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Climatologist James Hansen Defends Nuclear Energy
First time accepted submitter prajendran writes "James Hansen, the former director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, has been a strong defender of using nuclear energy to replace coal and renewable energy. He and three other researchers had written a letter, arguing just this. In this interview with rediff.com, an Indian news site, he was asked to address some concerns surrounding the issue, especially given the strong feelings generated by it. It may not be Hansen's best interview, but it did bring out his passionate side."
And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.
Nuclear can scale up very easily and rapidly. It merely requires the balls to bring down the miles of red tape standing in the way of building new reactors and reprocessing their waste. It handles base load and we know that it works because we've been using it for decades. If you want to bet the farm on something, bet it on something we already know works. As for the fuel, CANDU plants can already breed fuel from thorium and it can use MOX fuel including the weapons-grade plutonium from all those decommissioned nuclear weapons we have laying around.
There's plenty of fuel, waste is ridiculously tiny and low risk if you reprocess the fuel, it scales very well, and we know it works for all kinds of load. Why you'd want to bet human civilization on something new that's more damaging to the environment, causes more human fatalities, and has many unknown risks associated with it is beyond me, but I can say that it won't scale to what we'd need without obscene amounts of environmental damage and unknown risks to the overall climate.
The real solution involves using proven safe, clean technology on a larger scale.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.
So? The pools are a pretty good long term solution, if by "long term" you mean at least the next century or so, until future generations figure out a better place to store it, or more likely, an economic use for the "waste".
Science has solved the waste issue. Titanate nanofibers. One gram cleans a ton of waste water.
There is plenty of option for fuel waste treatments. France has been the world pioneer and leader of reprocessing. Only the US have decided NOT to reprocess their spent fuel. This is a political problem, not an engineering one. After reprocessing, you are left with a small portion of the original spent fuel which can be vitrificated and buried. These waste have a really high density and do not occupy much space. Trash landfill is causing more harm on the long term than there waste, but you don't object to trash landfill...
This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist.
Wrong.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Waste is not a small problem. There is a salt mine in Germany where there were nuclear waste was stored. Turns out, this mine is not as safe as originally thought. The mine is instable and there is water inflow and the nuclear waste stored there has to be brought back to surface. The German parlament just passed a law about this. Estimated cost (tax payers of course) 4-6 billion Euro. This is the thing with nuclear energy: It seems such a nice solution. As long as you ignore all the details. Then it gets messy and expensive. Really expensive.
The thing that has me really worried about LFTR is the removal of fission products.
In a conventional nuclear reactor, the fission products are confined within the fuel cell cladding. The only place rendered long-term insanely radioactive is the reactor core, which is mechanically pretty simple.
In a LFTR, there is a facility for removing fresh fission products from the liquid fuel. This is a combination of multiple processing steps, high temperatures, corrosive chemicals, and way too much radiation to let humans anywhere near for running or maintaining the equipment. Then the removed products either need short term storage, or to be rendered into a form suitable for long term storage - requiring still more processing.
I'll grant you that the core of a LFTR isn't going to cause an accident, but removing and dealing with those fission products on a regular basis with such a huge price on failure sounds like an engineering nightmare.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I read somewhere that if a human got all their electricity in their entire life from Nuclear power, the total waste product would fit in a coke can. Not sure if that is true or not (your figures indicate about a coke can every year) but if it is (or even 10x times that) it makes the waste issue seem to be blown way out of proportion.