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Waste Management: The Critical Element For Nuclear Energy Expansion
Lasrick (2629253) writes "As part of a roundtable on the risks of developing nuclear power in developing countries, Harvard's Yun Zhou explores the reprocessing of spent fuel. Zhou points out that no country in the world has come up with a permanent solution to nuclear waste in either of its two forms: the spent fuel that emerges directly from reactor cores and the high-level radioactive waste that results when spent fuel is reprocessed. Zhou points out that China and France have just announced a joint effort to establish a reprocessing plant, but that option isn't really practical for the developing world."
Nuclear plants might be safer/cleaner than coal and all, but when they fail (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners) it leaves areas of land unusable to us humans. Not just a little unusable either. It does it for such a long time that it might as well be considered permanent. Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.
About a decade or so ago I recall reading an article that suggested cutting a hole into the earths surface where it's thinnest and dropping the stuff directly into the magma. At that point it would just be a matter of building a good air seal to keep any remaining toxic or radioactive gasses from escaping.
Throw it into the Sun, maybe? - Zoidberg
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"no country in the world has come up with a political solution to nuclear waste" FTFY
The technology is relatively simple. But then so are the opponents.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
We spent billions on that facility and it can store most waste (including spent fuel) for 1000's of years. Use it!
There's really no comparison. Hydroelectric killed 280,000 people at Banquai. (Or was it 180,000?). Nuclear power has killed dozens of people in 50 years. Coal? Ever heard of Black Lung? Nuclear has proven to be orders of magnitude safer than any other option for bulk power.
Solar can provide about 5% of our energy needs, but for the vast majority of our power, we can choose between oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Of the options that can provide significant power, nuclear is by far the safest option, by a very large margin.
Solar power people are as deluded as the religious zealots they hate so much. Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell? The amount of silver? The mining of the silver is so destructive that solar power is one of the worst forms of energy for the environment. Coals worst of course. Nuclear is almost totally nurtral. The few accidents we've had with it have been on 40yr old 1st generation reactors, all of them. Modern reactors can't fail. We, unfortunately, don't build any of them however. Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion into the frey. I'm sick of it, if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells and I'd be getting rich of selling it to all my neighbors. What do I get instead? A $30,000, very ugly roof so I can save $30 a month on my electric bill. It's THAT GOD DAMNED OBVIOUS.
That's the wrong Yun Zhou. The Yun Zhou who wrote this article has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.
Modern reactors can't fail.
This. Right here. This is the attitude that makes so many people distrustful of nuclear proponents.
I know you said we don't actually build "modern" reactors, but ANY design of reactor can fail, because people run them, boards that demand profit oversee management, and sometimes people fly airplanes into buildings.
I'm afraid the author of that article got the facts grossly wrong, in a couple of different ways. DOE has a wealth of statistics in easily readable reports you can look at. Bottom line, by tripling the cost of electricity, Germany now gets about 3% of their energy from solar.
The author confused ENERGY with ELECTRICITY, and confused GOALS with RESULTS. Germany tried to reduce electric usage (via huge surcharges) and increase solar usage (via huge subsidies) so that solar would be a larger percentage of electricity. They could have just turned off all of the non-solar electric plants to get 100% solar electric (but a huge electricity shortage). That's essentially the same as what they did, but they were a little less extreme. Their goal was 25% of ELECTRICITY would be solar. To do that, you've got to dramatically reduce electric usage - no electric cars, for sure.
So a SINGLE person in the Senate has caused the waste of billions of dollars and left nuclear waste all over the country instead of using the money already collected to store it safely?
He has been representing the people of his state, so it's not fair to say a single person has caused it. People in Nevada vote for him because they know he will keep doing what they want.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think he meant, new reactor designs do not fail catastrophically. The built in *PASSIVE* safety of these new designs would mean it take a deliberate act (sabotage) to cause a reactor to fail in a way that involves the release of radioactive materials.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
If you're going to reference black lung and damn failures, you should really reference similar things in the nuclear industry. How many people have died from mining uranium? And yes the Navajo are people so should be counted. Unluckily it is hard to count as they usually die later from cancer and such and the government and especially private industry don't want to admit that radon exposure kills as well that Uranium causes heavy metal poisoning.. Then we can get to accidents such as Church Rock, killed one hell of a lot of cattle and sheep and the kids were playing in the same water but they weren't white so why care.
You don't do your argument much good if you downplay nuclear to make it seem perfectly safe when it isn't and stating that much of the mining was for weapons doesn't change that in the future it may well be for energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Church Rock mine? Are you kidding?
Coal mining: 500,000 victims of black lung
Hydroelectric: 300,000+ killed
Church Rock and all other uranium mining: 0. Maybe a cow.
Yeah, the uranium sure as heck looks like the safest option to me.
> With nuclear the probability for a serious accident is non zero, and the stakes are much higher than coal for instance.
Higher than coal, you day. Let's compare coal. There have been about 500,000 casualties from black lung, and the indirect, environmental damage is incalculable. Compare to about 200 people from nuclear power. Right now there are 600 nuclear power plants operating, and we've had nuclear power for about 50 years, so we have a good basis of comparison. Nuclear is, by the numbers, at least 2,000 times safer than coal.
Are there risks with everything? Of course! Nuclear has risks. Modern designs don't have the catastrophic risks of 1950s designs, but of course there are risks. We need power, though, so we need to look at the safEST options. Nothing is perfectly safe - taking a shower kills a lot of people. Of the available options, nuclear is safER than anything else that can produce the gigawatts of stable, reliable power that we need.
Please tell me you didn't just claim "OMG TERRORISM" as a reason to abandon a source of power. That is just delusional. If anything what nuclear has told us that with multiple reactor meltdowns having caused but a handful of deaths around the world it's one of the least likely terrorism targets around.
Now what we really should be doing is outfitting every hydroelectric dam with frigging lasers. Those things are deadly if the terrorist get their hands on it, or the x-men start waging a war inside them.
I don't need to be mislead. The data published is in the form of deaths per terra-watt-hours generated. Taking into account mining nuclear is MUCH safer as you can generate a crapload more power from a smaller mining operation.
I really hate the one sided propaganda the greenies spout about nuclear mining. In Australia they took a whole brigade of people into the bush and showed them the wonders of nature, then they took them to a uranium mine and said "Nuclear bad mkay!" No one mentioned that you could close 6 similarly sized coal mines if nuclear generation was used instead.
You want to talk Church Rock? Why don't you count all the uranium mine spills, deaths, fires, and other disasters that have ever happened in uranium mining and I'm willing to bet you can find the same figure for Coal mining except quoted as per annum.
11 birds a month. While sad, it's not even a statistical blip when compared to the number of birds we will with cars, skyscrapers and outdoor cats.
> Solar power people
I've never met anyone that's solar powered.
> Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell?
Yes.
> The amount of silver?
Is tiny. There's about 10 billion ounces mined every year, of which about 100 million is used in cells. What is used in cells is easily recycled.
> Nuclear is almost totally nurtral
Glad to hear it.
> Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion
I think it has a lot more to do with the overnight costs and the fact that we're still mired in what he UK calls "the credit crunch".
But posts like this, from the "deluded [snip] religious zealots", is one of the other big problems for the nuclear industry. They've been overpromising and underdelivering for 50 years. The costs of the plants on an inflation-adjusted basis has gone up about 6 times since the 1960s, which has decimated the LCoE in spite of excellent capacity factors. And that's about that. Do you think Morgan Stanley cares about the hippies? They don't. All they care about is the ROI, and that's where nuclear has fallen flat.
> if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells
Well let's see
1) where do you live
2) what are the dimensions of the part of your roof that's "the most south pointing".
I'll be happy to run the numbers for you at that point, or you can do it yourself following these basic instructions:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/grid-parity-in-ontario/
Your link supports none of your claims. Your claims are:
SEGS used 90% solar, 10% natural gas
SEGS provided primary power at night
SEGS "was eventually decommissioned"
The wiki article mentions none of those things. The references at the bottom of the article do, however, address those, and they say you are mistaken on all three points.
Nextera Energy say they are still operating the SEGS plants:
http://www.nexteraenergy.com/c...
Other documents in the references section show that the design is that they need to run it on gas 25% of the time. Traditional power plants are used to provide power for those customers when it's not sunny.
You can't put fail and sabotage together and say the reactor is unsafe. *ANYTHING* is unsafe if it's sabotaged correctly.
Risk is harm*probability. Now consider the maximum harm caused by sabotaging, say, a 1 GW nuclear plant, a 1 GW coal/NG plant, or a few thousand wind turbines. Except for the first option, you won't come up with a mode of sabotage that will take a few decades to clean up the resulting mess.
So, just build the nuclear plants in the middle of military bases.
If terrorists really want to kill a lot of people all they have to do is steal a strategic nuclear warhead. They're far more effective than sabotaging a nuclear power plant at killing people and contaminating huge areas. The reason terrorists don't do that is that we lock them up, and somehow for the last 50 years both the US and USSR managed to do that in a way that kept the nutcases out.
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
Nuclear tests excluded, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only two nuclear incidents with wide-ranging environmental effects. Chernobyl is mainly due to operator error and reckless disregard for even the most basic safety instructions (postmortem investigation found no evidence of any control rods in the core despite the manufacturer's manual saying a minimum of 20 or so control rods must be inserted at all times), trying to rush a 12+ hours ramp-down procedure in less than four hours while most of Fukushima's problems were due to poor plant layout, running all power feeds in the same conduits and putting most generators in floodable zones, making it impossible to restore power to cooling pumps in a timely fashion.
TMI was an exercise in dumb design with the status light bound to the switch instead of a position sensor to give feedback about the actual valve's state. Relying on thermodynamic tables and flow rates to estimate reactor coolant level which could have been directly observed by a simple float sensor did not help confused operators figure out what was happening either.
Those old "unsafe" plants may not have been as close to intrinsically safe as MSRs but they did not fail on a whim either. Most of those failures could have happened with MSRs too if MSR designers had not learned from others' past mistakes.