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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."
of-course the only real we have today to cover our energy needs while destroying the environment the least is by using nuclear energy.
Of-course the governments of the world stand in the way of the free market experimenting with nuclear energy, AFAIC that's the reason I don't have a flying car yet, it's because we are not yet powering cars with tiny nuclear reactors and that will not change until we get gov't out of energy business (and if you want progress in any field that is useful, get government out of it).
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah, I have a passionate side too. And I like to take long walks in the park. And it's not just about 'climate change', it's about survival.
Every little bit helps though.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
If only we had the time.
We understand that today's nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently.
Name the advances and name the new technologies - like Pepple-Bed;which is the only one I know.
I have a anit-nuke in my family. For the exception of waste disposal, their arguments against nuke power is ALL based on 1960s technology. It would really help the pro-nukes who really know something about the latest nucluear tech to explain it to the public.
It's great to post here on Slashdot about the ignorance of the anti-nukes but information is pretty scarce. The only reason I even knew about the pepple-bed tech was that it was mentioned years ago in a Scientific American article and I hardly see articles on nuke power in SciAm; let alone in the general media.
is how to keep somebody from tricking the electorate into privatizing it with the promise if big, big savings from the more efficient 'Free Market' approach, and then cutting corners and/or not retiring plants when it's time. It was pretty well documented that the Fukushima plant had outlived it's safe operational time. My favorite argument was that these kind of disasters happen once a century, when the last record of such a disaster was about 100 years ago...
:(...
Basically, Nuclear power can be safe, but it's ever so much more profitable when it's not. And I don't know how to keep people from trading tax cuts for their safety
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In summary he states that present nuclear technology is too dangerous, but that it is possible to create systems without the flaws. Well in that case we need prove. In addition we need a plan to do when we run out of what ever the source is for such nuclear technology. However, I cannot see how they can build a device which is able to recycle all waste.
Renewable sources are much easier to build, they allow to produce energy in a distributed matter reducing the risk of blackouts by plant failure. The only open issue is cheap and reliable energy storage. Presently, there exist technology to fill this gap, but they are not convenient enough due to their cost or their requirement (like pumped-storage power stations). Still this is much closer to a solution than the save and clean nuclear technology.
Surely you're not saying that other means of generating energy don't have similarly massive pollution concerns? Or are you really that naive as to think that nuclear waste tech is still at the same state it was in in the 1950's? Or are you still hoping that we can solve all of our problems with solar?
Dear kids from the future,
Well, we went nuclear so we wouldn't cook the entire planet (and thus allowing you to live).
On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff. Seems to me like you guys should be able to handle it with your quantum teleportation technology or whatever you come up with. Or just keep an eye on it.
Underground. But I don't see any envirohippies making a big fuss about all the uranium ore in the ground and the massive fission reactor thats probably at the heart of the planet so why the big fuss when someone suggests burying the radioactive waste underground later?
There's so much knee jerking going on in the enviromental movement with regards to nuclear power that they could probably audience for starring roles in Lord of the Dance.
Well the problem is the best way to "fix" the waste problem is to reuse the waste from step N-1 in step N after N = >6? you have stuff that is very short term radioactive (but has a very bad temper in large enough amounts).
Keeping the number of Nations that have used Nukes in Acts of War to 1 is why this does not happen.
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Would you prefer to inherit an industrial civilization or a pristine planet? Because you can't have both.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk. Sincerely, the kids from the future.
Dear kids,
Extremely small volumes of waste needing safe storage for only ~300 years is probably the best we can do. Shall we do it -- or will you prefer to be sharpening sticks to hunt among the silent rusted remnants of wind turbines?
Sincerely, LFTR
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.
Gee, 300 years of storage for a small segment of the waste. The rest of which can be reprocessed into fuel, unless of course you're in the US and have this boogyman fear of plutonium.
Om, nomnomnom...
It makes me wonder: Do you hate science? Did your mother beat you with a stick and say this stick is science? I'm just kidding, but it is bothersome that you seem to have swallowed a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff.
This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist. Hanford - nasty waste tanks buried in the ground. Fukushima - fuel pool at reactor 4 dangerously tipping and leaking. Yucca Mountain plans closed.
At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution. We need to get on this and make a place like you describe, pronto. Nuclear can be clean and safe, but so far nobody is really running it clean and safe. Money and greed are too human.
If you ask questions about our energy future from a nuclear context, you will get nuclear answers. If you think about it from en environmental viewpoint you get environmental answers. If you think about it from the economic perspective you get economic answers. If you think about it from the renewable context you get renewable answers.
Unfortunately, the solar industry looks at the issue from the context of huge solar power plants instead of dispersed solar installations. That is where the money is. If the solar energy issue is addressed from the dispersed solar context it looks way different. Imagine empowering businesses like WalMart to cover every store with solar panels. Imaging requiring every new home to have solar panels. Imagine retrofitting all the appropriate buildings in the country with solar panels. Imagine the hydroelectric power plants changing their generation schedules to generate at night when solar power goes away, instead of in the day like they do now when demand is highest.
This can be done much quicker and more cheaply than the nuclear path. It takes twenty years to get a nuke online. Dispersed solar can be online in a year or so. The cost of solar panels comes down almost every day. If you think dispersed solar, the equation changes on everything.
+5 insightful
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.
Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.
You can't have EITHER, at this point. Civilization is doomed by the whackos, and the planet is already far from pristine.
Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.
And buying nuclear power from France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. All the while, that solar energy is driving millions to make the choice between roof over head, food on table, or electricity. As prices start climbing towards of 40c/kWh.
Om, nomnomnom...
Worse, they're buying coal power from Poland (Poland does not have any power-generating reactors ... yet). All because of shutting down their own nuclear reactors in the wake of the post-Fukushima nuclear-is-bad hysteria.
Agreed. Absolute safety with nuclear materials is unattainable. But we can certainly make it as safe as it was before we dug it up out of the ground.
so why the big fuss when someone suggests burying the radioactive waste underground later?
Ummm, because it's a bit tricky to turn transuranic elements back into uranium before their reinterment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
What makes them interesting is being able to "burn" up existing nuclear wastes. So use LFTRs to clean up existing long term nuclear waste and get power as a byproduct.
I always thought Kermit was more of a "Cerenkov" green than a "frog" green. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
...because nuclear plants represent the closest thing to absolute power in our economy, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It becomes a confidence trickster game of convincing a community to commit their ratepayers to large projects where the costs can then be jacked up 900%.
Nuclear energy "works", but only certain cultures in certain eras have been able to manage it responsibly.
Let me also point out that the French are very lucky to have such a mild environment and geology; they too blew some tops immediately after the earthquake... but the quake was 1,000s of miles away and the tops were the kind that sport toupees and berets.
So the real question is whether society is mature enough to handle super concentrated power, without turning our economic and social life into a reflection of that concentrated power. In today's "privatize everything and let the god of greed sort out our problems" political and business climate, I'll answer that question with a resounding "No".
Germany is not buying power in any significant amount from its neighbours.
We are still exporting roughly 30% of our energy production.
Prices for ordinary customers like me are about 17 - 18 c/kWh.
Don't get where from you have your crazy ideas.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And Poland is buying wind power from germany.
So what is your point?
Selling and buying beyond frontiers is exactly the point of an international continent spanning energy grid.
If we would only sell and never buy you would blame us, too. Won't you?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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".
Right now no one knows how to solve the waste problem. ;D
That is likely the reason why now country on the world has a long term waste deposite.
If you have ideas regarding that, publish them
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
But also buying from coal central, or using a lot of coal electricity (think enorm open field, for which they even moved/destroyed whole town http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Tagebau_Vereinigtes_Schleenhain_panorama_midi.jpg/1000px-Tagebau_Vereinigtes_Schleenhain_panorama_midi.jpg here is anotehr one : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Tagebau_Garzweiler_Panorama_2005.jpg/800px-Tagebau_Garzweiler_Panorama_2005.jpg) and I am not even touchign the thematic that biurning brown coal is terrible. Not sure what is the amount of heavy metal radioelement there is in brown coal, but in black coal it ain't rosy.
So yeah, it is the perfect example how nuclear irrational panics threaten a whole economy (heavy electricity prices) and make it worst for CO2 emission. I am pretty sure the german politician are fucking hyprocit and realize that nuclear could be made better, but would rather think "vote!" and bent to the folks panic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"potentially ecosphere-killing crap"
The longer lived the radioactive byproduct, the _less_ harmful it is. I'll take waste with a 10,000 or 100,000 half-life over something that decays in 1 year any day. Heck, just put it in my back yard. I could use the steady income.
I'm no nuclear physicist, but I'm pretty sure that in substantially less than a few hundred years, the waste from your typical nuclear power plant will asymptotically approach background radioactivity levels. The tail that 10,000 year half-life begins almost immediately, and is exponentially less dangerous
What's dangerous about nuclear waste isn't the 10,000 or 100,000 half-lives. It's the fraction of byproducts mixed in it that decays in seconds, minutes, hours, days or a few years. Once those disappear, the rest is not that big of deal. Put it into a container, seal it, and put it someplace where kids won't climb all over it. Problem solved.
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe (for some definition of safe). What about the small but slightly larger amount of waste produced next year, and the year after, and the year after? The nuclear waste dump does not become safe until 300 years after the last thorium waste product is added to the pile and the pile has grown exponentially in the meantime. There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Right now no one knows how to solve the waste problem. ;D
That is likely the reason why now country on the world has a long term waste deposite.
If you have ideas regarding that, publish them
You are completely wrong about this. There are plenty of ideas how to deal with "waste". You simply use it as fuel in fast neutron reactors. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
Then you have real waste that only lasts 300 years before it is less radioactive than the ore original uranium was extracted from.
But of course, why build a reactor that uses $120/lb fuel when you can just dig up new uranium for $50/lb and store the current waste for later?
Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? It is an immense energy resource of which still contains roughly 99% of the original energy content. The actual waste remaining once the rest of the energy is released is very small, with lifetimes measured in decades, not millennia.
And how long, and how much aluminum and concrete, does it take to build a 1GW solar plant?
My grandparents generation left Europe as a smouldering wasteland for their children to sort out.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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...
OOTH, during the previous centuries, political bs has caused more death than nuclear waste will ever, so this would really be the last of my problem should a worldwide political crisis emerge. At worst, the storage site will turn out as a Tchernobyl-like exclusion zone, which is pretty OK.
The fun thing about a nuclear waste pile is that it generates heat. You can use it to run a generator without needing criticality. RTGs use this principle.
So it's a low-output power plant, as well as a waste dump.
Not a sentence!
FWIW, there is at least an uranium deposit in the world which as undergo nuclear fission naturally, but hipster are silents about it...
Give the earth a few millions years, and it will become "pristine" again. Life survived a meteor crash, it will survive mankind.
What makes you so sure our descendants will be better equipped to deal with this? Peak power per capita was in the 1970, our civilization is on the decline, so that seems like wishful thinking to me...
Mercury, cadmium, and other chemical poisons are poisonous forever. They are also harder to detect.
We've found tolerable solutions to our other toxic waste problems. Spent fuel adds the proliferation problem but is otherwise the same.
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.
It is (was) called "Yucca Mountain".
Simply put, if you aren't for nuclear you aren't serious about helping the planet or climate change. You are just pushing some other far worse alternative to line someone's pockets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Talk to Harry Reid. The scientists figured it out decades ago, but some politicians refuse to act.
Hey coal/gas advocates,
The nuclear folks have a better handle on the waste than you do.
Sincerely,
Someone from the present
For the last several decades, there has been a hideous lie propagated on the world. With the best of intentions, Greenpeace started out to protest nuclear weapons and educate the world about the dangers. But they failed. Not in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Which they didn't. Not in preventing massive damage to the worlds ecology. Which they didn't. Not in protesting nuclear weapons. Which they did. No, Greenpeace failed the world by getting hijacked by environmentalists. They did, however, succeed in proving that environmentalists cannot do basic math or understand basic physics.
GP states that long half-life radioactive materials are more dangerous than short-half life materials because they are "radioactive for longer," while reality states that radioactivity is based on the number of radioactive sub-atomic particles released in a period of time. This period of time is defined as "half-life", and the amount of radiation released per "mole" of a compound over time "T" can loosely described as "amount*(time/half-life)" So, given 1 mole of Pu-239 (half-life of 24K years) or 1 mole of caesium-137 (half-life of 30.17 years) will both release 1/2 mole of radioactive sub-atomic particles over their half-lives. So, obviously, the caesium-137 is the more radioactive material.
GP states nuclear power is bad. If you think about it, this is an arguable point. Nuclear reactors don't release greenhouse gasses. They provide a huge amount of power with little waste that is easily contained.
One of the things that believers in "Greenpeace Physics" do not want you to know is that the sum total Curie count of all the radioactive material released in every single nuclear bomb blast, stored in every single nuclear reactor or cooling pond, and released in every nuclear accident in HISTORY is less than the Curie count released every 6 years by the world's coal fired power plants. Yes, fly-ash is radioactive. And burning coal generates huge amounts of green house gasses. And their waste goes everywhere.
If Greenpeace had - instead of blindly fighting atomic energy in all shapes and forms - fought to make every nuclear reactor as safe and efficient as possible, it is just possible that we would not have loonies on both sides of the cultural divide arguing over what is causing Global Warming.
What Hansen is advocating are plutonium fast breeder reactors. Like the Clinch River plant that was cancelled in the 1980s. He wants to mass-produce them on an assembly line. He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.
He never defends his assertion that nuclear can ramp up faster than solar and wind. He ignores the fact that the government continues to massively subsidize nuclear via the Price-Anderson liability limitation and support for research. He ignores the fact that current plants take 10 years to build. And when he says the new plants would be cheaper than existing plants, I had to laugh. Cheaper than "outrageously overpriced" is still not all that cheap.
So yes, fix the waste problem, fix the terrorist problem, fix the fuel supply problem, fix the cost over-run problem, and fix the economically un-competitive problem And THEN we'll talk.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Right, the problem is solved but we need to get real about the proliferation issue.
I say the genie is out of the bottle at this. The policy might have made sense in the past but now our insistence on not having breeder reactors around is creating more risk then its preventing. Lots of people we did not want to get the bomb have the bomb now. China -check, North Korea -check, Pakistan -check, India -check, and Iran is so near it now that the Iranian nuclear issue is a political play thing. The President can send the Secretary of State out to strike a meaningless deal where the various parties don't even agree on what the language means just to distract from domestic issue, because it no longer matters they take the final steps anytime. All of these plays could without our ability to stop them spread it farther as well.
So it comes to the morals issues now. Firstly is clearly immoral to leave future generations piles of toxic waste for which the only solution for dealing with is one we have deemed unacceptable in our time.
Secondly though, what right do we have to deny another sovereign people nuclear power. We certainly under no obligation to give it to them but to deny them is wrong. Look what convulsions our own economy goes through whenever there is a oil price shock. It should be clear that cheap, abundant, reliable energy is critical to, if not the driver for success in the modern world economy. As a practical matter support for nonproliferation policies at this point is synonymous with support for poverty and inequality and war.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Except that the scarcity of the fracked natural gas (which is expected to peak in 2017) isn't being priced in (like many other things). So you can't have a proper Free Market.
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
Some nuclear designs have fuel lasting thousands of years at current energy usage rate. (Whether any of those designs are feasible is another question.)
What makes you think we can't build and manage (even large) nuclear power plants without the help of large corporations?
Most nuclear waste is NOT transuranic. MOST of it has a half life measured in years, not centuries.
Store the stuff a hundred years, and 90%+ of the radioactive waste is no longer radioactive, and the rest can be stored that much easier (what with not being nearly so radioactive and all).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
Is this from solar panels falling onto people? I'll admit I have never heard of a nuclear plant falling onto someone.
The risks of nuclear are huge - companies demand lavish subsidies and government underwriting before they'll consider building a new nuclear power plant. And the "red tape" you so casually dismiss is government and safety regulations like "don't build in a known earthquake zone" and "don't use substandard materials."
Of course, I agree the waste problem has already been solved - it's not like we're looking for a solution 60 years on, are we? We're just going to give it to a reputable company whose interest is in something other than its bottom line and share price, get rid of "red tape," close our eyes, and hope they haven't dumped it in our drinking water. Problem solved.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
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.
+5 insightful
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are.
The key thing to understand in our generation is the cost of the infrastructure to transport the spent fuel around. In the U.S this is estimated to be a 30 year project with significant costs attached to it, in and of itself. Fukushima has demonstrated the danger inherent in the spent fuel cooling pools, that is why any infrastructure project has to start with an actual location to transport it to.
In the U.S Yucca mountain does not meet the requirements Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products, especially the ones you are referring to. Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash, you *need* granite if you want a serious facility. Even the Swedish test facility is better designed than Yucca and the design of the actual facility shows the U.S how it *should* be done.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution.
Actually, leaving it in those pools until the hottest stuff burns itself out and what's left is the lower-level stuff, is not such a bad idea...
This is the primary call of the open letter, Responsible Nuclear Advocacy. Despite my criticisms of the Nuclear Industry I support the development of a reactor that addresses the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 (and much more U-238) currently stored in reactor sites around America, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist these issue onto later generations.
One of the core reasons I support the development of such a reactor because it is capable of utilising weapons grade plutonium as fuel creating an impetus for disarmament and, hopefully, slowly defusing the asymmetrical weapons threat.
Unfortunately, because there is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water revealed by Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.
We need something made of granite. The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore, so it has to be an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the spent fuel containment facility are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once. As I pointed out in another post, the design of the Swedish facility shows how a reactor facility that complies with the industry designed improvements could be implemented.
Even doing that will probably take 30 years to complete, but there is more to it than that.
I was a big fan of the Integral Fast Reactor as a potential solution and in a way I still am. But the reality is 3rd and 4th generation reactors are a pipe dream because our material science is not advanced enough yet to produce a reactor design that will last the thousands of years it will take to use that fuel. If you are going to build reactors then do it properly and build a Terra-watt scale nuclear reactor facility the belly of a massive granite mountain with an attached waste facility and chomp up all your remaining plutonium or end all commercial nuclear activity altogether.
Why? Because Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because said technology (material sciences) are not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes the facility to all the issues associated with de-commissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. A reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen) and avoids all the energetic costs associated with mining, enrichment and de-commissioning/demolition of the reactor.
As long we are producing plutonium and there is no where for it to go we will have a Nuclear Weapons threat and this is the price we pay for opening that pandora's box. I don't hide the fact that I don't like the constant failure of
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can we put all that Radio Active Waste in your back yard?
Nuclear Fusion
Selling and buying power is not in itself a bad thing.
Using your neighbours as a battery makes your unpredictable generation source look more viable than it really is and depending on the billing model may be effectively externalising your costs on them. This applies regardless of whether you are talking about individual users with solar panels on their roofs or whole countries.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Is that before or after the power density problem is fixed for solar?
Nuclear is one of the safest ways of generating electricity. My belief is that people have a irrational fear of radiation mostly because it increases the risk of cancer, a deases that most of us will face either personally or in a loved one, and one that we are terrified of due to it being seen as a slow and painfull death. If radiation exposure increased the risk of cradiovascular deases (the number one killer but nonthless much less feared than cancer), I doubt Nuclear Energy would be as terrifying to most people.
One recent solution, posted not much above you: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45634657
Another one, that's actually been around for quite a while, vitrification (i.e. glassification): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513010313
And yet another one, that Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed some years ago: http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html
There's no dearth of solutions. The issue is one of political will and public relations.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.
Hey fossil fuel advocates by default, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.
Sincerely, everyone not working for an oil company
(Given present technology if you argue against nuclear power you are by default arguing for fossil fuels because that is the only available alternative for the foreseeable future even taking advances in renewable energy into account.)
I have a anit-nuke in my family.
So do I. I just point out that if you are anti-nuke you are by default pro-fossil fuel. Those are the ONLY alternatives right now and that will not change in the next 20-40 years. Renewable energy (solar, wind etc) can mitigate the problem but cannot eliminate it. So that is their choice. Dispersed pollution and probable climate change from fossil fuels or relatively small quantities of extremely hazardous radioactive material. The geopolitics of either choice are pretty awful as well. Hold your nose and pick one because those are the only choices available.
Germany's burning coal and gas like there was no tomorrow. Its per-capita carbon emissions curve is on the rise again as it starts to shut down its non-CO2-emitting nuclear reactors while supertaxing the ones still operating to help pay for the construction of new coal-fired and gas-fired power stations from its climate change fund -- they can't put consumer electricity prices up any more to pay for these new fossil plants as they're already the highest in Europe, double that of 80% nuclear France next door which has half the carbon footprint of its solartopian neighbour.
Meanwhile states like Ontario are moving away totally from fossil-fuel for electricity generation, having embraced nuclear generation along with hydro and closing down their main fossil-fuel plants. Germany will still be burning tens of millions of tonnes of brown coal and lignite a year in 2050 by the best hopes of the supporters of renewable generation, not to mention Russian gas if there's any left.
They handle this by using the excess to pump water into a hydro dam, and using gas turbines to make up the shortfall during the peak.
Most places do not have sufficiently large hydro dams available to make this feasible. Most places just sell off the excess energy (incurring transmission losses along the way) to somewhere else where it is needed.
Do you have a source for that? I was able to find this and world energy per capita is certainly going up. I also found this for the U.S. but it shows a rather recent peak that could be more related to the financial crisis than a real long term trend. In any event, why would a decline in per capita energy use indicate a decline in civilization rather than just increased efficiency?
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.
Hmm. Why is solar's manufacturing and disposal process "filthy"? Is it inherent to the physics and chemistry, or - like how we're still using old uranium reactor designs instead of something better - is it just because we're cutting corners like we do on everything else where a profit is involved?
And one large glowing squid destroying Japan.
"Clean, safe and too cheap to meter!"
Seriously, why would anyone trust a 21st century corporation with something as dangerous as nuclear energy? What's their motivation to keep it safe? They'll have an arbitration clause in fine print and will structure the entire deal with subsidies on the front end. Fukushima isn't just a disaster...it's a business model!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nuclear will work. There are several options though. But technology will be created to meet whatever challenge is imposed. If all coal and oil disappeared, there would be technologies to replace it all in a heartbeat. It would require rebuilding huge amounts of infrastructure, generating tons of jobs. There are already lots of options, even if someone wanted to generate all their own energy, it is actually possible for lots of folks.
The only reason we use so much oil and coal is because their lobby/marketing/PR gets their way. Every option that comes forward gets attacked in lots of ways.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
That's all there is to say.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Yeah like those solar panels, they just come from the Easter Bunny, 100% emmission and waste free, and when they are at the end of their service life, they just ***WHOOSH*** disappear back into thin air.
Really? They're not importing a significant part from it's neighbors?
And prices are pretty close to what I said.
Om, nomnomnom...
Everything you said makes perfect sense - unless you spend two minutes learning the most basic facts about nuclear waste.
There are basically two kinds of radioactive waste.
There is a small amount of highly radioactive waste. Highly radioactive means it emits it's radiation quickly. That's bad because it emits a lot right now, and good because because by emitting it quickly, the radiation is gone pretty quick. That stuff you want to store in very thick steel containers for a hundred years or so. Since there isn't much of it, that's no problem.
Then, there's the stuff that emits its radiation slowly, so it lasts a long time. On the other hand, because it is emitting slowly, you'd need to have it in your house for a few hundred years before it would make you sick. As a demo, I was going to eat a spoonful of it, which would probably give me a belly ache similar to eating an entire pizza. So no problem with that part either.
The only problem with nuclear waste is that some people don't know the difference. It's purely a political problem, there's no engineering problem. Safe storage is easy, technically speaking. Getting people to understand that after 50 years of misinformation by the anti-business lobby is the hard part. You'll notice that the exact same environmental organizations and leaders who convinced you that nuclear was bad are now trying to undo their earlier misinformation campaign, nowtthat it's obvious that nuclear is the only workable alternative to petroleum for 90% of our needs. Most environmentalists have realized that they can't continue to pander to their traditional allies, the purely anti-business constituency. To save the planet, they have to leave those old allies behind and tell the truth - for most of our needs, it's either nuclear or petroleum, and nuclear is by far the better choice.
Your articles don't argue your point. The first one says we would have to double the current number of reactors to meet 2054 target of growth or 208 reactors. Not the 12844 (35*52*7+104) that you suggest. The second article dances on non prolif concerns and makes no calculations. Where did you get your numbers? As a rough exercise, Currently 104 reactors service 19% of the US power demand. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power/. That means 548 reactors to replace it all and an extra 104(using your first article) to meet growth for 2054. Assuming average generating capacity blah blah blah. That would be a reactor every 5 weeks for the next 50 years. And that would be all nuclear so it would be slightly less since renewable energy would still be used.
Talk to Harry Reid. The scientists figured it out decades ago, but some politicians refuse to act.
Indeed. It's so dead (for purely political reasons, BTW), that the courts have said the DoE needs to stop charging consumers for it. Don't expect a refund for all the money they wasted, though.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Seriously, why would anyone trust a 21st century corporation with something as dangerous as nuclear energy?
Because the only other option is the government - which has shown just how competent it is at running projects by proving they can't even build a website given 3 years to do it.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
No true. There was same shift from gas to ignites due to relative shift in prices, but the missing nuclear power has almost completely replaced by renewables:
2010 2011 2012
ignites (Braunkohle) 145.9 TWh 150.1 TWh 161.1 TWh
nuclear 140.6 TWh 108.0 TWh 99.5 TWh
coal 117.0 TWh 112.4 TWh 116.1 TWh
natural gas 89.3 TWh 86.1 TWh 75.5 TWh
oil 8.7 TWh 7.2 TWh 8.0 TWh
renewables 104.8 TWh 123.8 TWh 142.4 TWh
others 26.7 TWh 25.6 TWh 25.9 TWh
imports 42.2 TWh 49.7 TWh 44.2 TWh
exports 49.9 TWh 56.6 TWh 67.3 TWh
(net imports) -17.7 TWh -6.3 TWh -23.1 TWh
consumption 615.3 TWh 606.8 TWh 604.6 TWh
(source: http://ag-energiebilanzen.de/)
I think you are confusing total energy imports with electricity. Germany has net exports in electricity and this did not change even after shutting down 6(7) nuclear power plants. The missing power has indeed been replaced mostly by renewables [1]. It is true that the prices for electricity are high (among other reasons) because subventions for renewables are added as a fee. In contrast, subventions for nuclear and coal are/have been hidden in general taxes.
[1] I posted the numbers here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45636919
I believe there's a typo. David Suzuki is a pop scientist not a top scientist. Bye bye Japan and an evacuation of the North American continent is absurd. We would already have developed it on purpose as a weapon if you could clear a continent an ocean away with a cloud of anything. He even suggests that the likely hood of it happening in the next 3 years at 95%. It's just absurd on the face of it. When I first saw David Suzuki I thought he was ok, but the more I hear him, the more he just sensationalizes marginal hypothesis. Even for him though, this should appear nutty to anyone who know anything about nuclear energy or the dilution of gases in the atmosphere. For crying out loud, we've probably released more radiation from the thousand or so above ground nuclear tests we did. Or the thousand or so Russia did. Or the hundreds (maybe thousands) China did. Or the testing the dozen or so other countries have done. BTW, you likely do have isotopes in your body from these experiments, it's just so ridiculously diluted across the atmosphere it poses little more threat than eating a banana.
That comment is an insult to your intelligence. I flat out don't believe that you believe that.
Well, considering most of it is stored in pools at the reactor sites which are mostly on the coastline which will be most affected by sea level rise, if we leave it all there we can kiss the ocean goodbye as a food source before long. And of course we haven't been able to move it anywhere for political reasons, that is why it's stuck where it is now for the most part. Over half of all nuclear accidents have occurred in the USA. Reactors are targets in military conflicts and potential terrorist targets. Fukushima is just the latest in a line of nuclear disasters. And there are people who are not insane that would like to build dozens more such sites to multiply our capacity and most importantly, our RISK? Read some of the details of past disasters and you'll see that we are simply not competent enough to manage the technology. On paper, perhaps, but not in practice.
AC may have mocked this, but it is correct. Several instances were discovered at Oklo, in Gabon, Africa. I'm not really sure what this has to do with practical energy generation, however.
In the grand scheme of things, is it more important to slowly use up the resources of the Earth and Sun, then fade out of existence altogether (does it matter which form of life does this, really?) or to use them as the building block to expand into the rest of the Universe (at which point you can leave Earth as your nature preserve)? The consumption of potential energy is the building block of life--the bottom line. You don't consume energy, you don't live.
Now, how long do you think we can mutually sustain a list of pet species you'd like to have around? 1000 years? 10,000? Until the Sun warms the Earth so much that nothing "living" as we know it can exist here? Maybe just leave it to them, to make sure that humans aren't the ones who evolve to consume all these resources. It sure doesn't sound like a sustainable solution if your solution is to live off (only) this one local fusion reactor until it runs out and humans/other life forms go extinct altogether.
TL;DR: If you want to "save the planet", invest in science, figure out how to mine the rest of the Universe, and get us off this rock. Otherwise, physics has exactly 1 conclusion for our scenario, and it doesn't end with you posting on Slashdot.
This is the dirty secret about life. It consumes resources. The other dirty secret is that all resources (potential energy) run out, at least so far as most widely accepted theories about the Universe go. Perpetual motion machines allowing us to "sustainably" use the same energy source "forever" don't exist. Most humans would rather not admit either one--some sort of current top-of-the-food-chain guilt combined with willful ignorance of physics and the inability to look at the potential future of conscious entities in the Universe rather than just their own kids. Who else is going to get the only known conscious entities in the Universe off of this planet for the long haul? The dolphins?
We need to figure out how to mine for resources somewhere else, or we run out eventually. That's the hard, cold bottom-line.
THAT case was just a stupid case of ignoring scientific criticism for profit. The Swiss did it a bit better, they invited everybody to review the proposals for multiple sites and only after all criticism was resolved did they start construction on a site. The Asse site was just a, oh look I have an abandoned salt mine, hmm, how can I get rid of it as profitable as possible...
It's sad to see how many people are part of the anti-nuclear group.
Ignorance is not a sufficient excuse for making the wrong decision in today's age of information dissemination.
If your using a reprocessing cycle you don't need to keep is safe for that amount a time. Perhaps a century, maybe a little longer. Even without reprocessing its not 10000 years. Where do these ridiculous numbers come from? Where did you get this number from?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
And there are proposed solutions to those as well. Also they make up a very small portion of waste.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.
What the hell are you talking about? *if* we do nuclear we should be reprocessing and breading and that means plutonium. The amounts and grades in reactors can't be used in bombs without some large enrichment. Any nuclear fuel can be used in a bomb. 233U was even used from the Th fuel cycle.
Really why is he crazy for suggesting breeders? cus that is all you got. Breeders fix the waste problem, well most of it. And we can't fix anything of these problems without *building* something.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.
But the US is almost unique in this stupidity.
Other countries reprocess their fuel.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The best thing about solar panels is how they don't even work half the time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
imports 42.2 TWh
exports 49.9 TWh
(net imports) -17.7 TWh
That subtraction has a 10 TWh error in it
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You won't see accidents if nuclear plants are operated with a modicum of competency.
Yes you will because humans are involved. Even competent and well intentioned humans make mistakes. If a mistake can be made, eventually it will be made. Nuclear power plants are complicated and a lot of things can go wrong including some things (like natural disasters or wars) that are beyond the control of the people designing and building the plant. You can design a plant to withstand a 8.0 earthquake but what happens when an 8.5 earthquake hits? There is no way to adequately shield a nuke plant from a targeted bomb. We can plan for a lot and nuclear power plants can be operated with reasonable safety but the notion that we won't ever see accidents if plants are operated competently is demonstrably wrong.
The more time, effort, and money we waste chasing nukes, the less we have for a real solution.
Alternate solutions ARE being chased but for the next 25-50 years your choices in most locations for base load power are fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Both have extremely serious downsides. Pick your poison. If you are anti-nuke you are de-facto pro fossil fuel until there is some form of breakthrough energy technology (like fusion or superconducting batteries) because that is the only alternative right now. Fossil fuels have serious, climate changing pollution problems which are not so easily contained as fission byproducts. Fission has highly toxic but concentrated waste products. Both cause serious geopolitical problems.
Nobody with half a brain is going to argue that nuclear energy is without some serious problems. The issue is really whether the downside of nuclear is an improvement over the downside of fossil fuels. Personally I favor using fission wherever the geopolitics and geography make it not insanely scary and then some fairly draconian pollution scrubbing technology on fossil fuel burning plants for the rest. Keep pumping money into solar and wind and fusion research. Not a perfect solution but maybe a least-worst solution for the next few decades.
And the one reason why Yucca Mountain is closed, is because the current Senate Majority Leader is from Nevada. While that NIMBYist gets to set the legislative schedule, there will be no movement on a plan that has been in motion for decades, is ready to go, and will make the nation safer and more responsible.
Today, the price point of solar depends on those subsidies. take them away and one of two things will happen:
It depends on MUCH more than just direct subsidies to solar. It depends on the subsidies provided for fossil fuels and nuclear. It depends on the fact that fossil fuel plants do not incur the full economic cost of their waste disposal. It depends on the local geography - if you have a nearby dam, electricity is probably pretty cheap.
Want a level playing field for solar? Make coal and natural gas plants actually have to pay for the cleanup of ALL their pollution rather than just dumping into the air. This includes the full cost of mining, delivering and processing of their fuel as well. I'm fairly confident that solar would become almost immediately competitive.
Nuclear power is the most heavily subsidized power source.
No it is not. Fossil fuels are by a wide margin. There are some direct subsidies (lord knows why) which we all know about but there are also indirect subsidies. Fossil fuel plants do not incur the full cost of cleaning up their pollution. They mostly are able to simply dump CO2 and many other emissions into the air. Companies that using fracking for natural gas dump huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the ground which never get cleaned up. Plants that process petrochemicals can be seen burning away by-products. Etc, etc. As a result they effectively are receiving an enormous subsidy. It's a lot cheaper to produce power when you don't have to worry about dealing with the pollution in any meaningful way.
The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore
I'm sure the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt will be surprised to hear that. Never mind that Mount Rushmore isn't a structure (it's a carving) and receives regular maintenance to ensure the faces don't crumble and fall off.
So yes, fix the waste problem
Reprocess the 1% of neutron poisons out, and then load it right back into the reactor as fuel. Fixed.
fix the terrorist problem
And which problem is that? The so-called "dirty bomb" chestnut? Where spreading an amount of a radioisotope over an area makes it completely not an issue? Hint - for a radioactive material to be dangerous, it needs to be concentrated.
fix the fuel supply problem
Already did, when we instituted the reprocessing.
fix the cost over-run problem
When the constant NIMBY lawsuits end that plague any project that uses the scary word "nuclear", this problem solves itself.
and fix the economically un-competitive problem
Fine, let's put a regime of waste disposal on the current incumbent technology (coal, petroleum) that is a bit more nuanced than blowing it into the atmosphere all willy-nilly and see how cost competitive it really is.
And THEN we'll talk.
Sounds like we should be talking right now, then.
Wind peaks either side of solar, extending the peak of that to cover the demand of residential use (breakfast and tea).
This is strange. You think wind has time of day based peaks? Time of year I can imagine, but time of day?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
This should be fun.
Also fun, watching the Republicans praising him for suggesting more nuclear energy.
All the details are simply engineering.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You'd need to complete about one per week for the next 35 years to replace ONE-SEVENTH of the energy we now get from fossil fuels.
Where in the links you quote does it say that?
Finish one reactor per week. Good luck with that.
That notoriously "can do" country, France, built 56 reactors in 15 years.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
small-scale reactors can be mass produced, much like how solar and wind would need to be mass produced, except with far more bang for your buck.
You may want to rethink your language!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The one guy being ridiculous is you. We do have to solve the problem, since we created it. Pushing it in front of us, out of sight, out of our generation is not a viable option.
Oh - and there are a few more issues with keeping our descendants in the loop. Information will be lost, no matter how careful you are....
So far we've had three meltdowns in the past 50 years
No, five. Don't forget we had 3 meltdowns at Fukushima.
And that's only counting destruction of commercial power reactors. If you count experimental designs and partial meltdowns we've had quite a few (Chapelcross, St Laurent des aux (twice!), Lucens,.the Chechoslovakian A1 plant, EBR-1, ..)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Nuclear is the most dangerous way to generate power.. except all the other ways.
People get all freaked out about how dangerous nuclear power generation can be, and ignore how dangerous all the other forms of power generation *actually are*. They get upset at the potential for long-term damage to the environment but ignore the massive ecological devastation that coal and oil and natural gas are constantly doing to the world. Look at Deepwater Horizon for example. Oil will be fouling and poisoning the gulf for an extremely long time, and the chemicals used in the cleanup will likely reduce the lifespan of the people who helped in the cleanup dramatically. When you look at the damage caused to people and to the environment of power generation objectively, nuclear is by far the safest and least damaging option, even factoring Fukishima and Chernobyl which represent risks that are unlikely to cause problems in the future.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Question is: who is going to pay for watching this nuclear waste for the next couple of centuries? The nuclear industry? I would like to hope so, but I'm not at all confident...
Furthermore, it is not a solution to the nuclear waste problem.
The nuclear waste problem is a tough one. Problem is that most people are asking the wrong question. The fossil fuel waste problem is just as tough if not worse. The real question is whether nuclear waste is preferable to fossil fuel waste. For the next 20-50 years at minimum we are going to have most of our power generation coming from those two sources (progress in renewables notwithstanding). So pick your poison. Arguing against one is by default an argument for the other. Both have very serious problems and there is no near term viable replacement available.
And it is not a solution as a long-time energy source.
Nuclear fission is approximately as long term an solution as fossil fuels is. A couple hundred years at least. After that, who knows...
the re-newable energy fraction have working machinery and also the energy storage problem is solvable, as we already have that technology even if it is not yet cheap, reliable or implementable everywhere
It is not remotely a given that the energy storage problem is solvable and unfortunately there is no evidence whatsoever that we are close to solving it now. While I agree that is MAY be solvable (and I hope it is), that is not remotely the same argument. We have to invent some totally new technology to store these vast amounts of energy. As a result we really need to be investing in solar/wind generation, battery technology, fusion, and a few other technologies. Research results are not predictable so we need to place a lot of big bets and see what happens.
However, these issues are easier to fix than come up with totally new technology.
So your argument is it is easier to come up with a totally new technology than it is to come up with some other totally new technology? Rather peculiar argument you have there. It is not remotely clear that coming up with a breakthrough in battery technology will be any easier than a breakthrough in fission or fusion.
Germany's production is mostly fossil fuel. They may be the champion of renewables but it still represents only a small part of the picture.
The way Germany works is more of less like this : France has plenty of nuclear reactors that are good at producing base load power, so, when demand is low, Germany buys this excess power for a low (sometimes even negative) price. Now, when demand is high, France's nuclear power is not sufficient for its own use, so Germany starts its gas plants and sell back electricity at a high price.
THAT case was just a stupid case of ignoring scientific criticism for profit.
Of course, that would never happen anywhere else.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Do you want to hold on to that coke can for 10.000 years? OK, not you alone, also you child. And his/her child for the next 40 generations.
As I understand it, on a normal day (stormy days are different) the sun will heat the air closest to the ground causing it to rise and mix with the colder air above it which will create wind, thus the strongest winds should coincide with the daily temperature peak which should be sometime in the afternoon. Because the ground tends to cool off quickly after the sun goes down, the air also cools and less of it rises, and thus there is less mixing and the wind will normally be weaker at night.
In coastal areas, there will also normally be a temperature differential between the air over land and over water which will drive some wind on warm days (and potentially cold days too, I guess), amplifying the effect you would get in landlocked areas.
I'm not sure if this daily variance is sufficient to drive a noticeable trend in wind-power generation, but it could be.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I would say worse (not in actuality, but in hypocrisy) is that by far they buy the most power from France, who in turn generates 80% of their power VIA.... nuclear.
So what is Germany doing again?
They are politically making it someone else's problem while not solving their own issues.
How many coke cans would it take for - say - a few decades of the N. American population. Could you fit said coke cans onto a shuttle and blast it off towards the sun? (assuming that you wouldn't just reprocess it and re-use, as much of this waste could be if we weren't... wasteful).
Designs are great but they need to be built with actual, physical materials. Those materials will be supplied by someone.
Every single large nuclear plant to date has been built and run by large corporations.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Pffft .... we are trading with our neighbours since decades.
Obviously the 'business model' works for all involved parties.
Sooner or later they will produce energy the same way we do.
Problem with 'uneducated' people like you is: you don't understand how predictable solar/wind in real live actually is.
It is not so that a solar or wind plant suddenly (without any forecast) drops from 100% power to 0%.
Power companies and grid operators use localized weather forecasts for every area they have a plant in, that means they actually have a pretty good idea how much power an "unreliable" plant will generate the next hour, the next two, the next three and the next four hours. So there is plenty enough time to adjust your own plants or make deals on the international power market.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
page 2, paragraph 7:
The question boils down to the accumulating impacts of daily incremental pollution from burning coal or the small risk but catastrophic consequences of even one nuclear meltdown.
And at the end:
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
The referenced article isn't the slam-dunk that its headline suggests. There are other more valid reasons to be pro-nuke than pro-coal. (Heck, there are valid reasons to be anti-coal even if you take nuclear-anything out of the equation.) The article doesn't add as much in the way of useful light as I had hoped it would; interesting, but not a compelling data point.
Lol, you link a site posting coal and oil imports while we talk about electricity? How stupid are you?
And no, your prices are not pretty close to what you said, younclaimed 45cents, euro cents I assume? While I have a standard vanilla electric contract as anybody in this country has who is not switching to a cheaper supplier. Normal prices are 17cent (euro) to 20 cent (euro) no one pays 45 cent, that is ridiculous.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry this is just nonsense. And claiming such bullshit when you obviously have nomclue about power production pisses me off meanwhile. ... during daytime usually there is no trade between the nations as both are capable to handle that themsleves. There is onl trade where frensh industries buy german power in long term contracts.
Does not even make sense to debunk your two claims,they re so wrong on many scales e.g. germany has no 'normal' gas powered plants. We only have fast minute reserve gas plants.
Secondly france is a net importer for german power, as they have not enough own power to refill their pumped storage plants over night
Renewables are in germany at about 30% of daily power production and in peak situations like stormy sunny autumn days, 60%.
All that can easy be read up on german web sites of the power companies, as they have to disclose such infrmations on a dail base.
Google is your friend, moron!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
On the whole, since we literally are close to the tipping point that will make it incredibly expensive (as in ten to twenty times) to the GDP to deal with climate change events (storms, massive fluctuations like bizarre cold snaps, acidic oceans destroying shellfish, Antarctic ice sheet sliding off and raising sea level 2 meters worldwide, etc), this is a reasonable argument for short term thinking, given the massive increase in coal use in China and worldwide.
However, to do it safely, you would have to use either the Canadian or French model, where you have 1 or 2 plant types that are rolled out everywhere, not the US-based Each Plant Is Special And Different approach, to minimize accidents.
That said, you still need to actually reduce - not maintain - coal oil and even natural gas (all fossil fuels) use worldwide, especially in the EU, US, China, and India.
One way would be to not subsidize nuclear energy, but to remove all tax subsidies and exemptions for fossil fuels, charge market rate leases for public lands (seriously, 5 cents to mine an entire acre in a national park or at sea?), and use those funds to - at the same time - provide capital (not operating expenses or subsidies, just low cost loan capital) for renewable energies (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal).
Adapt or die.
Because climate change is now, and I hope you don't live close to a coast.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I really wonder how stupid you really are. You claimed a 45cent rate for 1kWh in germany ( which implies Euro cents ) then you link a forbes.com web site to prove your claim. AND the highest price for electricity is significantly below 30 cents? (Implying that forbes com is using US cents anyway?)
And you post those links to bolster your original claim? rofl
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Thank you for pointing this out! It was a typo: exports have been 59.9 TWh for 2010.
I am not sure what you are talking about. It was a government-operated mine (after it was a commercial salt mine before) which served as a test-bed for Gorleben. The thing is: People just appoached this problem in the 60s/70s with the same naivety you can still observe here on slashdot: This nuclear waste is not a problem. Such a small amount, we can just bury it underground somewhere. It is not problem at all!
In some areas you can pretty much set your clock by the wind changing. Like at the north end at the Garda Lake in Italy.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Xolotl didn't explain the key point.
It's not the buying and selling that is the issue. The issue is that they are still burning the same amount of coal, while claiming they burn less. The trick is that the coal is being burned across a geopolitical border. So the politicians and pseudo-environmentalists can claim a victory, with no actual environmental gain.
There is another option: Don't use nuclear energy until it can be done safely and profitably without government subsidies and set-asides. Until it can be done without leaving a pile of external costs for taxpayers to pick up. Until it can be done without having to write special laws protecting the nuclear plant owners from liability.
The problem with nuclear energy, and fossil fuels, is that they both require government protection to work. That's hardly the "free market" at work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
300 years? Others plan for more then 100.000 years.
Covering existing roofs in solar panels kills no more land than is already "dead" from human habitation.
As you suggested I checked Google for facts and I was indeed wrong on some points, sorry. Germany gets most of its electricity from coal, not gas. And I thought the import/exports where on a daily basis instead of a yearly basis (I didn't write it though, so you probably implied it somehow).
However my point still stands : Germany export expensive fossil fuel power when demand is high and imports cheap nuclear power when demand is low.
Here are the facts about Germany :
- Coal : 45%
- Renewables : 22%
- Nuclear : 16 %
- Gas : 11%
- Exports are higher during winter (high demand) and imports are higher during summer (low demand)
- Renewable electricity production is at the lowest in winter
- Coal electricity production is at the highest in winter
- Germany is a net exporter globally, France is also a net exporter globally. Germany is a net exporter for France.
Source : http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2013.pdf (+ others)
Another thing : according to this http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images/7/75/Half-yearly_electricity_and_gas_prices.png household electricity for s1 2013 in Germany is 0.29€/kWh, that's more than 0.40$/kWh and among the most expensive in Europe. Are you taking everything into account when you are talking about 0.18€ (taxes, subscription...) ?
So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe
Okay, world installed generation capacity 2010 5,067 gigawatts Let's replace it all with LFTRs.
Let's pick a hypothetical 1Gw LFTR design, most of the LFTR folks think there would be no advantage to scale larger.
5,067 of these LFTRs produce (5067*0.17) ~861 tons of waste per year requiring 300 year storage.
So with no increase in LFTRs from the 2008 power capacity, as much as (861*300)~258,300 tons of waste would be stored in this single (hypothetical) depot, which represents the waste of 300 years' total world electricity generation. Using density of lead (arbitrary) I get ~ 729,700 cubic feet, or a an array of foot-cubes 855 feet square. Or ~38 American football fields, that is if there is no stacking of these cubes. It all could fit into Yucca Mountain with room for a few more thousand years' worth to spare. That is, IF it was necessary to store it long. But really only ~300 years.
The world's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain with LOTS of room to spare.
On second thought, let's reserve Yucca Mountain for tourism and grab 40 football fields at random.
There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.
I reserve my deliberate deceptions for less important topics than Thorium.
One of the reasons I sing the praises of Kirk Sorensen's two fluid LFTR idea is that there is really no practical life-limit envisioned for the fluoride salts themselves. Even the Hastelloy-N plumbing is potentially recyclable. While others like David LeBlanc are pursuing interesting variations such as the Denatured MSR which delays processing as might be desired in a small reactor, I believe Sorensen has decided to pursue the 'endgame' and produce the most useful and logical embodiment to the concept. His active processing column is (in my opinion as a layman) a best-fit for the scale of 1GW reactors that could power our world.
I do not completely believe the Chinese Thorium time window feint. I think there might be tactics in play to dupe world investors into thinking that Thorium energy is on the really slow boat from China, so they have plenty of time to lollygag and burn more coal. Then (I think) one day, sooner rather than later, it will be suddenly announced there is a working prototype and the Chinese firms are looking for capital.
Regardless of the Chinese effort (they really NEED this technology as do we) I'd rather see some US investors in play to build this thing that we have invested developed.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I'm pretty sure that the URSS ones have been built by the government.
Good points.
I was using this graph : http://earlywarn.blogspot.fr/2011/09/peak-oil-per-capita.html , but it's only oil (and you see a stagnation rather than a decline, but since the EROEI goes down, the available energy for society from oil also goes down).
Increased efficiency plays a role, but if I'm not mistaken it's about 0.5% per year. I'm not sure if a better metric than energy per capita exists : you would need to somehow sum up the transformations that this use of energy allowed. Maybe computing exergy would be better?
Then, I guess my hypothesis comes more from the feeling that we're "scraping the bottom of the barrel" with the hydraulic fracturing and tar sands, while many of western countries show signs of political rot.
Lets us, just for argument sake, accept your maths as to the total high-level spent fuel at 861 tons for the global generated power at 2010, and let's pretend we can transport and densely store it on hypothetical football fields without encasing it much larger volumes of other material to stop it getting too hot. From your reference site we see that the world electricity consumption increased from 16391 billion kwH to 18466 billion kWh over five years (2006-2010). That's exponential growth at 3% and new generating capacity will have to match that for the foreseeable future. So you start with 861 tons (2430 cu ft) next year you will need to find storage for another 887 tons (2500 cu ft), the next for 913 tons (2580 cu ft)... In 10 years time you will need to find space for an extra 1157 tons (3270 cu ft), after 20 add 1555 tons (4390 cu ft), after 50 the annual addition will be 3774 tons (10600 cu ft) and total under storage will be a shade over 100000 tons (285000 cu ft). I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; in the exceptionally unlikely event consumption does not plateau in the meantime, by the time your first fuel is expiring at 300 years the current year's waste will be 6.11 million tons and the total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
The Yucca Mountain facility has a statutory limit of 85,000 short tons. Even by your no-growth estimate Yucca mountain is already too small to hold 300 year's worth of thorium waste (let alone 300 years of current fuel wastes). At 3% consumption growth it will be full in less than 50 years. Of course, political reality means there will never be a single repository (or indeed universal nuclear power) but the requirement to manage the global total amount of waste would remain.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
There's a lot of bad stuff already in that general area.
Google Maps satellite view of the Yucca Flats area: http://goo.gl/maps/y7DcV
Each of those craters is an nuclear bomb crater, with fission products and residual plutonium completely uncontained, except by the fact that they're underground.
The waste at Yucca Mountain, by contrast, would have been very stringently contained, mixed with molten glass and cast into solid lumps, inside concrete and steel casks. Not just sitting inside a hole in the bottom of a crater.
I understand what Xolotl wanted to say and what you now claim. However: it is simply wrong.
Energy transfer is recorded and published, you can easy look up that germany does not import significant amounts of "coal power" from Poland (or nuclear from France or that matter).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Depends how you define, daily bases I guess.
In principle there are long term contracts and short term (down to hourly) deals at the spot market.
E.g. the company EnBW is selling a lot of power in long term contracts (1-2years) to frensh companies. Deals like that are between a power selling company and an end consumer.
Otoh surplus (well, any energy, but that is less relevant) energy is traded at the european spot market. So during peak production or other reasons (steel plant shuts unexpected down etc.) power companies trade amoung each other. So a german company might buy from France or other neighbours. Either to fill up pumped storages or simply to power down one of their own plants.
Production of renewables is a bit tricky to calculate correctly, as the increase in production is so high. Renewables are basically solar plus wind (biomass is still not much).
So I guess the sum of wind and solar is in winter low? Or it is only low in percentages as the total amount of energy production is much higher? Anyway wind energy should be more in winter than in summer!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; [â¦] total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).
Thanks for the excellent breakout. Okay, hrrrmph. Perhaps my 'no growth' napkin math was an attempt to illustrate in simple snapshot-fashion what the geographical waste-footprint of this technology would be, in a way that could be grasped easily and took a minimum of work.
Or was my failure to to factor exponential growth due to laziness? I'd rather take the short answer and say yes, rather than muse on which exponents to use. Start with people. Which projected population curve should I use: the red 'rabbits-R-us' or the green 'UN releases contraceptives into water supply' curve? For the US population growth has been 0.75%, fertility rate of 1.88 children per woman, less than the 2.1 'replacement rate'. As a clumsy social commentator I have to conclude that choice has something to do with it. I cannot really suggest that there could be a natural plateau to population growth rate where your average woman wants a reasonable number of children without running afoul of Catholic seed bank or some future Pol Pot's depopulation agenda.
What about energy use? Should I take the position that the developing world has no right to a level of energy use equal to the most use-heavy? Could there be some future plateau to worldwide per-capita energy use once (reasonable) conservation measures are in place AND Africa is completely wired for electricity as is North America? Perhaps!
All in all 30,000 football fields for a World -- with a continuous removal of decayed safe-matter from the bottom of the stack, doesn't faze me on a planet of some 50 million square land-miles. That's probably all the football fields in the United States. Oh well, there's always baseball.
I'm not trying to straw-man you here, the use of exponents, some times taken from thin air for planning purposes has always been wise for planning. My assertiveness arises from the same utopian dream as the people who would sincerely wish Africa would and could do it all with windmills and solar farms. But it won't work for us, and would never work for them. My utopian dream is to see Africa covered with grids and base load energy production to US levels. Because that is what they want, and I am morally obligated to want it on their behalf. Because most women in the world today still wash clothes by hand.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Only 300 years? It sounds like that can be used in a pile. Don't throw it away.
I think there are a bunch of links in this Slashdot discussion claiming otherwise. On the surface, it makes sense: shut down nuclear plants, and what else are you going to do? Solar just can't produce that amount of power (yet).
To confirm this, I just did a quick Google search for "Germany Coal Nuclear Solar":
https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+coal+nuclear+solar&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
which seems to confirm the increase in coal burning, although the Poland connection seems to be false.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-G-N/Germany/
"More than half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of 2013, compared with 43% in 2010." but it says nothing about the shutdown of nuclear reactors.
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/05/debunking-common-myths-about-nuclear-coal-power-in-germany-this-time-repeated-by-the-guardian/
"coal (including lignite) is up around 5%...have nothing to do with nuclear in Germany."
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0716/The-dirty-coal-behind-Germany-s-clean-energy
This sites the 5% figure but doesn't mention why. "Germany has managed to be praised by environmentalists more than any other developed nation and yet is building more coal plants than more or less any other developed country" but it has no specifics.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/green-energy-bust-in-germany
This one claims the same thing.
"Germany is indeed avoiding blackouts—by opening new coal- and gas-fired plants. Renewable electricity is proving so unreliable and chaotic..."
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57035
"they are now building coal-fired electricity generation and shuttering nuclear power plants..."
I don't know what to believe now. Ultimately, we would need to see the energy mix numbers from the German power companies/government to know for sure. Just pointing out that new coal plants are being built doesn't mean much. They might be replacing existing ones, or making cleaner/smaller ones.
First off all:
The nuclear plants are still running, only a few are offline.
Yes, we build new coal plants, they where in planning and under construction since 15 years. They are ment to replace older inefficient or dirty plants.
Most links (I did not look at them) are simply "newspapers", they have no clue, sorry to say it so bluntly.
Here is a good link (missleading name) about german power production of this year: :D
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2013.pdf (Someone else in this thread posted it allready)
I hope it is self explanaiting, so you don't need google translate
As you see: we export nearly every month roughly 30% of our production. Also you see we produce in the yearly average over 20% of our energy with solar / wind. With peaks over 40% (on special days like 1st or second January with exceptional perfect weather)
Ultimately, we would need to see the energy mix numbers from the German power companies/government to know for sure The PDF should contain some links to the sites where you can obtain such numbers, but the PDF actually has summarized them quite nicely imho.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, :) ... who cares? As long as *I* know when my ants produce I can schedule my grid accordingly ... ... but it will happen)
should not have dismissed your links so quickly, but I was in a hurry to catch my train
A few are quite interesting, but bottom line they are bad written.
They main problem always is: outsiders see everything. in the wrong context.
They don't know:
a) for the new coal plants older plants get decommisiond (not all ofc)
b) they don't know how predictable wind and solar energy actually is for power plant operators, so they always yell: wind is not blowing all the time
c) they cry about open pit mining of lignite coal, not knowing that all the pits get renaturated and transformed into woods, lakes and are in fact all very nice restored
d) they draw wrong conclusions from wrong premisses, e.g. unemployment will soar when the nuclear plants are finally all offline. Caught, caught, how many people exactly do work in 20 plants? 200? Plus security personell, perhaps 400? Make it 1000
e) So in the first half of the year we produced more energy with coal than in the year before? Perhaps there was a reason, e.g. a cold winter?
f) They claim all the coal, especially the brown coal is so 'dirty' not knowing that germany basically has plants (especialy the newer ones right now in construction) where emissions are ZERO. Everything is scrubbed and deposited or reused as building materials.
g) They rant about CO2 emissions, I mean come on, seriously, germany HAS reduced its emissions, FAR MORE than we commited to. And we continue, and then an US newspaper / pseudo sciense web site complains? Erm, how much did they reduce their emissions? And: bloggers and reporters semm not to know that in a few years mandatory sequestering starts. Click. ZERO CO2 emissions from power plants anymore (not sure if that is a good idea
Even if it sounds like a rant, it was not ment as a post 'against you' ... just windering where all those energy experts got their braindead ideas from.
Right now e.g. germans wind energy is 95% generated 'on shore'. While we add now offshore plants in 25 years we will have replaced all nuclear and most of the fossile power with wind. (Offshore very reliable, runs basically 8000 hours a year for sure and roughly half the time far above 'rated capacity')
Then there are the other idiots who always come with: oh, a 100kW wind turbine will only produce 25kW, you know! It is because 'nameplate' production is never happening, you know! Yeah, sure, it is like with german cars, if you buy a 250PS car you get in fact only a 60PS car. Obviously you are allowed to write utter nonsense on the nameplate ;) in germany, that is!
Then wind parks need so much space ... they never actually saw one, they are placed on ordinary farmers fields. And the farmers happily accept the thousands of dead birds as fertilizer in their fields!
And then the black outs ... wow, we live in 2013. I'm close to 50 years old. I can count the blackouts we had on one hand. And most of the time it had a very serious reason and was fixed (rerouting everything) in a few MINUTES. The longest I remember was 2h.
We are living in the biggest interconnected synchronius grid of the world, spanning from the Island via Siberia over Mongolia from north skandinavia to Turky.
If something fails, it is because of a serious hardware problem, not because the wind is not blowing in germany.
I would bet if next second all german nuclear power plants drop instantly from the grid we had no blackout.
Ah year and another point to the list above: wind makes the grid so instale. ROFLMA, another stuid claim from uneducated stupid writers who make their stuff simply up.
For my power provider it is NO DIFFERENCE wheather I switch my Sauna unscheduled on and draw 5kW power, or if my wind plant suddenly produces 5kW less (or more). The grid oper
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Don't get where from you have your crazy ideas.
Ideological camps are so strong in the US that you can find a "study" that "proves" pretty much anything you want.
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.
http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/Life-Cycle-Emissions-Analyses
Sounds like Nuclear, solar/wind are basically about equal when it comes to CO2 and waste issues. Wind being the lowest of course.
But like Nuclear, when you talk about solar, you really need to compare the right type of solar and right type of nuclear. Most advocates of solar want to see more concentrated solar power plants, not necessarily every roof in America covered with panels. (Although most would argue that every home covered in solar panels is still way better than coal).
In 10,000 years, an equivalence in coal use would be over 10 trillion tons, and as others have posted, burning coal releases radiation too. So instead of being dead from radiation from spent nuclear fuel, our descendants can all be dead from radiation from burnt coal plus black lung.
Do you really think we are going to use coal for 10.000 years?
Do you really think nuclear technology will be static for 10.000 years?
The waste will be a problem for a long time. In Germany they already had to dig up radioactive waste : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine. You can not count on your grand children to solve your problems.
There are reactor types that consume waste. That could mitigate the problem. There is also the Thorium nuclear reactors, which were researched in the 1950s or 1960s and proven feasible but abandoned by the US government because the Thorium nuclear reactors could not be made into weapons. Thorium reactor waste has a much shorter half-life. And of course, controlled fusion has been "20 years away" for fifty years. But sooner or later we'll get it right, and even if it takes 300 years of further investment, the payoff is immense.