If we can find a way to safely store nuclear waste, why not just use the energy to get rid of global warming?
(may be broke/outdated!)
If we can find a way to safely store nuclear waste, why not just use the energy to get rid of global warming?
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5 Responses
I agree. Although there must be a strong emphasis on safe. France is a good example of this.
Good point. Suggestion: write president Barack Obama and senator Harry Reid for better answers. Why? for they were the ones killing the Yucca Mountain project, which called for the safe entombment of nuclear waste. Irony: senator Reid is searching for alternatives, but why ask us, he’s the big honcho, he should know what to do, right?
Is your question politically or scientifically motivated? I’m not into politics, but I have a degree in the hard environmental sciences, slanted toward chemistry and geology.
Yucca mountain isn’t a safe storage spot. They found compounds that didn’t exist in the world until the 1950s in ground water under the mountain, so anything that leaks is going to be in the water in 50 years or less. Yippee skippee! The truth is that there’s no place in the world to deposit something radioactive, leave it alone, and expect it to still be there in a million years . . . and the half-life on much of the nasty stuff is longer than that. Radiation is extremely corrosive to anything we would try to contain it in, and there’s this corrosive stuff called water that’s all over our planet. Yucca is pretty dry now compared to most of the planet, but as I said, water and chemicals are proven to percolate through it . . . and over a million years or more, climates are bound to change. That’s not a political statement either; that’s a fact. It could be snowy there in a a few tens of thousands of years for all we know.
There wouldn’t be an issue surrounding “safe” nuclear energy if there were such a thing, but there isn’t. It’s somewhere in the top three as far as the most expensive energy per kilowatt goes. I say top three because it’s a fluctuating statistic as advanced technologies continue to change the prices on various types of energy. Solar panels are still crazy expensive, for example, but getting better. Hydrothermal power has its problems, and solar panels are still prohibitively pricey for most of the world (they obviously give you more bang for your buck in Arizona), and wind power is awesome but only reliable in some areas . . . which is also changing as we continue to improve on a concept the dutch have had forever. Coal is going out of fashion and natural gas will only last us so long, but despite all those drawbacks, nothing has drawbacks as severe as nuclear.
It isn’t “safe.” It’s a hazard to dig up, a hazard to transport, a hazard to use, and we have no plan, not even a bad one, to deal with the waste yet. We don’t have the science to deal with it, “yet,” but frankly we’re not even sure if there is a way to deal with it, much less of when we’ll figure it out if there is. We can look at Chernobyl and point to lax Russian controls, but we have nuclear disasters here as well. There’s some real squiffy data surrounding the Three Mile Island “incident,” but if you have access to peer-reviewed journals (usually best accessed through your school or library), you’ll see study after study of “this isn’t good. This is worse than we thought.” If you don’t have access to peer-reviewed, premier, scientific articles, you can try a Google Scholar search, but take anything less than a respected science journal with a great big brick of salt. Or better yet, skip it. Science isn’t done in magazines and political discussions. It goes there to die, in my opinion.
The US Department of Energy is such a broken place that they’ve already disbanded and tried to rebuild it once. It didn’t take! We’re still finding nuclear safety violations right and left, and these are just the ones we *find.* These are the ones we know about when the system is working as well as it knows how to. Yuck.
There’s also the bit about any nuclear material–raw, spent, or processed–being a terrorist target. I’m not so much into the “AH, TERRORISTS ARE GOING TO GET US!” panic, but it’s another layer of hazard for the stuff . . . especially if you intend to put it in a box, forget it’s there, and leave it alone hoping it will never come back. I’m rather unimpressed with the whole thing.
I’m curious as to why France uses nuclear energy, and intend to try to look it up one day. I’ve been putting it off–I hate politics. :-P
because nuclear energy isn’t that clean. Where do we store it? Under the ground in Yucca mountain which by the way will lead to something similar to that movie Erin Brockovich. The waste will leak out eventually as it always will and there will be a need to continuously access it because we will need to continuously put more waste in it and it will need to be made larger and larger as we add more waste. the dangerous waste would have to travel hundreds of miles by truck or train which, if there were and accident, it would be catastrophic. The waste will end up causing cancer to anyone who lives near the location and possibly throughout Navada. Look at the trash problem we have now, and trash isn’t even that bad compared to nuclear waste. Also nuclear power does pollute, it isn’t as clean as Obama makes it seem (no i dont’ hate obama he at least cares about the environment). The reactor rods must be submerged in water to cool them to prevent meltdowns. These rods heat the water to very high temperatures and then the water is released into lakes, streams, and oceans. This causes heat pollution which can lead to algal blooms and even mass extinctions of fish and marine mammals which would in turn affect not only the fish market and the economy but entire ecosystems and the biosphere considering the earth is 70% water. We don’t need to ruin anymore of our dwindling drinkable water supplies.
These power plants are heavily supported with tax dollars. They are a way to reduce some of the mess from mining for weapons by governments, they will never be safe, never be clean. This is how the US “Knows” that Iran is looking to make weapons, not cheap energy.
As the scientist stated, there is no safe or clean energy that comes from uranium. Period. To show you how desperate governments are to get rid of it. The US military fires weapons made from D.U., or depleted uranium, and this is more then likely what the gulf war syndrome is. In Iraq, birth defects has risen drastically, water supplies are contaminated and disease and cancer is on a serious climb in the area.
This is how the US gov is trying to get rid of our leftover poisons here in the US.