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Worldwide Support For Nuclear Power Drops
ProbablyJoe writes "A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years. However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The U.S. remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly. Much of the decline in approval has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers' opinions had not been affected by the events, and there was an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events. With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?"
What do they think of nuclear power in comparison to the other options?
I don't think anyone was ever truly a fan of nuclear power, it's still way more dangerous than hydro electric, geothermal, solar, etc. etc. But it was the best of a bad set of options.
The press will screw up the world just to get headlines. Nuclear power is incredibly safe.
Nuclear accidents can make areas uninhabitable or unfarmable for many generations. It isn't a one-time event that gets cleaned up in a few days. It's something with lasting impacts on the environment and habitability of the area, over generations. In a country the size of Japan, the effects are even worse because they don't have so much land area to be throwing parts of it away like that. The exclusion zone around Fukushima is now unfarmable.
And just like after Chernobyl we were all assured by the nuclear proponents that "there can never be another nuclear disaster", we're being assured that now too. But there will be. It WILL happen again. If we are lucky, it won't be as bad as Fukushima. If we are unlucky, it will be much worse. The only certainty is that it will happen, and it will be because of something unprepared for that is only obvious in hindsight.
Captcha: "Trauma".
Maybe it's time to start rolling out Thorium reactors.
First of all, people who live near coal-fired plants get more radiation exposure than those living near nuclear power plants. You're burning coal, which has been known to have bits of uranium (and other radioactive components) in it and sending all that coal smoke right into the air.
There's a problem with a 50 year old nuclear plant built on the coast in an earthquake zone, that means nuclear power is too dangerous for everywhere else! By that logic it's not worth buying a 2011 Mercedes, after all the timing chain broke in my 1961 Dodge that must mean all cars are garbage.
Life cannot be made safe. No matter what precautions are taken, nature and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause a disaster.
FTFY
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I think we should power our society by burning chiropractors.
Life cannot be made safe. What do you suggest we do?
Does the latest BBC survey really show a lack of support for nuclear?
http://world-nuclear.org/wna_buzz/DoesthelatestBBCsurveyreallyshowalackofsupport.html
like all "n% of people said x" headlines there is a lot more info if you look in more detail at the results.
The vast majority of nuclear power plants which have not failed prove that nuclear can be made safe.
All Fukashima proved was that building a nuclear power station next to the sea in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, then building a defence wall that might be a little bit low and placing the backup generators at a level that would be "below sea level" if the wall failed is a bad idea.
The demands of perfect safety at all times is actually chasing better designs off the table; "no new reactors" means better designs can't be built.
Fukushima is an example of how subtly corrupting the "public/private partnership" can be in privatizing gain while pushing risk onto the shoulders of the public.
Mankind will turn to nuclear power because it is cleaner than the alternatives, because it is energy dense, because it is scalable, and because it is dispatchable (available when we need it). This headline reflects a temporary revulsion from the tsunami, nothing more.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Stupid comment of the day... seriously... You're an idiot.
Hi Grub.
Oh, no -- that's a serious pollution hazard -- chiropractors are uniformly toxic.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am generally not in favor of nuclear power.
But my support for new reactors is not that bad. I'd say I even support them.
It is the old reactors still running, those cash cows running at absolute safety limit or bewlow, that I really want to disappear.
The alternatives will be there in the future, but until then we need power and a lot of it. When the oil runs out we will need more power for electric vehicles (if it goes that way). Im an environmentalist and understand the risks. The footprint of a nuke plant compared to the alternatives is huge (with the exception of nuclear fallout).
You are wrong on two counts:
Calcium is not created somehow by biological processes, at best it would be extracted from the atmosphere. Also carbon is more common, are you sure you don't confuse the two?
The chemical element with the least energy is iron.
Therefore, if everything reached the least energy state due to nuclear fusion and fission, everything would be iron, not calcium, and it would be really really difficult to generate energy from it by fusion or fission.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
irradiated soil is the only immediate downside I see of that. You'll have to compete with the NIMBY's though.
Safer than coal, anyway.
There is plenty of evidence of coal mine disasters, OK there are a few uranium mining disasters as well, but I don't want to minimise the mortality from either if I can help it: the simple fact of the matter is, you're 4,000 times more likely to die from a coal-related power generation cause and 1,000 times more likely from oil-related power generation than you are from nuclear-related power generation. It all carries risk, but the protocols and procedures surrounding uranium handling mitigates the risk to the point where people who actually work it tend to worry less. Fukushima was, in my opinion, unfortunate but avoidable; OK the tidal barrier was inadequate. It could have been higher and it might have diverted the tsunami but that wouldn't have helped with the ground subsidence. The location probably wasn't that well thought out, being that close to one of the deepest ocean trenches on the planet. It was probably the wrong type of reactor to have built there even if it was proved that the location was suitable for a power plant that could potentially (and as it happens, did) crack and go critical after just one good shake and a deluge of salt water. Lessons learned, we all hope, but I wouldn't like to try and assure the surviving families around the plant of that.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
No, Fukushima proved that, given a disaster that killed at least 15,000 people, with many thousands still unaccoutned for, that the entire world will forget it and focus on a dangerous yet manageable situation which has thus far caused no deaths directly, and might, given a worst-case-scenario playout, cause 1,000 cases of cancer, not deaths.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
And plants with outdated designs.
Bring on the new designs.
Questions of the nature "is nuclear power safe?" seem more political than scientific. Shouldn't the question really be "is this nuclear reactor design (including its associated fueling, storage and waste handling) safe?
Lets try to take some of the emotion and politics out of the issue. If someone asked you "are cars safe?", wouldn't you want to know which car? Different car designs offer a wide range of safety. Not just due to cost compromises, size/weight and design goals, but also due to when it was designed. Materials, technology, scientific understanding, computer modeling, etc have greatly improved our capabilities over recent decades. I wouldn't feels safe in any race car from the 1940s driving at 100 mph wearing a leather helmet, however I would feel safe doing so in many higher end passenger cars today. Maybe a recent reactor design is far more safe than say some 1960s soviet design?
Science and engineering are making great advances in solar, wind, tidal, etc. Aren't they also making great advances in the area of nuclear?
Probably the simplest answer to this is that it would be expensive.
I mean that in a few ways, the notable two are putting things underground is just plain expensive; the second being that maintenance becomes a giant problem.
Basically putting a nuclear reactor (at least, the traditional design) underground would push the cost of that power higher than solar/wind/etc.
When it comes down to it people don't actually care about safety nearly as much as they do money.
As a side note, I'd encourage you to do some looking at the new generation nuclear plants if you're interested. They include such important design concepts as built-in automatic "oh fuck something went wrong eject the core" failsafes. The newest designs for nuke plants really are *insanely* safe, but they cost a lot of money to build
If it enters the ground water, that is bad too.
It might be even worse.
You could build the plant somewhere far away from ground water, like in a salt mine, or one of those underground locations they are planning to store the nuclear waste. But then how do you cool it?
You are wrong on two counts: Calcium is not created somehow by biological processes, at best it would be extracted from the atmosphere. Also carbon is more common, are you sure you don't confuse the two?
The chemical element with the least energy is iron. Therefore, if everything reached the least energy state due to nuclear fusion and fission, everything would be iron, not calcium, and it would be really really difficult to generate energy from it by fusion or fission.
Isn't iron where the fusion reactions of stars stop and they "explode"?
You had me up until "subluxations".
It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
The result of sufficient lobbying is that everybody is believing paying cheap nuclear electricity, while in reality everybody (or the descendants) take a chance paying huge future costs. Just like Japanese now do for the next decades.
You're proving that we should power our society by burning stupid people. It's an infinite resource.
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
The problem is, from what I know of management, funding decisions, and the psychology of long term complacency, I don't trust society with nuclear
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hey Bob, I thought you'd given up on your trolling naw that your real identity has been discovered?
Because if there was a meltdown you'd trigger a supervolcano or a megaquake on the San Andreas fault, or annihilate Tokyo or some such rubbish, I'm sure.
(Also, you'd irradiate the soil and the groundwater something rotten.)
now* dammit.
That's FUNNY, not Overrated. Stupid mod dropdown! Posting to undo.
All Fukashima proved was that building a nuclear power station next to the sea in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, then building a defence wall that might be a little bit low and placing the backup generators at a level that would be "below sea level" if the wall failed is a bad idea.
And that, even then, the tsunami caused far more harm than the damage to the reactor.
The anti-nuclear nutters could save more lives by demanding that no-one is allowed to live in a tsunami zone anymore.
I don't care if they have worldwide support. I will stick to my regular vitamin drops, thank you very much.
is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
There is only one "solution" to the world's energy problems - demand below renewable supply. Uranium is not a renewable resource. It may seem abundant at current rates of consumption, but the supply is finite.
Yeah but they explode as a result of being unable to fuse iron into anything heavier. Iron is extremely hard to fuse. When the star converts everything into iron and stops burning there's no radiation pressure to support it anymore, and when you consider just how sodding massive a star is, that's pretty serious. It starts to implode, and the temperature rises. In previous times when it exhausted a fuel (when it stopped burning hydrogen, for example) the increase in temperature reached a level at which the star could fuse a heavier element such as helium. This cycle stops when it's onto iron, and the collapse continues, and continues, and the enormous envelope (still mainly hydrogen and some helium) falls faster and faster until it slams into the iron core, and bounces. This bounce is enormously energetic and provides enough energy to restart the entire sequence, and the envelope rapidly fuses its way through hydrogen all the way up to iron - and beyond. (Incidentally, the only natural way to produce even a trace of heavier elements that I'm aware of is in a supernova.)
People will change their minds once harsh winter comes and there is not enough power to keep your little baby son warm. Nuclear plays a ver important role in economy and life, it cant just be discarded and replaced by windmills.....
I agree, because technology and science have *never* provided a solution for any problem that may have affected the human race Oh wait, sustainability has mostly been driven by scientific advances.
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source scales the way nuclear can.
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source can provide on-demand base-load power the way nuclear can.
Reliability can be built into nuclear plants in ways that distributed "small" clean power cannot match.
Safety record of nuclear power generation speaks for itself, esp. when context is provided (coal, hydro).
Waste management is an issue that is primarily an engineering challenge, not an obstacle.
Can designs be improved? Certainly, and much work is ongoing in this space (Toshiba, Hyperion, others).
Over the long term, nuclear is the cleanest base-load power source we have, and it is inevitable that more nuclear power plants will be built and brought on-line worldwide.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Controlled nuclear power was first demonstrated nearly 70 years ago in 1942. The Fukushima plants were based on designs from the 60s and built in 1971 and SURVIVED A QUAKE 10X BIGGER THAN THEY SHOULD HAVE before the tsunami created the real issue. TMI was started in 1974 and was a scare rather than a real disaster. Chernobyl was 1977, but was both human error and Soviet-era design. Today we've got 3x the experience we had when those few incidents, I think we've learned a little about preventing these issues.
The problem is people do not understand the concept of trade-offs and the fact it they effect every decision. And while people have short attention spans they tend to focus more on the long term problems then the short ones on hand.
Right now people are dying from cancer and other illness due to coal power plants, it is adding tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Nuclear solves these immediate problems. Are their potential future problems? Yes they are. But after we fix our current problem we have time to fix the next set of problems.
It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet. The longer we wait putting off those "Greener Energies" in hoping you will get Good "Green Energy".
OK Natural Gas Fraking has an environmental impact. But it is better then strip mining.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
Can we get coal to burn even cleaner? How many cars can befit from hybrid technology? We as a world culture is spinning our wheels on trying to get a perfect solution. There isn't one... Sorry... But why don't you get off you butts and stop opposing everything and start supporting better solutions that are available now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's what knocked out the backup generators.
Yup.
And unfortunately the number of idiots living in the world far exceeds those that use their brains to think about the world around them.
I fear for the future of nuclear power. We'll soon be in some backward world where the crazies have forced us to use "renewable" resources that damage the environment far worse than nuclear power would ever be likely to. And how will people ever support fusion if they've rid the world of fission power through their ignorance?
I think the best solution was provided by one of the above posts-- burn the stupid people to power the world! It will provide power *and* reduce power consumption at the same time!
How many people died from nuclear exposure?
How many people died from big stuff smashing them?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Even worse, there are all the issues that happen from coal *mining*. Never mind what happens on the burning end, coal mining kills people and ruins huge areas of land.
If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse.
Until a catastrophic failure of the nuclear plant, then it quickly passes the coal plant in toxic emissions.
Of course. It's also not nearly as likely as coal miners being trapped underground, or you dying because of your silly fear of RADIATIONZ! and insistence on burning coal next to your house. So, do you prefer to live next to a nuclear plant, or a coal-fired one?
as long as it's the Gov't running the plants. I don't trust private business to invest the kinds of money needed to maintain and improve safety; the profit motive is too strong and always looking for 'efficiency', e.g. corners to cut. Take a look at privately run dialysis clinics vs the gov't run ones. The Gov't run clinics have much lower rates of mortality, and the studies show it's because they don't cut corners by reusing supplies.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Neither can hydroelectric power. No matter what precautions are taken, gravity and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause some poor bastard to fall off of a dam.
This is the thing that everyone misses -- just how damned big that earthquake was. Twenty thousand people got washed out to sea -- whole trains, whole villages. While there are lessons to be learned from Fukushima, people seem to miss that it was in the context of a 9.0 quake.
Want to build one in my backyard? Be my guest. A nuke plant in my backyard pollutes my life far less than a coal plant across town.
Thousands of coal mining deaths per year, probably a huge number more attributable to air pollution caused by coal. I couldn't find any appreciable numbers for uranium mining deaths.
And the radiation. How much radiation has coal burning put into the environment? How does that compare to TMI, Fukushima and Chernobyl combined?
Or the lakes of toxic coal sludge stored near coal plants, often in above-ground containers that can rupture and cause toxic coal sludge tsunamis.
+1.5 for nuke over coal (I get another 0.5 for Lived Near Nuke Plant bonus)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted" huh compared to Chernobyl there are very few efects - Chernobyl had wards full of firemen and conscripts dieing horrific slow deaths from radiation poisoning - Fukushima nothing.
people seem to forget that >25k people died in the Tsunami - the effects of Fukushima are trivial compared to that.
[citation needed], much? All the comparisons I've seen, doing exactly what you suggest, have come to the exact opposite conclusion.
Stupidity alert?
When did I say they could?
Oh, right. I didn't, you're just being an asshole.
You can't compare. Because no real research being done to link all the health problems people encounter back to the coal plant itself.
"Bob developed thyroid cancer and skin cancer."
"Well Bob smoked a lot."
Never mind that Bob lived a mile downwind of a coal-fired plant for 50-odd years.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah. Let's talk about coal mining deaths.
http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html
Nearly a thousand in the US since 1980.
Now let's look at China's track record over the last decade.
Nearly 53 THOUSAND people dead mining coal.
How many people have nuke plants killed again?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They can be just as bad as profit motives. Choosing plant designs based on what company operates in whose district, rushing completion so a pet-project plant of a politician can go online before election time, hiding defects in that pet project plant during the next election cycle so that politician doesn't get kicked out of office for supporting it.
And think of the ability to keep bad things secret. With government, that's it. You really have no recourse if it wants to keep bad things secret. With plants operated by business, you have government oversight, someone to go to when things aren't being done right that isn't related to the people not doing things right.
One nuclear plant surpasses that coal plant once every few decades.
Meanwhile, thousands of coal plants spew out their radiation every day as part of normal operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have a lot of confidence in modern nuclear technology, but I have very little confidence in the companies building and maintaining it. No matter how theoretically safe you make a reactor you're always going to be up against the cost cutting, profit oriented ethic that forms the basis of capitalism. I just don't think it's practical to regulate the industry enough to ensure it's safe.
That said, I would still take the minute risk of a nuclear disaster over the continuous disaster of fossil fuels. There are better alternatives, but it seems like the prevailing attitude in the industry is "Don't want nuclear? Fine, we'll go back to coal".
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Compare deaths per terawatt produced between coal and nuclear.
OK, Deaths per TWh:
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Nuclear: 0.04
The consequences of Fukushima are a direct result of the power station being unchanged since the 1970ies, even though it became clear already in that decade, that safety precautions were insufficient. Especially concerning the risk of hydrogen explosions (hydrogen was already a known problem during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979), the lack of autocatalytic recombiners (which prevent them) and the lack of filtered containment vents - which were installed in both Germany and France (which you mention here) in the 1980ies and 90ies, in anticipation of otherwise unacceptable releases during a meltdown.
Nuclear power is like plane travel.
It's safer (cancer rate from Fukushima/Chernobyl less than cancer rate from 10 coal plants), but many people are afraid of it, since when accidents happen, they are terrible.
-----------------
Crunch the numbers. It's healthier to live 20-30 km away from Chernobyl or Fukushima than downwind from fossil fuel burning plants or a busy highway or live in a busy city.
Nuclear power can save lives by the thousand by offsetting air pollution from fossil fuels, even if the accident rate was 10 times higher than it is now.
Hence Dawn Stover's proactive piece for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists..
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Since it is the public who buys and consumes nuclear power, it is entirely appropriate for the public to pay for it's safe operation and storage.
Then again, if we had a truly functioning nuclear economy, we'd have a hell of a lot less high-level fuel waste, because we could reprocess the reactor fuel.
If the right safety measures are taken then there is VERY VERY little risk. Nuclear power is a great way to power the world as long as we make sure that the engineering around the plants is beyond acceptable.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place. It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Don't have power, then.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained
And this is the crux of the problem. Most people if you sit them down and talk to them, even those with pretty anti-nuke attitudes, will admit that it is theoretically possible to do fission in an environmentally responsible way with risks appropriate to the level of benefit. That is not the problem. The problem is the complete lack of trust in our corporate or even government culture to actually accomplish that goal. And there is no foot to stand on arguing that these institutions deserve that trust. In fact they've shown time and time again that they are the last people you should trust with this level of responsibility.
So since we obviously can't hand the keys to the car to the town drunk, and finding a new designated driver is going to take a decade or so of trust building, the OP raises an important question: "can nuclear power actual save us if public opinion cannot be swayed?" This is a political and social question, and frankly the technology doesn't matter much. On the renewable energy side, since the risks are lower and the responsibility is more distributed, the question being grappled with is "can renewable energy actually save us if the investor class never buys in sincerely?" This is also a political and social question.
At the end of the day we only have our own cultures to blame for failing to both produce and promote people with the education, common sense, and strength of character to be deserving of our trust.
Someone had to do it.
I missed Bob getting outed. Got a link?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2437110&cid=37457272
In some sense the public pays either way. It's a question of whether the cost is explicit, and included in the rate paid for the electricity, or hidden and deferred, in which case the public ends up paying in the form of higher taxes -- and does not get a choice about whether it was a good idea in the first place.
Should the public pay for cleaning up an oil spill, or should the oil company (and its investors and insurers) responsible for the problem bear the cost? Hint: if there are no consequences to a spill, the industry will operate unsafely, as it increases profit.
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
Try basing your statements on FACT, rather than basing your FACTS on your belief :)
Remind me, how many people have died because there were Reactors at the Fukushima sites when the tsunami hit? (heres a quick tip, its a nice round number) How many people have actually suffered any serious ill effects from any emissions from Fukuskima? (another nice round number)
Stop trying to help spread the nuclear FUD lies, it's not big, and it's not clever.
Probably less than those of coal in the US since 1980.
To top it off, how about some RADIOACTIVE STEAMZ? Or even better, TOXIC STEAMZ WITH RADIATIONZ. Honestly, I had to check what the hell a subluxation is. As it turns out, it's as real as fibromyalgia ( = non-existant). tl;dr: Can't tell if trolling or just very, very stupid.
Hey Bob,
Doesn't having your cranium inserted in your anus also cause severe subluxations? Maybe you should see a witch doctor, sorry, I mean chiropractor.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Why the hell is Coal power bashing in Nuclear threads always moderated "insightful". This should be moded -1 / offtopic.
Everybody knows that coal is wrong. The question is not "should we build coal or nuclear". The question is, "should we invest about the value of one nuclear power plant (10-20 Billion / about 1GW) or should we invest the equivalent in renewable energy sources e.g. doubling the research budget for three years (currently e.g DOE funded to about 2 Billion yearly) then easily paying to build the same capacity as the nuclear plant in terms of offshore wind plants (about 1Billion / 300MW - you would need three of these) tidal (again about 1Billion for about 300MW capacity - three of these too) and hydro plants (1Billion will get you 2GW of pump storage capacity ; put another billion into small scale hydro and you will get back loads, though I can't find clear enough calculations)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
[The question is, "should we invest about the value of one nuclear power plant (10-20 Billion / about 1GW) or should we invest the equivalent in renewable energy sources e.g. doubling the research budget for three years (currently e.g DOE funded to about 2 Billion yearly) then easily paying to build the same capacity as the nuclear plant in terms of offshore wind plants (about 1Billion / 300MW - you would need three of these) tidal (again about 1Billion for about 300MW capacity - three of these too) and hydro plants (1Billion will get you 2GW of pump storage capacity ; put another billion into small scale hydro and you will get back loads, though I can't find clear enough calculations)]
... uh ... what was the question again?
The answer is
If 1kg of Thorium or Uranium cost as much as a house - $300.000 - the material cost would still only add $0.03 per kWh of electricity.
10-20 billion for one GW of nuclear capacity? What currency is *that* in, because it's certainly not dollars, euros, pounds or anything similar.
>>I think we should power our society by burning chiropractors.
Not all chiropractors are crazy nuts. My guy doesn't believe it causes cancer or whatever, and he did an amazing job fixing my back.
What, would you prefer I be on painkillers the rest of my life and unable to walk?
> It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
Exactly. I seriously doubt we are soon going to come up with any way to get billions and billions of Watt/Hours of energy without some nasty side effects. They all involve trade offs between instant costs and longterm risk, environmental losses, direct risks to humans, etc. All of them. even 'Green Energy' unless somebody patents direct conversion of unicorn farts... and locates some unicorns. And they probably have some serious downside we wouldn't discover until going into GW scale production.
>"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet.
And won't ever be. "Green Energy' is energy without consequences. As soon as a proposed 'Green' energy source gets beyond research, beyond government subsidized toys for 'I'm Greener Than Thou' prats and goes into real production the side effects (which were there all along) become visible and the Greens turn on it.
Look to history. Remember when Hydro was THE perfect green energy? Most /. readers are too young, but I remember. Then of course people noticed it disrupted fish lifecycles, submerged whole ecosystems, changed flow patterns of rivers and in at least one instance caused an earthquake. OH NOES, CONSEQUENCES! Can't have none of those, start bustin' those damned dams.
Windmills kill birds, environmentalists just won't abide them anywhere THEY have to see the eyesores. A couple of windmills are great, LOOK, I care about saving the earth! A thousand windmills cranking out MWs for the power corp? EVIL!
Solar? So long as the government tosses enough subsidy cash and the toxic manufacturing stays out of sight in China oh yea, plenty of Holier than Thou egoboo for the preening green. Cover the desert in collectors to generate industrial scale power? What! Lizards and shit live in the desert dude!
Geothermal? Causes earthquakes. Oops. Sorry bout that.
Tidal? Will kill fish. Just wait, you know it does.
Biofuels? Just toying with it spiked corn prices and is on the brink of causing worldwide hunger. Any attempt to derive a noticable chunk of our current energy needs from there is folly and our energy needs are about to skyrocket as the bulk of the world makes it to the 19th century.
Democrat delenda est
Thank you -- I think you're using the only argument that can work. The US's energy policy for 50 years has been based on the axiom "radiation scary!"
Make public policy decisions based on historical fact and statistics rather than fear and ignorance.
The facts show nuclear power causes less pollution and fewer deaths than any other economically viable energy source.
But accept that "less pollution" does not mean none, and "fewer deaths" does not mean zero.
Anyone unwilling to accept that needs to stop using cars and electricity.
You're proving that we should power our society by burning stupid people. It's an infinite resource.
*****
I'm crying on the outside as my moderation points are poofed. BRAVO!
durr hurr troll troll science make brain hurt +100000 insightful
I assume you're alluding to the chemical toxicity of Plutonium. I can only speculate what that has to do with its half life, radioactivity or the ability to destroy it using newer reactors, or how you imagine it will get from the inside of a reactor into your breakfast cereal any more than the contents of all the chemical plants in New Jersey do.
I don't think nuclear has ever killed anyone at all in the US, actually.
In 1961, all three operators of SL-1 in Idaho were killed. The cause was one of the operators manually withdrawing a control rod too far. One theory is that it was a suicide-murder due to a love triangle.
The environmental movement is likely one of the major reasons why Nuclear power has fallen out of public favour.
Consider the possibility that after weighing all the factors (carbon emissions, other air pollution, mining, radiation, etc) that Nuclear power is a major net benefit to the environment.
It's entirely possible that the planet would be better off if the environmental movement never existed.
I don't know if that's actually the case, but I think it's pretty damning of the environmental movement that it could come down so strongly on either side of an issue where there's a legitimate debate. Maybe as a rule of thumb when a movement starts rallying around causes that could very be hurting their objectives than that movement has gone off the rails.
I stole this Sig
"If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse."
Price ? Otherwise it wouldn't even be used.
New things are always on the horizon
Adam West: Oh My.
Doctor: Probably from rolling around in that toxic waste. What in God's name were you trying to prove?
Adam West: I was trying to gain super powers.
Doctor: Well that's just silly.
Adam West: Silly, yes...idiotic...yes
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
That's based on recent completion costs in USD rather than some fantasy "estimate" made up to justify a forthcoming indefinite boondogle for the military-industrial complex.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
[The question is, "should we invest about the value of one nuclear power plant (10-20 Billion / about 1GW) or should we invest the equivalent in renewable energy sources e.g. doubling the research budget for three years (currently e.g DOE funded to about 2 Billion yearly) then easily paying to build the same capacity as the nuclear plant in terms of offshore wind plants (about 1Billion / 300MW - you would need three of these) tidal (again about 1Billion for about 300MW capacity - three of these too) and hydro plants (1Billion will get you 2GW of pump storage capacity ; put another billion into small scale hydro and you will get back loads, though I can't find clear enough calculations)] The answer is ... uh ... what was the question again?
Sorry; The question is higlighted. I got totally distracted with the details of how to calculate the financial efficiency of small/micro power and forgot to check the grammar when I came back. It's really fascinating; the realisation that one sharp corner low down in your pipes may have a real effect is really fun. More interesting is that when you look at it you really start to wonder why there isn't more of it done. I would guess that most of the power stuff is done with very short term thinking (which puts gas powered plants to the front) and the Nuclear industry gets by this by being connected to military use.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Buses are safer per miles traveled too, but people still drive cars....you cant just use safety stats. Nuclear is a sexy technology, and everything in me as a geek screams for me to support it. However its not an economically better option, and even less so if you factor in all the external costs; including nuclear waste, WMD proliferation fears etc. Fukushima might not have killed anyone, but what is the economic cost of the loss of all the productive land that has had to be evacuated? Countries like Britain only ever built Nuclear reactors because it produced the Uranium for their Nuclear weapons industry, and to reduce power of the coal miner unions....not because it was cheaper, even by the very optimistic calculations of the people that wanted it.
I always see the same arguments by pro-nuclear proponents here. I divide them into two threads...(1) Dont judge us by previous reactors designs....newer designs are safer...fair enough, but their still super expensive and can still fail catastrophically in a worst case scenario...and (2) My magic bullet will fix everything e.g. thorium, fast breeder.....sorry, none of these options exist commercially yet, are feasible, or meet all critical concerns.
Im not anti-nuclear...it has current applications like big bombs or powering very expensive warships... but ive yet to see a good economic power producing argument for them that includes all the external costs. I don't close my mind to new ideas e.g. a travelling wave reactor.....just make a good case for it first.
and probably many less deaths than say Aberfan which killed 116 children and 28 adults in a single coal mining incident in 1966
First of all it was a record flood that killed those people. The dam couldn't handle such a massive, prolonged downpour, but what do you think would have happened if the dam wasn't there?
Secondly the dam was built to control flooding, more than 20 years previously. It probably would have been built with or without the hydropower station. How many lives do yout think could have been saved over 20 years of flood control?
Nuclear power causes dangers that wouldn't have been there if not for the nuclear power station.
Hydropower taps a resources that is produced because of flood control.
Flood control can be done badly, sure, as can anything, but if done well it saves lives, houses, crops, etc.
Turning all that harnessed power into electricity, especially when the efficiency of doing so is so high, the resource is so renewable and the pollution is virtually nill, is just good sense.
Got any examples for a recently built nuclear plant for that price? Because I can't think of any.
You're counting deaths from mining nuclear fuel there too, right? Right? sigh.
You should be a politician.
The real nuclear power position of ... everybody ... is (3) 50 year old reactor designs beat the crap out the of the safety record of every other technology, including solar and wind ("how could that possibly be ?", well solar is installed on rooftops, I'm sure your mother told you why that's a problem, and wind is in 50-150 meter high towers and not well designed : wind generators have exposed wheels, meaning every x-th maintenance they double as a meatgrinder. And boy, do wind towers need a lot of maintenance).
And that's ignoring the fact that ~40% of cancer diagnoses would be impossible without nuclear reactors (without, to be exact, plutonium-producing nuclear reactors). If you count the lives saved due to the availability of advanced isotopes, made in the worst type of nuclear reactor design we have, then nuclear power saves more people per TWh than coal kills. In 50 years, the number of lives saved is probably more than all the deaths due to bombs as well, even though it's complely unfair to chalk bomb casualties up to the technology. I mean if you counted bomb casualties, in WWII, the Germans used coal, so that's bound to be a disastrous stat, and everyone else used oil in the 65 years since, with a bit of solar power military systems thrown in in the last decade)
Nuclear power is perfectly safe. Just look a Fukushima - it's proof that Nuclear power is safe.
SAFE!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Even worse, there are all the issues that happen from coal *mining*. Never mind what happens on the burning end, coal mining kills people and ruins huge areas of land.
If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse.
This is the question everyone really should be asking:
... with what will we replace them?
When coal runs out, when oil runs out, when natural gas runs out
Any answer that involves the long-term use of fossil fuels is a non-starter. If we do not have a more viable option than nuclear power when there's no more coal, it's a forced putt: we'll go nuclear in a big way, whether we feel "safe" or not. We're in the big leagues now: a multi-terawatt civilization, whose power requirements are increasing with no end in sight, one in desperate need of denser energy sources.
The reality is this: fossil fuels are a. not a long-term solution and b. should be considered as civilization's flying start, our grubstake for the future. We absolutely will need to replace them for power production at some time in the not-too-distant future. If someone knows of a technology that can provide continuous electric power at current and foreseeable usage levels that doesn't involve combustion or nuclear fission I would very much like to know what it is.
I will say this as well: all the anti-nuclear, green-power proponents will be screaming bloody murder, right along with the rest of us, when the rolling blackouts begin. Mark my words.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why would people living near nuclear power plants be going to chiropractors? Why wouldn't they be, oh I don't know, dying from cancer in the hospital?
Yeah it's just stupid, pu-239 is no more toxic than sugar
Yes, but how does it taste?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's based on recent completion costs in USD rather than some fantasy "estimate" made up to justify a forthcoming indefinite boondogle for the military-industrial complex.
Keep in mind, however, that the old Atomic Energy Commission (whose mandate was to promote the use of atomic power) was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which does little else but put up costly roadblocks to building and commissioning nuclear facilities. The NRC is a legacy of the anti-nuclear hysteria of the sixties and seventies, so you really have to factor in the political cost as well as the actual costs.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think we should power our society by burning chiropractors.
You can more than double the output if you catalyze the reaction with pureed scientologists.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't think nuclear has ever killed anyone at all in the US, actually.
In 1961, all three operators of SL-1 in Idaho were killed. The cause was one of the operators manually withdrawing a control rod too far. One theory is that it was a suicide-murder due to a love triangle.
And after Three Mile Island, cancer deaths in the years following decreased slightly. Not statistically relevant either way, but at the time there was a lot of (ahem!) "concern" that TMI's release of radioactive gas was going to kill a lot of people. Of course, it didn't work out that way, but when did our media ever let facts get in the way of, well ... anything.
Actually, I blame a couple of things for the American citizen's demonstrable inability to make rational decisions. One, education, or the lack thereof. Two, the public media, which are incapable of reporting anything even resembling the truth, especially regarding technological issues. Remember when that fellow got arrested a few years ago for playing around with a laser pointer with his son in his own back yard? They pointed it at a police helicopter and shortly afterwards SWAT took him down as a potential terrorist. It was a legitimate concern, I suppose, but the police reaction was way over the top.
In any event, I actually watched this "News Anchorman" (I believe the anchors were in his head where his brain should have been) commenting, with a straight face, "One has to ask if it is possible for these readily-available devices to burn through an aircraft cockpit and kill the pilots." Ignorance must truly be bliss, I suppose.
Reporting on nuclear power issues is generally performed with a similar level of competence.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The problem is people do not understand the concept of trade-offs and the fact it they effect every decision.
It's risk-benefit analysis, and it is by nature a cold-blooded business, but it is the only way to assure that you get what you need while minimizing the impact. The problem is, we Americans want zero-impact, perfect safety and absolute reliability. The fact that you can't ever have that doesn't seem to matter in our decision-making.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Vogtle plant cost 13 Billion dollars as an example. There are plenty more where that came from (for example Levy county at 17 billion (including transmission). If I were feeling cynical I'd think that the fact you don't know this must show you work for the nuclear industry.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Both of your examples quoted are for *two* reactors of 1.1 GWe each (and for the second case, some transmission lines as well). So that's less than $6000 per kW, not the $10,000 to $20,000 you claimed. Did you not even read your own links?
I do understand that. However, that's the inevitable consequence of the nuclear industry demonstrating complete incompetence. Look on Slashdot and most other places where "technical people" meet with their religious belief in Nuclear power. You will see that the Chernobyl and Fukashima disasters are presented as evidence that Nuclear power is safe. "This is the worst you can get" they say. But the only reason we have to believe that is statements from the same nuclear engineers as told us that these accidents were impossible in the first place.
It's been demonstrated that nuclear engineers, who claimed that accidents were "one in a million years" with the first generation of reactors don't know what they are talking about (this was the standard statement in the 1970s and 1980s). Treating that as experimental evidence it strongly suggests that right now we seem to have to ignore the engineering advice about how safe or unsafe plants are. Instead we have to look at the accidents statistically. We can learn that major incidents happen yearly. Normally I'd say that it's a good guess that nuclear accidents follow something like the an accident pyramid. If that's so, and if serious accidents occur approximately every 5-10 years as recently, then we can expect an ultra-serious (small country destroying?) accident some time in the next 50-100 years.
The kind of safety over-engineering we have to do to get away from this has real costs and environmental implications. If those costs make nuclear more expensive than renewable then the message is clear. Build renewable energy sources and limit nuclear reactors to one or two worldwide on which we can learn for the future. Ensure that those plants are run for research, not profit and that they are seriously monitored to ensure that they are safe. When the minor incident rate in those plants goes below one every ten years (which on a typical pyramid would suggest one catastrophe about every 5000 years; still a bit more than is really desirable), then we can start considering having multiple plants running.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Yeah it's just stupid, pu-239 is no more toxic than sugar
Yes, but how does it taste?
like chicken.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Most existing dams don't have hydropower stations on them.
For example:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/retrofitting-non-electctric-dams-for-power/
That's a lot of free energy, which can be efficiently tapped.
And that's before considering places that could or should be dammed for flood control and could in the process get hydropower stations, or places that don't need flood control but could provide a lot of power if dammed.
My cost was per power station, not per reactor; It's very rare nowadays to build a single reactor on a site. I don't think the total average output is 2GW. As with Wind power, but to a lesser extent they have down time and outages (surprisingly much due to the requirement to shutdown every time there is a nuclear incident - fossil fuel power stations can keep running even with minor problems). If I remember right this gives about 80% availability and the plant runs at about 80% of nominal capacity.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Despite public opinion, government policy, or personal preference, this universe is only equipped with a single source of energy and it happens to be Nuclear. We can either obtain our energy needs directly from the natural sources of fusion (stars) by using photo cells, indirectly by using wind, wave, hydro or stored biomass carbon fuel, or we can produce it directly ourselves in fission or fusion reactors. Our current solar technologies,fully exploited, are not capable of supplying the energy needs of 7 billion plus humans. We will, of necessity, require nuclear fission to generate the balance of the power to maintain a minimum standard of living for the worlds population for the foreseeable future. We do not, however, have to locate that generating capacity inside the Earth's gravity well/environmental cocoon. We have the technology to place that generating capacity either in an unstable high earth orbit ( so that it flies away from the Earth if the orbit decays ) or on the Moon. The energy can be transmitted back to earth by laser, microwave, or as chemical reagents ready to be recombined into harmless byproducts ( like water ). We can, and should, be moving in this direction as a matter of policy. We aren't because no one has figured out a way to turn a profit by doing it.
releases into groundwater can be even worse than releases into the air. so to really gain from burying it you would want to bury it below an impermeable layer of rock which in turn is below any local aquifers. Not impossible but bloody expensive.
Further nuclear power stations are fundamentally heat engines. Heat engines need a place to dump the waste heat and that place needs to be as cool as possible (heat engine efficiency is related to the ratio of Thot and Tcold). Realistically that means either a sea water heat exchanger or a cooling tower. Either has the pontential to cause releases of radioactive material if the shit really hits the fan (yes you try to have multiple loops but heat exchangers can melt).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place.
You wave of the toxicity of pu-239 and focus on radioactivity. You completely ignore that when pu-239 bio-concentrates in the food chain it analogues iron as a micro nutrient and becomes a potent source for the gestation of cancers such as leukemia, bone marrow cancer and lung cancer when inhaled.
The *FACT* is that pu-239 is radioactive and substantially toxic not only for 25000 years but the average cycle of daughter products that bring it closer to 500000 years before it becomes benign.
Why else would Glen Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium call it the most dangerous substance on earth and name it after the Greek god of Hell? Plutonium is carcinogenic at one-millionth of a gram, soluble, teratogenic. It also damages the genes causing recessive mutations that take generations to express.
Your statement was modded up because it panders to the illusory perception of the ardent nuclear fanbois here on slash dot and the insecurity caused by having their belief system completely crushed by reality. Just like religious cults whos claims that the end of the world is nigh, when their claims are proven false they become even more strident that their claims are TRUE TRUE TRUE.
It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
And which reactor would that be PBMR, IFR? Supported by which materials technology? Can you specify an actual burn-up rate? Do you know what a burn-up rate is or what the nominal burn-up rate of a conventional reactor is? How do you propose handling the now enormous amounts of fissile ash created?
Do surprise me.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
I can only presume you are referring to the fissile ash output of your "modern reactor" design that would be produced in abundance. Those products are radioactive in the 600 year time frame and as there is no geologically stable waste containment facility in America how and where would you propose it to be transported and how would it be stored. Your statement is naive and reveals a complete lack of understand of the industrial size of the logistics of your flippant statement.
durr hurr troll troll science make brain hurt +100000 insightful
Indeed, whereas your post relies on social proof, mine relies on actual evidence that isn't an insult to actual science. I ridiculed your post because I had better things to do, like get drunk and relax in the sun. You ignorance, rampant as it is, makes me weep. Baaaaa baaaaa baaaaa.
or how you imagine it will get from the inside of a reactor into your breakfast cereal any more than the contents of all the chemical plants in New Jersey do.
What about a plutonium fire in a spent fuel cooling pond at Fukushima. What about ground water contamination or even a hydrovolcanic explosion. Are you certain the engineering that supports the actual containment of these transuranics are able to stop leakage from occurring? What sort of concrete lasts 25000 years? What sort of geology do you think contains plutonium in ground water thus preventing contamination from occurring? What
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You wave of the toxicity of pu-239 and focus on radioactivity.
I'm not ignoring the toxicity, I'm pointing out the FUD with regard to the half life. The fact that it takes a long time to decay is irrelevant because the radioactivity isn't the problem, even though that is what scares people.
At that point you can stop talking about nuclear physics and start talking about chemistry. But the problem there is that there are plenty of extremely toxic substances we deal with on a daily basis, and you haven't pointed out any reason why Plutonium in particular needs to be singled out for special treatment. Arsenic and Mercury are both extremely toxic but we use them all over the place in industry. Mix bleach an ammonia in an unventilated space and you'll be having a very bad day. Half the stuff under your sink will kill you if you get it hot enough and breathe the vapors, and the facilities that make and store those things would cause serious problems for anyone downwind if they caught fire.
You don't have any reason why Plutonium has to be singled out. We deal with toxic substances regularly. When mistakes happen it's very bad, so we do what we can to minimize mistakes. But the non-existence of a zero percent error rate is no excuse to shut down all of industry, and there is no reasoning why it should be applied that way to nuclear power when it isn't to anything that has the same degree of harm when things go wrong.
And which reactor would that be PBMR, IFR? Supported by which materials technology? Can you specify an actual burn-up rate? Do you know what a burn-up rate is or what the nominal burn-up rate of a conventional reactor is?
Do you actually have any purpose in asking these questions? You can destroy Plutonium with anything that bombards it with neutrons. It's fissionable. Unless you're trying to dispute the possibility of a reactor that can produce neutrons, what's your point? That it will take a long time? We already have a lot of Plutonium. It can be used as reactor fuel, and we want to get rid of it. If it takes a long time that's only evidence that we need to start building those reactors as soon as possible and in quantity, because we have more fuel than we know what to do with (and the existing reactors are making more every day), so we need to get to work using it up.
How do you propose handling the now enormous amounts of fissile ash created?
Let's come back from the propaganda term "fissile ash" and actually consider what that is. It's the elements the fissile elements are split into. Various elements with various half lives, which can be chemically separated. This is largely stuff with commercial value -- it's how we make x-ray machines and a variety of other equipment and methods that fall under the heading of "nuclear medicine." There are various other industrial applications. For example, Sr-90 can be used to make radioisotope thermoelectric generators like the Russians used to use in remote lighthouses or NASA uses for space probes etc.
This is really the whole problem with talking about "nuclear waste" -- it's not waste. People pay money for this stuff.
I missed you Bob! Thanks for the laughs.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Anyone unwilling to accept that needs to stop using cars and electricity.
Eating too, don't forget eating!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I would point out an even bigger factoid that many seem to miss. Fukushima Daiichi isn't the only nuclear power plant that was hit in the tsunami. The other plants shut down properly and caused no issues.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Only because most people don't understand that radionuclide release into the environment, bio-accumulation and micro-nutrient analogues are far more insidious and deadly issue. It's exactly because this isotope is stable in this extremely toxic chemical form for so long that it deserves to be singled out. Your comments sought no balance, no mention of it's toxicity and presented hope of the prospect of dealing with plutonium with technology that isn't available with existing materials technology. All in all a clever mis-representation of the truth.
Ingest one millionth of a gram of plutonium and it will kill you, the radiation will induce cancer in the body - they are facts.
On the contrary I have cited many reasons for Plutonium to be singled out. It's precisely that we continue to make these mistakes so often that we can't afford to continue to make these mistakes with plutonium any more. It's extreme toxicity is stable for at least 25000 years despite the level of radioactivity it's gone through a process of significant concentration and neutron bombardment to achieve its form.
Yes I do, to gauge your depth of consideration. Yes it is fissionable but on an industrial scale, unlikely. These are straightforward questions, like What is the Net Energy return of a new AP-1000 reactor?
And so far, I'm not wearing my surprised face.
Please don't insult me with schoolboy arguments, I know how valuable these elements are. The real question is are you aware of how deadly they are outside of your circle of expertise? sr-90 might be a valuable substance (as is plutonium) but that doesn't mean it won't kill you and generations of children after you. Do you know what micro-nutrient strontium-90 analogues in the body? Do you know how much energy it takes to decommission a nuclear reactor? Can you describe how it moves through the food chain?
You seek to cast these elements as benign. You talk about reactor technology that doesn't exist as if it does yet when you are asked the most rudimentary questions about nuclear power you are unable to offer an answer. This begs the question of how much you have actually considered, really considered, what you believe to be facts about nuclear power.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's exactly because this isotope is stable in this extremely toxic chemical form for so long that it deserves to be singled out.
Except that stability is not rare. It isn't a reason to single something out. It's just a propaganda tool: "Toxic for 24000 years!!11!" Never mind that most other toxic elements are toxic forever.
hope of the prospect of dealing with plutonium with technology that isn't available with existing materials technology.
You do understand that it has nothing to do with materials technology and nothing to do with untested reactors. You don't even need new reactors. A variety of existing reactors can use mixed oxide fuel. As I recall the CANDU is supposed to be the most effective at destroying Plutonium of those already in commission.
The hold up on actually doing it with all existing "waste" Plutonium -- which isn't to say that it hasn't been done before -- is the proliferation concern. Supposedly if you go around transporting Plutonium to be reprocessed into reactor fuel, it gives terrorists more opportunities to steal it. Of course, that's completely nonsense because it can't be stolen once it's destroyed, but it can be if you just leave it sitting around indefinitely. (One can also imagine a trivial way to deal with this: Put the military in charge of transporting it from place to place and have them take the same precautions they do with actual nuclear weapons.)
Ingest one millionth of a gram of plutonium and it will kill you, the radiation will induce cancer in the body - they are facts.
So you're reiterating that it's toxic and saying cancer because it's scary. Now distinguish why we should care about Plutonium but not care about arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, vinyl chloride, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, cyanide, cobalt, etc. etc.
On the contrary I have cited many reasons for Plutonium to be singled out. It's precisely that we continue to make these mistakes so often that we can't afford to continue to make these mistakes with plutonium any more. It's extreme toxicity is stable for at least 25000 years despite the level of radioactivity it's gone through a process of significant concentration and neutron bombardment to achieve its form.
That isn't "many reasons." That's "it's toxic" and "irrelevant information can be scary." What does neutron bombardment have anything to do with anything? If you make the same isotope of the same element by bombarding a lower atomic weight element with neutrons as opposed to spontaneous decay from a higher atomic weight element, is the result somehow more or less dangerous?
Yes I do, to gauge your depth of consideration.
What you are attempting to engage in is known as the "ad hominem fallacy." You attack the person you're arguing with instead of the argument. If I say, "Plutonium can be destroyed by neutron bombardment," and that is a true statement of fact, it doesn't matter one iota whether it's the only thing I know about Plutonium whatsoever. It isn't made false by the lack of additional knowledge on the part of the speaker. So as you seem to have no interest in disputing the fact of the matter, please forgive me if I lack the time to answer irrelevant questions that anyone can look up on the internet and which have no bearing on the original matter in any event.
Yes it is fissionable but on an industrial scale, unlikely.
Would you care to back up your unsupported assertion with some reasoning or citations? Because I can.
The real question is are you aware of how deadly they are outside of your circle of expertise?
I'm going to ask this once more: What is your reasoning behind why these isotopes should be prohibited from the world, when I can give you a list of compounds as long as your arm that in actual fact have each caused more deaths and more cancer and yet we still use regularly in industry?