Iceland has so much free thermal energy the volcanoes are trying to give away more than the people want right now. If they keep it up all of Iceland could easily be buried under tons and tons of free thermal energy. Well, that and ash and rock - but you can't pick and choose.

My only problem with nuclear energy.. Is how to dispose of the waste in a sane and safe manner.. Sorry sticking in a salt mine is no answer. It only puts off the inevitable. What to do with the waste. SoI remain cautiously in support, but would like more research on how to dispose and eliminate the waste in a sane and safe manner.

Putting off the inevitable isn't an option? What's wrong with it? It's no worse than using coal or petroleum. Or breeding. Or breathing and eating, for that matter.

Drop it into the sun of course. What's a few tons of depleted uranium added to the vast nucular furnace already there gonna do?!

Or bury it on the moon. (Or just stick it on the dark side where no one will see it from Earth, anyway. ) The moon won't care. It's a ball of rock, and it's closer than the sun. Then again, I guess the waste could just be shoved toward the sun from some sort of orbital staging platform. It'll get to the sun eventually, if it doesn't get nabbed by Venus or Mercury...which also won't care, given that Venus is a nasty (albeit not-nuclear) furnace itself and Mercury isn't much different than the moon, except that it's tidally locked to the sun, not to the Earth.

Then again (again), is it a good idea to add heavy elements to the sun? Can it fuse such things? I thought it could only fuse up to iron, but I don't know for sure. Not enough of an astronomy geek, I'm afraid.

Anyway, the point is that if we (as in humanity as a collective) get up off our ass and actually develop a space program again and make it not just scientifically-oriented but commercially-oriented...Well, it'd solve some problems. We're already moving in that direction with all the satellite communication and entertainment stuff. Should commercial space travel happen, waste really wouldn't be a problem. And even if that doesn't happen...Well, frankly, I'd rather have radioactive waste safely buried in concrete sarcophagi than having crap floating around in the atmosphere, which is the result of burning fossil fuels. :P

I'm seeing a problem with the 'launch the radioactive waste into space' solution and that would be the huge amount of energy needed and astronomical cost of getting it out of the Earth's atmosphere.

My problem with it is that it's wasteful. We don't know what we could do with it right now, but who knows what we could figure out to use it for in the future? This is especially pointed given possible advances in breeder reactors - if we ever get those things working really well we're going to want to put the lemon rinds back into the juicer again and use that waste to make power. It's recycling. That's good, right?

You stole my response to this. But yes, it is definitely a huge bill for garbage disposal, imagine it costing more than your mortgage. Imagine you have to fly to Africa monthly to dispose your garbage.

It's a great idea to dispose such waste, or any waste for that matter, toward the sun. The sun itself is big enough to handle any amount of waste we send to without raising the environmental concern. Or the moon itself is not even a bad idea (until human start settling there). The big question is "getting there" that deems illogical, cost wise. Until our technology matches what is depicted in Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Gundam, or any of your favorite sci-fi where a fly around space is as common as public buses, this "great idea" will remain in, and only in, your favorite sci-fi. Especially with the current world economy now, Egypt is threatened to go under this July 2011, and European financial nightmare will begin, and constant bickering about US budgets and debts ... It is like asking a beggar to fly first class, not happening.

I would think that the problem with "Launch radioactive waste into space" would be more of a problem in the fact that a disturbingly high proportion of ships we launch end up exploding. If a ship with radioactive waste exploded over a populated area...

It wouldn't really have to be a populated area. Even underpopulated areas are usually the home to something that we eat/use/move vehicles through/find value in.

Still better to look into recycling the stuff. If you recycle it enough it stands to reason eventually the waste product's going to be something fairly innocuous because we've wrung all the exciting stuff out of it.

I can't believe this has been taken so seriously, can we say "facetious" boys and girls?

Instead of closing the plants down, why not relocate them all in Nevada?

(I'm being sarcastic).

You shouldn't be. Nevada wouldn't be a terrible place to relocate all of the nuclear capacity for the US, assuming we'd upgrade our existing power infrastructure to take advantage of advances that have happened in the decades since we last put a significant amount of money into such things. With the exception of the area around Yellowstone, once you get "past the Mississippi and Tornado Alley, but before the California quake zones" you're looking at an area on the map that's remarkably safe from issues with natural disasters. Centralizing such a capacity would bring other sorts of issues, but it's doable and it waves away a lot of criticism for the placing of plants in places like in California or Miami, for instance.

It's part of the reason we were talking about the region as a place to shove all the spent nuclear fuel underground - it's really stable, farther away from people than most places, and oh hey, the government already owns vast portions of it.

Sorry - I should have known it was a joke.
Speaking of breeder reactors, it was a surprise this morning to see in the NYTimes that Japan has a fast breeder reactor in Fukui prefecture that's also in trouble because a '3.3 ton device crashed into the reactor's inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.' This happened last August. The reactor is also on an active fault (but that's not what caused the accident).
It's a good article and talks about how Japan is lacking in energy sources which is driving them to take these risks with nuclear power. Link: In Japan, Another Nuclear Reactor Tests a Nation's Will
Also AlJazeera had a good article about Fukushima. I like this quote from Dr. Shoji Sawada, 'Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.

"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."
Also from Arnold Gunderson: "Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."

Last edited by RoseCity : 19th Jun 2011 at 4:29 AM.

As long as we continue to consume energy at our current and increasing rate, nuclear power will be an economic necessity. Sure, it would be nice to shut down the nuclear power plants and avoid the (very small) risk - but then we have the choice of serious energy conservation, which both businesses and the public would never go for; or increased use of fossil fuels which cause pollution, harm to the environment, and global climate change with the consequent deaths and destruction. Renewable energy like wind, solar, etc. can't pick up the slack for the foreseeable future. IMO the potential real answer is nuclear fusion - if it can be developed to the point of being practical it'll be safe since a failure would only result in the reaction shutting down, would produce little or no pollution, and the waste decays quickly so there's no major storage problem. It's unlikely to happen in my lifetime, but maybe in many of yours.

too emotional topic for me, so just try to be short and reasonable: everything made or controlled by a human is known to break; nuclear energy eruption is great danger to a wide amount of people in a large zone And time apart from the event; recovering from a nuc catastrophy is few times more expensive than building the station, shutting it down and starting using sun\water\wind power instead. and, the worst part, you don't start thinking about all this till you face with it one way or another.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4347547...ews-environment



I'm waiting to see how everyone flips out in the comments after this article.

Dammit, this is why we can't have nice things/nuclear energy.

So leaks that are not a health risk and we are aware of them and presumably have rules declaring that the leaks must be fixed? Uh, that's what we're supposed to have. That's how engineering and maintenance works. The only thing scary about this is that presumably with Republican budget cutting we're going to end up with a lot less oversight for things like this, and less money in grants to fix them.