time. Why sit in a traffic jam with 6 lane stop and go listening to the radio with the A/C on max when you can just walk across the hallway to an office which is far more comfortable than any cubical employers want to provide? I have been doing this since 1980. I made more money and had time to spend with my kids. I
Dump enough of it into an enclosed space and it gets hot enough to melt itself, and other rocks. Nuclear waste is heavy too. so it should be possible to do as the GP post said, and just let the nuclear waste melt itself a hole the rest of the way.
The biggest problem with your idea though is that we haven't figured out how to get anything that deep yet - and there have been attempts, samples would be interesting.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
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..."
Lets see..
You mean the tons of yellow-cake discovered in Iraq?
Which tons of yellow-cake? where are the news items on this from verifiable and independent sources?
Or the sarin-filled artillery shells the terrorists were using against the Iraqi people?
First of all they were the legal and recognized government of the country (helped to power and supported by the USA for a long time)
Seconmd, that is about 1 1/2 decade ago
Third, the ingredients for this were provided by the west.
This does not change that it was horrible and evil what the officially recognized Iraqi government did there (and in many other cases) of course.
What about the mobile weapons lab?
What mobile weapons lab? Noone ever showed undisputable proof of those existing. Speculation about the use of specific trucks, which could indeed have been mobile weapons labs, and could as well have been many completely valid and non weapons related things are all anypne ever produced. Where are they? why didn't we get a huge amount of press coverage when there was this undisputable proof for them?
Or the buried MiG fighters?
I was not aware that Iraq was banned from havign jet fighters. Thery were banned from using them over specific areas of the country after the first gulf war. There is nothing weird or illegal about a country trying to protect its property.
Or the satellite photos of Russian trucks leaving key installations known to house WMDs for Syria before the invasion?
If those were 'known to house WMDs' why weren't they destroyed? With all their cruise missiles and long range bombers, smart bombs and all, it would have been pretty easy to do so. There were also no legal obstacles to doing so, considering that the Clinton administration spent 8 years doing exactly that, bomb installations that were known to have been involved with WMD production in the past. This could be done easily and legally due to the first gulf war.
None of the things you claim have been proven other then the use of chemical weapons 15+ years ago. Many of the claims have been disproven however.
Do you know what it is to actually think instead of just repeating the nonsense your favorite politican spoon feds you?
If you were arguing that Saddam is a very evil dude and that it was good to remove him from power I can agree, but if you can't see the lies from your government for what they are then you are a complete and utter idiot uncapable of any critical thought. The lies are too clear and obvious to miss unless you desperately want to miss them or are mentally retarded.
At least Britain and Australia only had small majorities against the war
I can't speak for Australia, but up until war was declared, the majority of British people opposed the war.
There's also the small matter of the largest popular demonstration against government policy ever recorded.
You might be interested in Snopes' take on the 'Al Gore invented the internet' thing - If you haven't heard it, or any of the other umpty-billion other people who pointed out that the whole thing was a giant con job.
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.
Obviously, here on slashdot we want to see the RIAA, MPAA and SCO (and MS as security consultants) design the waste disposal facilities.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"