Waste Management: The Critical Element For Nuclear Energy Expansion 281
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."
Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... (Score:5, Informative)
TANSTAAFL. Coal and oil are pretty good at rendering large areas uninhabitable. Water (tidal and hydro) is pretty good at major ecosystem change and rendering areas uninhabitable. Wind and solar might look like ok in the area of _deployment_, but if you look at the manufacturing... [ok, I'll save you googling it, here's one that took me all of 30secs to find: http://www.worldwatch.org/node... [worldwatch.org] ]
Re:Consider the source (Score:5, Informative)
'fraid not. They hope 25% of ELECTRICITY. 3% actua (Score:5, Informative)
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.
!?!?!? 500,000 is more than zero (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:No thanks on Nuclear proliferation... (Score:5, Informative)
Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage.
Coal mines and coal mining can however.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Seriously, though if you're trying to make nuclear energy look bad, please don't compare it to coal unless you're trying to actually make it look good. Ignoring the mine fires which have rendered quite large areas utterly uninhabitable and are projected to last for centuries (not to mention afterwards leaving the ground dangeroudly prone to sinkholes for milennia).
You might want to read this too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
Basically, it's a question of scale.
https://xkcd.com/1162/ [xkcd.com]
Nuclear energy is many many orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal. What people generally don't realise is quite how vast the scale of coal mining is. You need a lot to generate energy for an entire country. Not just a lot, but the most insanely huge unimaginable amounts. The sheer scale of the thing is incredible.
As a result the coal energy industry churns through many billions of tons of rock, coal and ash each year. With that come all sorts of nasty things including radioactivity and heavy metal contamination both of which do leave land more or less unusable. Then there's the other bits and bobs like fly ash slurry spills and so on.
The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that most of the mining now happens in poor countries or in the middle of absoloutely nowhere (i.e. Austrailia). Coal mining is so polluting and so destructive there is no way it can happen anywhere near civilisation in a developed country now.
It's actually easy to crunch the numbers. In terms of deaths per kWh and land rendered unusable, and a whole bunch of other things, nuclear wins.
Yes there will be accidents. Better engineering will reduce the rate and severity of accidents because engineering tries to compensate for the human factor and others. It's impossible not to have accidents when you're talking about supplying power to billions of people for a hundred years. Such things are not possible.
But if you opt away from nuclear, you're choosing to pander to your fears with the deaths of energy workers, without actually making the situations you fear any better.